Yapp: An App for Your Events

Nowadays events are usually planned through Facebook. You invite guests, provide times and location, and people can comment and ask questions right on the event’s page. However, Facebook doesn’t really allow you to personalize events. For more prestigious and ceremonial events, such as a wedding, people tend to want something more along the lines of a website. A new startup, Yapp, looks to fill that niche of event planners that not only want a website, but would like an app as well.

The app is very easy to use and allows anyone to set up an app in minutes. The process is simply picking a template and then adding in the necessary information for the event. The apps also allow those that are invited to chat and to upload photos.

Unlike many app building services, Yapp is very rigid and it limits really what you can do with the service. There is no real way to customize your app or the template, and if you are looking to build the next big iPhone game you may want to look for platforms elsewhere. Yapp is built particularly to provide a simple solution to a problem rather than a complex open source platform for app building.

And that is where its struggles most likely lie. Yapp may be too niche specific. As I previously mentioned, many people are happy with the offerings of Facebook since it is easy and many of their friends are already on the social network. And though there is a market for event websites, that market is smaller for mobile apps. A wedding website, for example, can still be visited from a mobile device. This brings up the question as to who really is in that much of a need for an event app. And should there be an audience for it, how will Yapp make any money? There are no clear features at the moment it could charge for and charging for the basic tools wouldn’t do too much good since many of its competitors are completely free options. But Yapp is still young, and only time will tell whether it gets anywhere.