ShoutEm Review

BUYER BEWARE! Sure this company looks like a pretty cool company, with all the bells and whistles for building an app, WRONG! Their products do NOT work and their customer service is atrocious! They pretend to have some office in New York when in all actuality, they are somewhere across the world in some country they will not disclose. Their response time is horrendous and they only communicate by email. SAVE YOUR MONEY and find a company who can provide a functional product and worthwhile customer support! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED…

Hi,

Thank you for your review.

As for the WorldBuyers comment, we are grateful that you have stated you opinion, as we know that there will always be customers that aren’t completely satisfied by our product, and that is something completely normal in the business world. We are trying our best to upgrade our services, so we can provide the very best user and client experience.

Considering that, I have to challenge your statements here.

Our products certainly DO work, as we have many customers that are very satisfied by our service. If something didn’t work for you, feel free to send us your feedback at:

shoutem@shoutem.com

and we will do our best to see what specific thing didn’t work for you.

As for the office in New York, the office exists and it is located on the address:

ShoutEm, Inc.
175 Varick Street
New York, NY, 10014

That information is publicly available on our website in the Contact section:

http://www.shoutem.com/contact

We have two more offices in Croatia: located in Zagreb and Osijek. That was never a hidden information, as you can clearly see that the author of this text clearly stated that information so the thesis that we have an office somewhere across the world and that we won’t disclose that information is simply untrue.

I’m sorry that you weren’t satisfied with our customer support, because we really do give a lot of attention to our clients, and are doing our best to provide a simple and clear response in the least time possible. Our policy is to tend to our customer needs in 24h tops, but that is rarely the case, as our response time is much much faster. Only time that there is a possibility that you will have to wait a little is over the weekends, but we usually give our best to answer some of the support inquiries then aswell.

As for the communication over e-mail. That is the only thing you got right.

We usually do our communication over e-mail, but there are exceptions to this rule, because we offer Premium phone support to our reseller partners that have Medium reseller plan or above. Also we provide phone support to potential big customers, such as companies, political parties, associations etc …

If you have any more questions, feel free to leave a comment or drop an e-mail to: shoutem@shoutem.com

Vlatko
Support Specialist, ShoutEm
http://www.shoutem.com

Does ShoutEm have a Windows Phone 8 / Windows 8 app builder in the works? When will it be ready?

Hi Vidar,

we currently don’t support the WP7 / WP8 platforms with our applications. We are aware that they are on the rise and we are actively considering about implementation of that support in the near future, based on the demand of our users.

Our HTML5 apps are currently optimized for webkit browsers (iOS, Android, Google Chrome, Safari …), but considering that HTML5 is developing rapidly, and standardization will occur, more sooner then later, those platforms will probably get their HTML5 support first.

Whether or not we will code natively for that platforms, is yet to be seen, as HTML5 is becoming de facto standard for mobile applications. Many would argue if that is the case, because native applications have better performance and more functions, but that is nearly coming to its end.

HTML5 is getting Push notifications soon, and that was one of the best pros of the current native applications, and day by day the performance difference is vanishing.

You can read a post about the from one Co-Founder Viktor on our blog:

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/02/09/would-push-notifications-for-html5-apps-kill-native-apps/

I’m going to stay neutral on this one. I’m a former Shoutem customer and not all fully happy with them. Overall, their product deserve a 3.5 out of 5 stars. Service is ok due to that fact that they only support via email. There’s no user forum to exchange techniques, we just have to email them for everything, and there’s no supporting document beside the blogs.
The product itself is just above average. Because 1. What’s good is the place feature without rating?2. What’s good with the Event if there’s no distance sorting?3 What’s good with the News when we can only read the headline? and 4. What’s good with the GPS if Iphone user can’t enable GPS location without several steps including restart the app? 5. There’s no user setting, they just have to stuck with whatever Shoutem provides, they have no choice of changing anything.6. Their ipad version is useless, 70% of the feature will not be on iPad.

There’re still many missing features and I hope the upcoming version focus on that instead of the shopping cart, PLEASE! How many people are buying online using apps, beside the app market itself? I can see that 4.0 version is focusing on getting people to sign up rather than bringing the tech up a notch.

Well.. good thing is they’re free until you decide to launch, so I’m not sure how one can cries out “FRAUD!” when they are not paying until they decide they like it.

We’re definitely going with Shoutem. After shopping around, it was an easy choice to start developing with them. They’ve been reasonably responsive in e-mails and we’re super impressed with the ease of use of their site as well as their mobilizer app. Considering their prices, we’re super pleased with our app so far.

