Over the past several months, we have been quietly developing something that we hope many of you will find useful: an Android application that allows you to navigate much of the information available on this website. We took a look on Google Play (formerly called Android Market), and noticed a glaring lack of real supplement reviews apps. We wanted to be the first to come out with something truly useful.
We carefully weighed the options of developing a mobile or responsive website against a mobile app for iOS or Android. We figured that a dedicated app would offer a better experience for the mobile users, which have been growing proportionately in recent times. Since Android has been gaining significant global marketshare, even though there have been anecdotes of iOS perhaps being more popular in North America, it only made sense to create an Android application first.
The app is in the final stages of development and testing, and we expect that it will be released to Google Play some time in the near future.
Without further ado, let's take a sneak peek at some of the screens in this app.
Main screen
The main screen is divided into 3 tabs: Brands, Goals, and Ingredients.
Brands
The Brands tab allows you to find the brand that you may be interested in, either by clicking the initial letter and then scrolling through the list, or by entering a part of the name.
Goals
The Goals tab is one of the most interesting in the whole app, and mimics the functionality of the Supplement Explorer on this website. It allows you to hone in on a supplement on the basis of up to 3 goals that you may choose. Only those supplements with at least 3 ratings for that goal (effect) are included in the results. The results are shown in order of highest rating first, in the order in which you picked the goals.
Ingredients
The Ingredients tab is similar to the Brands tab, in that you can search by name. One difference is that some of the ingredients have children, or different forms of that ingredient. You may select either the main ingredient or one of the forms.
Brand screen
Clicking on a brand from the Brands tab brings you to the Brand screen. This screen shows you all of the products in our database for that brand, and allows you to search for a product. For each product it shows you the broad category, the retailer with the best price per serving, the number of reviews, and a visual indication of the overall rating.
Ingredient screen
You navigate to this screen by clicking on one of the ingredients on the Ingredients tab above. It shows you the supplements in our database in order of the highest amount of that ingredient first, together with the form of the ingredient from the label, and the amount. If the label shows the ingredient but not the amount (because it's part of a proprietary blend), it shows the amount as unknown.
Conclusion
There are more screens, but like we said, this is a sneak peek; we don't want to reveal everything at once!
We hope that your interest has been piqued, and at this point, we would like to remind you that the quality of the data you see in the app depends on comprehensive reviews and ratings contributed by users such as yourself.
Please stay tuned to this spot to stay abreast of the latest developments on the app. Or, you can subscribe to our newsletter to get instantly notified when the app becomes available for download.
Comments and feedback are, of course, welcome.
(If you are a journalist or a blogger and wish to write about our app, you may inquire about obtaining a pre-production release by using the "Contact us" link at the top of this page.)
