Mobile App Design and Submission has Never Been This Easy

I mentioned a while back that Amazon had quietly revolutionized the app creation process by allowing submission of HTML5 apps to their marketplace. Very few people understood the significance of this change which allows people to publish without the burden of going through the traditional app production process. So I’m going to cover this topic a bit more within this post. Firstly, what does the existing process of creating and submitting an app to an app store look like?

The Typical App Submission Process

The steps required to create and submit an app vary depending on the tools you’re using and the app store you’re submitting to, but the steps go something like this:

1. Pay for a developer account (recurring annual fee).
2. Use your developer account to produce a code-signing certificate (a way to verify that you paid to publish).
3. Insert the signing certificate into your app.
4. If you’re a coder, compile your app. If you’re not a coder, pay some service or developer to compile your app.
5. Submit your app to the app store and wait for approval.

The New Process Created By Amazon

Amazon essentially reduced this process to a single step: submit your content to the app store. No fee, no signing-certificate, no packaging, no need to know a heavy-duty programming language or to pay someone who does. Your content just has to be in the form of HTML.

I don’t think it was clear to many people just how easy Amazon’s app submission process has now become, and how favorably it compares to other options.

Thankfully, David Isbitski, recorded a video on how to submit an HTML5 Web App to the Amazon Marketplace:

Unlike other app stores, getting an Amazon Developer account and submitting an app is totally free!

Don’t know how to create HTML5? No problem.

You don’t need to be a web developer to take advantage of Amazon’s HTML5 app submission process. You can export HTML5 directly from InDesign using in5, upload your content to a server and submit the URL directly to Amazon. InDesign to app! No programming knowledge required and no recurring costs.

How in5 makes it even easier

When creating content with InDesign and in5, you can simply enter the Amazon Verification Key into the in5 dialog and in5 will even generate the web-app-manifest.json file for you so that you can focus entirely on the design of your app (and not programmer-type things like “manifest” files).

Here are the two fields that are available in the SEO & Meta section of the in5 dialog:

Take a look at in5 and the Amazon HTML5 submission process and let us know what you think in the comments below.