Just because some of these dudes aren’t native Americans doesn’t mean they are creating affordable and well made solutions to the app market.

Anyone reading these reviews above, just know that there’s at least one very happy customer.

Hi there. For starters, thank you Timothy for your sincere words about our service. We appreciate your feedback, because we are always striving to upgrade our services for the benefit of all users.

>> There’s no user forum to exchange techniques, we just have to email them for everything, and there’s no supporting document beside the blogs.

We are rolling a new version of both applications and the application builder on early – mid April that will bring new features and redesign. We will create new support articles and a user manual on top of that one. Also, we are considering some type of community page that would give our users the option to share and rate user created languages. However, there is no clear ETA when that one could become available, as it is still on the drawing board.

>> What’s good is the place feature without rating?

Thank you for suggesting this. Rating system is one of our strongly considered future features at the moment, as it would give users that own restaurants, caffe bars etc. the option to get their places rated.

>> What’s good with the Event if there’s no distance sorting?

Our Events now support linking them with places, that automatically sorts them out by distance.

They can also be sorted out in regard to: Manually, Start time, Distance, Creation time, Edit time and Name. Both ascending and Descending.

>> What’s good with the News when we can only read the headline?

RSS services are commonly used for getting news headlines, and we can only display the content sent through RSS in the application itself. Most of the pages don’t send whole posts in their RSS feeds, but the shorty summary with a Read More link. If that is the case, it is the only thing that we can display in the application itself. However, in time we have realized that our users would rather have whole posts if possible. We will do our best to display as much content as possible in the News sections, but this limitation doesn’t come from our side, its rather a limitation of the RSS itself.

>> What’s good with the GPS if Iphone user can’t enable GPS location without several steps including restart the app?

We agree with you on this one. This is something that we consider a bug. Sometimes, application doesn’t activate location services on the first load, and it is mandatory to restart it to work properly. This has been fixed in our new application version that is soon to come.

>> There’s no user setting, they just have to stuck with whatever Shoutem provides, they have no choice of changing anything

Our new application version is bringing the swiping menu feature similar to the one Facebook is using. That one will give us the option to add a Settings option inside it to give our users features like setting the default language manually, provided that the application owner supports several languages.

>> Their iPad version is useless, 70% of the feature will not be on iPad.

It is true that iPad version is a little restricted at the moment. The reason for that is that the iPad version is more media oriented the the mobile ones.

Currently it supports News, Web, Photos, Audio and Video podcasting modules. We will upgrade on this features in time.

>> I can see that 4.0 version is focusing on getting people to sign up rather than bringing the tech up a notch.

Web shops are a growing market, and we think that it will be beneficial to our users that we get integrations with shops like Shopify, Magento, Big cartel and Prestashop added to the application. However, we are bringing in a lot more upgrades to the both the apps and the application builder itself.

New builder will contain a new statistics center that can be used to manage People, Deals and Places. Also the new version will be redesigned and more user friendly, with greatly improved navigation. We find that one to be a core upgrade to our current feature set, because it will give us the option to improve on all of our current features, and redesign some of them to incorporate it in the application in a more seamless and stable manner, that will in turn boots the user experience for our clients.

>> Well.. good thing is they’re free until you decide to launch, so I’m not sure how one can cries out “FRAUD!” when they are not paying until they decide they like it.

I agree with you on this one. We always provided full customer support for both our current and future users. Many times we helped our users to set up their apps, only for them to say that they won’t use it afterall. However, we don’t consider that one a loss, because every customer that we help to better understand our service will be familiar with our current features and can decide to publish his app any time later.

As for the other comment.

Thank you Evan for your kind words, we are glad that you are satisfied with our services.

>> They’ve been reasonably responsive in e-mails and we’re super impressed with the ease of use of their site as well as their mobilizer app. Considering their prices, we’re super pleased with our app so far.

We do our best to respond to all of our customer inquiries. However, our turnaround time can be a little slower at weekends, but we tend to answer all e-mails even on holidays and non-working days.

>> Just because some of these dudes aren’t native Americans doesn’t mean they are creating affordable and well made solutions to the app market.

We think that quality of the product matters more then where that product came from. Today is the new age when people from all parts of the world can communicate and get back together.

We are glad to offer our services to users in all parts of the world, but most of our customer base at the moment is currently situated in the USA so we try our best to adapt to their timezones. However, our sales and marketing team is situated in New York.

If you have any more questions or comments, please let us know!

ShoutEm team wishes you all Happy Easter holidays!