Convo’s revamped iOS app is a slick and speedy way to share with colleagues on the go

There are few services we at The Next Web could tell you more about than Convo. We use it all day, every day for keeping in touch with each other, sharing story ideas and making sure our team is a mean, lean blogging machine. Sadly, its mobile experience has lagged way behind that of its desktop app.

That changes today, at least on iOS, with the launch of a completely overhauled app that makes conversing and sharing with colleagues on the go much easier and more enjoyable than it was before.

The first thing the new app has going for it is speed – both in literal terms and in terms of how quickly you can access the information you need. Convo says that feed scrolling is now 100% faster and commenting and messaging has been sped up by 40%. It’s hard to verify those figures but  as a user, the difference between this and the previous version truly is night and day.

In addition to everything loading in a pleasingly speedy manner, the UI has been overhauled with ‘pull to refresh’ (complete with a nice ‘unfolding page’ animation) and a really nice ‘quick view’ for comments on any thread. From the main feed you can only see the latest comment on any thread, but a simple swipe to the left pops out the full comment thread without you having to leave the feed itself.

Search has received an overhaul too, with advanced options to help you find the exact conversation you need. When you use Convo as much as we do, this is really important – digging up a colleague’s year-old prediction that a Facebook phone would launch the following week (for the lulz) has never been so easy. There are bigger images and a new image gallery too.

Convo wanted to make sharing Web pages easier with this new app, and its done that via the introduction of an iOS staple – the Safari bookmarklet. Unfortunately, just like every other bookmarklet on iOS, installation is a fiddly process involving editing a bookmark to add a Javascript snippet. It’s easy enough once you’re used to the process, but Apple could make this so much easier with a customizable ‘Share to…’ menu, Android-style. That said, once you’ve set it up, the bookmarklet makes sharing a Web page with your workmates a breeze.

There’s still a lot of work to make the Convo mobile experience perfect. An Android app is sorely missing, although we’re told that’s planned for the future. For the time being, users of other platforms can use a mobile Web app which, while not as good as the new iOS app, is way better than its previous incarnation. Also, the IM function of the desktop app is notable by its absence on mobile apps at the moment. There are times when I’ve been on a bus or tram and wanted to have a private chat with a colleague and have had to resort to email when normally I’d ping them on Convo for a quick answer.

Convo tells us that the TNW team has passed the 700,000 post mark on its platform in the two years that we’ve been using it, with 3,000 daily interactions and 95% of the team logging in every single day. With that in mind, this iOS update is a welcome move for us, and if you’re considering adopting the service, which competes with the likes of Yammer and Salesforce Chatter, it may well be welcome to you too.

Convo is priced at $9 per user per month, with a limited free option and an enterprise version with variable pricing.

➤ Convo 

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Image credit: Getty Images