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Guest Post by Ambika Pajjuri from KidSenz

Hello fellow Appery.io developers.  I am founder of KidSenz, a company that delivers news videos and blogs in a kid safe environment, and wanted to share my experience with Appery.io

I was looking for a product that let me bring my app to life fast and in the most cost effective way. Instead of learning native programming languages and environments, I wanted to use HTML5. The idea was to build a Beta product as soon as possible to help figure out what works and doesn’t so we could pivot and iterate fast, before launching into production.

I tried a few tools including Sencha, Brightcove and Appery.io that enable the use of HTML5 for mobile app development.  As a novice to mobile apps, I found Appery.io to be the easiest and most user friendly development environment.

The features I found very useful include:

• Appery.io drag and drop, re-size, element nesting capabilities and built-in defaults  significantly reduced the learning curve so I could focus on the business problem.
• I didn’t have to deal with the CSS since it was generated.  This enabled me to focus on creating a good app rather than the code behind the scenes.
• Appery.io provides out of the box support to attach to various backend options such as SendGrid, Twilio, Parse, AT&T, and Singly via REST API – this is in addition to support for their own database.
• Support for custom Javascripting and HTML that makes it easy to add functions when out of the box support does not exist.
• Automated generation of the iOS/Andriod/Windows apps to get them to the app-store/marketplace with Phonegap
• Easy to use test and demo environment
• Access to the native capabilities via Phonegap – I have not used this capability so far.
• Cloud based development and backup

The KidSenz app I created delivers a number of educational videos in various categories along with associated blogs and a simple quiz (more details when we launch since we are currently in Beta trials).

Working with Appery.io has been a great experience.  The documentation has been good with plenty of examples. What I like best is the availability of examples to work with various backends. Last but not the least, support from Appery.io has been outstanding. They respond quickly to issues and helped ease qualms about working with a cloud based system.