Tapatalk is turned off at this point. You can thank the EU and GDPR for that. It may come back once we have time to work through it. Here are some stats though:
- Tapatalk is the #1 maintenance item on the forums. Constant security updates, broken bits.
- Tapatalk had an annoying banner for any non-Tapatalk mobile user on the forums. The way to remove this was to move to a paid subscription.
- We looked at moving to paid, but the advertising is so poor/ revenue share so poor that Tapatalk revenue was on the order of $0.05/day. For $1.50 in revenue per month, it did not cover the cost of upgrading. The rates given to publishers like STH are frankly terrible.
- On the GDPR front, Tapatalk essentially sucks all content/ data and makes that data hard to manage.
We may revisit it at some point, but the new EU GDPR was finally the last straw that means we cannot support it at this time. I have three international round trips and 26K miles to fly in the next 13 days starting today so no time to deal with Tapatalk. I know we have a few people that love Tapatalk, but from a site owner point of view, it is not worth it at this point.
Mobile phones and tablets are ubiquitous. Although I’d venture to guess 99.9% of users here have desktop and laptop machines, many I’d imagine would be similar to myself in that checking forum activity is much more convenient and pleasant in an armchair with a tablet or phone on one interface.
Even with a wealth of desktop machines, I’m just not in “work mode” in front of them when I choose to check forums generally.
This is in part why I don’t venture here much, and is likely a data point missed in your site analytics- those who will be far less active or completely inactive without Tapatalk.
While Tapatalk is certainly imperfect, it’s the best thing going. Until there’s high quality alternative options or you design your own mobile interface for sth Tapatalk will be the only game in town.
That you dislike their terms is unfortunate for me but of course it’s your choice. Many find a way to manage.
The effort in creating compatibility is not drastic nor should it be the largest piece of your maintenance regimen. If it is perhaps there’s a greater issue in your methodology. Plenty of sites I frequent (some of which EU based) which survive purely on a shoestring of donations of site administration, maintenance and server costs manage to keep seamless compatibility.
Just offering a perspective that may be the same as many, but a voice that you will likely never hear / a data point that won’t be clear from your userdata.
Likely they’re all on reddit or anantech or comparable and won’t take the effort to express their issue.
To quantify a lack of growth or rather growth rate stunted by a lack of mobile users is rather impossible. So, making a wager as to its value is as much a guess as anything. However, judging by mobile device adoption worldwide id bet on retaining mobile compatibiltity.