AppDrop with QR Codes

Props to our developer Shobhan (“Trey”) for getting AppDrop set up with QR codes for his app installations.

At left you can find an example QR code that forwards to this install page for an app we’re creating on behalf of AngelList. (If you don’t know about AngelList, take a look at our CEO’s kudos towards AngelList here.)

Trey is turning the AppDrop URLs into QR codes that can be scanned by phones.

Here’s a video of Daniel using the QR code at left to install the AngelList app:

Here’s a transcript of the video:

Using AppMakr’s AppDrop with QR Codes
Daniel Odio

Hey guys it’s Daniel, and I have in front of me here a QR code that I am going to scan using a program that just scans QR codes and then it gives me a URL, and this is actually a way to install an App.

I’m going to go ahead and click on the URL. It’s going to take me to a page called “AppDrop.” AppDrop is an AppMakr-only piece of functionality for Adhawk test apps to be installed without having to synchronize with the computer, so it’s over-the-air installation of test applications.

I’ll go ahead and click “install test app” and it says AppMakr would like to install “AngelList,” and I’ll say go ahead and install- then it takes me right over and starts installing the app. Let’s just watch it load for a minute here.

The AppDrop technology is especially useful if you want to try making an app through AppMakr and then send it off to a bunch of people to see what they think about it and then you can get feedback from people before you submit it to iTunes.

In order to do this, you do need to have the UDID’s of the people who are going to be installing the app through this Adhawk installation process. You can actually get that UDID through an app that we have in iTunes called AppUDID.

So you can see here that this application has now installed and I can take a look at it. It’s actually the first time I’m looking at it. By the way, if you’ve never heard of AngelList it’s great!

Here’s push notifications that we enable through AppMakr so it looks like that’s working. That’s awesome. Let’s just take a look at the different pieces of functionality…

There’s a “Join AngelList” piece- that looks good…

There is a Twitter feed…so it’s going to probably pull in the AngelList or the VentureHack’s Twitter handle and…while it’s loading I’m going to take a look at the other stuff…

We have a news section– oh nice, Quora Reviews– they’ve got Twitter for VentureHack specifically, so pretty cool!

Here’s the news feed- I think it’s actually just Google News. This is just a Google News RSS feed that we pulled. Let me go back to the Twitter feed and take a look– so here’s the Twitter feed for AngelList…very nice.

The Join Page again…so as you can tell this is still in testing mode so all activity which I think is going to end up being the AngelList funding activity- this is an HTML implementation but this is not working yet. This is a great example of using the QR code in AppDrop to be able to test functionality in an app. Now I can let the app maker/ app creator know that this tab isn’t working. So, very nice! This is a test app and it looks good.

Let’s just take a look at one more thing- Quora Reviews. I don’t know, let’s see if this has been implemented yet or not…it doesn’t look like it. So, again, another thing that we can ask the app creator to work on.

That’s an example of using a QR code and taking a picture of the QR code with the phone and then installing the app using AppDrop.

Ciao.