Dont you think its time Empty Closets had its own app to make the forums more easily accessible and to get the Chat Room working on ipads/androids? The times are changing. I dont know how possible this is. Just a thought.
This comes up a lot! It's our most requested feature. Although the team aren't working on a specific app at this stage, our new platform (very long awaited, I know!) is mobile friendly and so much easier to use. We know a lot of members currently use EC from their mobile devices... and that it's awful. As for the chat room, I believe we're looking for a mobile friendly platform for that, too. At least I think that would be a nice thing to have. It would certainly give a much needed boost to that part of the website.
I don't see how an online forum would work as an app as opposed to a mobile-friendly approach. Call me old-fashioned or a dud at tech stuff, but having a forum with huge data as an app is questionable to me.
There are, in fact, a number of forums that have apps... so an app is possible, but not economically feasible to do well at this point for a variety of reasons. The logistics of managing a code base for many different screen resolutions, different OS versions, and different OS platforms, as well as keeping up with minor revisions, bug fixes, vulnerabilities, and various other things makes it an impractical consideration. Additionally, there are a lot of fundamental problems, not the least of which is that many EC users are closeted, so having an app on one's phone labeled "emptyclosets" would not be an option... and Apple, at least, is not fond of apps that are intentionally deceptively labeled. So... we've had the discussion about 10000000000 times in the past year (anyone ever actually check the archives before posting??!!) and it isn't on our radar at present. But as Spartan said, the new platform, which is currently in testing, has much better portable device support than the current (12 year old) platform. Chat, on the other hand, will be completely replaced with a much more robust, modern, and stable platform that works on mobile devices as well as laptops and desktops.