Hi Mark, 

Thank you for your suggestion! I apologise for the belated reply - this is quite a big change, so we wanted to see whether other people feel this way as well. 

Seeing as they do, we did have a real think about this one. At the moment  we're still developing the new voucher feature, however, following this, we will focus on some significant tweaking on the app. 

I have added this request onto our development queue and once we start working on the app changes, I will update this post with new information. 

Thank you once again and please, do keep the suggestions coming! 

Hi Jason, 

This is one we're getting increasingly often, so thank you for putting it on here, as it's an important idea to answer. 

The short answer is: we'd love to do a Windows Phone app and very likely will do one in the future. 

The long answer is a bit... well... predictably enough, longer. At the moment, Perfect Pint is still in its early stages, considering everything we have planned for the road ahead. As a start-up, we have to be careful in terms of starting more than we can handle with regards to manpower and resources. As we have learned very clearly so far, it's best to do a few things well first and then expand on that, rather than starting a million threads that end up in one big messy knot. 

When we first started working on PP, Android and iOS were the dominating mobile phone platforms and so those are the ones we decided to do an app for. Windows Phones had a less than 4 percent market share at that point. This has now climbed to 8.4 percent and could well climb even further. Still, it is a small share compared to Android's 50+ percent and Apple's 25+. 

Developing an app is a very long and pricey process, as one can imagine. At the moment, we think it's best to pool our resources into making the iOS and Android apps as good as we can make them. The iOS is nearly there, I think, and with the new features we have planned for the big update in September, it will be one excellent app, according to my completely unbiased opinion. 

Android, due to the fact that it has to be compatible with more than 2,000 devices (as opposed to iOS's four), requires a bit more tweaking and we are spending a lot of time at the moment working on that. Nevertheless, we expect Android to climb towards the mythical 'excellent' status gradually over the next couple of months. 

NOW, that's the 'bad' news, from your perspective. 

The 'good' news is that once this process is finished and the two apps stand side by side as something we can be very proud of, we will look at what we can do next. This will include planning new directions, such as other platforms. If the Windows Phone market share continues to rise like it has so far, we would be silly not to do a Windows app! And so that is a path we will very likely take, however, I think this will be one for early-to-mid 2014 (yes... it takes that long to make an app like PP!). When that time comes, we will certainly tell everyone about it. 

In the meantime, we have just developed a new mobile site for Perfect Pint. This is to make the website much more user-friendly on your mobile phone. So, if you go to perfectpint.co.uk on your phone, you should now see the new mobile layout. With this new site, you can see the pubs around you and the beers they serve, just like on the app. Of course, the app has many more features, but this basic functionality is now available for anyone with a mobile phone. So I hope at least that one bit helps. 

Once again, Jason, thank you for the suggestion and I'm sorry about the long answer, however, I wanted to explain where we are, so that you don't think we hold some strange grudge against Windows Phone users - we don't and I think I speak for all of us over here when I say that we're very much looking forward to the day when we can start making an app for Windows. 

Hi filmcritic, 

Good idea! I have put this onto our 'roadmap' - we are working on a slight website re-design at the moment, to increase user-friendliness and add a few new features, so this can fit in nicely with that. The re-design should be live in a month or so, so I'd expect this to be out around then as well. I'll update this post to that effect when this happens as well. 

The one tweak we're thinking about is for beers. The most checked-in pubs over the past week is an excellent addition - this number often varies, so it would be a very nice and dynamic table, promoting a range of new pubs. 

With beers however, the most checked-in ones are usually the same, week after week, due to their national availability. This would mean that the list would be rather static and populated by a few very familiar badges. 

So instead of check-ins, we figured we'd base the list on beer reviews. This way, you'd see the highest rated beers for that particular week. A table like that would often feature seasonal beers, special releases and so forth and would therefore always have something new for users to discover and enjoy. Does that sound good? Or would you still say that beer check-ins are the better variable? 

