Tapatalk is a service that lets users interact with bulletin boards using mobile devices. Rather than going to a bulletin board with a mobile device’s browser, users can use a Tapatalk app instead.
Tapatalk’s app supports phpBB as well vBulletin, IPBoard, kunena, myBB, WoltLab, SimpleMachines and xenForo. Used with phpBB, you must install a Tapatalk extension downloaded from its website and configure it. If you have an older phpBB 3.0 board, a Tapatalk modification can be installed as well.
Tapatalk provides a common interface for accessing all these forum solutions. This makes things simpler for users if they frequent lots of forums, not all of which are phpBB, providing these forum solutions also integrate with Tapatalk.
In addition to providing a common app, more recently Tapatalk has started hosting their own forums which you can use, called Tapatalk Groups. This has some advantages: they maintain your bulletin board, and host it as well, so it’s effectively free hosting. Users use their app to interact with it. You may be able to import your phpBB bulletin board and create your own Tapatalk Group.
Tapatalk Groups have certain advantages. It’s mobile first. You can integrate donations to fund your board because it’s built into their architecture. But it will serve ads, which is how they normally monetize their service through donations. You can use its built in donations feature to help monetize your board. Spam protection is built in and some customization of the group’s look and feel is available. It’s also cloud hosted, making access very fast with extremely high uptime.
When used with phpBB, not only do you install their extension, but you must also upload a mobiquo folder to your board’s root directory. Most of the work between phpBB and Tapatalk is done by libraries in the mobiquo folder. Your users don’t have to use Tapatalk, but could access your board using a browser as well.
Tapatalk allows you to create a branded app, but they charge for this service. This allows people download your app, not a Tapatalk app per se. They would find the app in the store for their mobile operating system under your brand name. This obviously can simplify things. To access your board, people simply open your branded app.
About twenty percent of my clients have Tapatalk installed. These days, Tapatalk seems less useful. This is because phpBB is now responsive, i.e. you can use a browser on your mobile device to access phpBB and it will size down intelligently for the device’s screen size. Most styles for the old phpBB 3.0 software were not responsive, meaning boards were often be hard to read because they were scrunched down so much to fit the narrow screen width. You had to pinch to zoom in and read content in many cases.
Still, some would prefer to use an app optimized for bulletin boards rather than a mobile browser. For these people, using Tapatalk might be a preferred solution.
You won’t find Tapatalk as one of phpBB’s approved extensions. Why is this? It’s because their mobiquo library is proprietary software and works independently of phpBB’s software, so it violates its GPL-2 license. This makes it ineligible for inclusion in their list of approved extensions.
Also, the Tapatalk app provides a standard user interface, but it won’t reflect your board’s style. You can make posts, create topics and make attachments to posts, but any additional features made available through phpBB’s extensions cannot be used. So you won’t get the same experience with a Tapatalk app that you will get interacting with a web browser.
If you install the Tapatalk extension, be aware that it works outside of phpBB and may introduce problems.