Others - please feel free to comment as well! We can always change things around if something doesn't work, but it's nice to get things right from the very start occasionally...  ;) 

Hi Jim, 

This is an excellent idea and it is something we plan to introduce in the future. In fact, we also plan to introduce a filter, which will allow users to only display pubs with Beer Bingo beers on. 

We are currently finishing work on our new voucher feature, after which we will make a few user interface changes on the app. Once that is done (I suspect at some point in December), we will work to add a whole new set of features to the app, this definitely being one of them. 

Thank you very much for the suggestion and if you have any more, let us know! 

Hi Phil, 

This is a good suggestion and one I'm personally very much in favour of. The only real difficulty is that, with the current way we do things, there is no way for us to 'approve' a new pub submission like we can with a beer, hence we cannot award Ambassador points. 

Having said that, we would very much like to expand the Ambassador platform and this would be a good place to start. It will require a bit of tweaking when it comes to the back end of our system, but it is possible. Also, we will need to figure out a way of how to make sure people submit quality pubs as opposed to, say, a chain restaurant with one nationally available beer on (please feel free to add your ideas here). 

Considering everything we are working on at the moment, I would think this would come to be early in the new year. Once we get there, I will update this point. But it is definitely something I would like us to do - it's just about figuring out the details. 

Thank you for the suggestions and do keep them coming! 

Hi Gill and Paul, 

Thank you for your feedback. I'll try to cover things point by point, highlighting in bold the relevant sections. 

Firstly, the issue of adding a beer on the mobile site: indeed, that is something that should be there. For the past few weeks, we have been debating the issue of what to do in terms of mobile pub management: whether to stick to the current mobile site or whether to expand the app to allow pub beer management. 

Having discussed all the options and possible problems, we are looking at opening up the app to pubs. As part of that, several things will have to be developed and tweaked app-side. Part of those will be the ability to add beers. I cannot give you a precise time estimate at the moment, as we are still developing the new voucher feature, however, I would expect this to be done very early next year. 

The reason why admin approval is required for new beer submissions is a fairly straightforward one: without the admin input, the amount of duplicates we were getting through the system was simply overwhelming. There are multiple ways to spell a beer's name and because of this, pubs were adding beers that were already on the database. These beers then get checked in, favourited, points get awarded and if one has to be deleted, it creates a bit of a nightmare, especially for a team of our size. 

I know the delay can get irritating at times, but we are working on getting things done quicker. But, based on the limited experience we had, having beers automatically added without admin approval creates a situation that is worse than the present one. We are thinking of creating a system where, if a user has a history of high quality submissions, their suggestions will get approved automatically, however, this is still a bit far away in terms of the development schedule. 

Paul raises an interesting point concerning adding breweries. We were thinking of a button like that, but we thought the amount of times it would get used did not warrant a separate button, hence why we encourage people to contact us via the website form or email. It might be interesting to add it as a separate suggestion on this forum, to see whether there is greater demand for an 'add a brewery' button, in which case we'd definitely add one. 

Finally, quite a few people have raised the issue of adding a beer with unknown style/tasting notes. I know the compulsory fields can be frustrating when users don't know the information. Basically, the reasoning behind it is as follows: when we only had brewery and beer name as compulsory fields, that's all people used to submit. From our side, it is important that the information we display is accurate, so when such a submission was made, we had to contact the brewery directly for information. This introduced quite a delay in the beer submission being accepted - at times up to a week. As you can imagine, this didn't make people happy. 

We introduced the compulsory fields as a trial and it improved things dramatically, as all of a sudden we got most of the information we needed. In most cases, a beer now gets activated within an hour or two, which to us meant that the change was worthwhile, seeing as it enabled us to be much more responsive. 

However, that does not eliminate the problem you have when there is no information available. What I would suggest in these cases is to put any information in (even if incorrect) and mention in the tasting notes section that you have no information available. This will let us know that we need to investigate the beer in the 'old-fashioned' way. 

Once again, thank you both for the input and I hope these answers help a bit. And please - any more ideas/suggestions/comments - do let us know!