Ask HN: Features for our Enterprise App Store?

[pharaohgeek]

My company -- a Fortune 1000 company in the financial sector -- has developed a dozen+ mobile apps in-house. Some of them are targeted at all of our employees, while others are aimed at a specific group or role. Since our application base has now gotten rather large, we're looking at designing an Enterprise App Store to distribute these apps to our users. The app store will consist of a front-end application, similar to Apple's AppStore, as well as the backend services necessary to make it work.

My question to you is, what features should we include in our app store? At a minimum, we have outlined:

* Search and categorization, for easier app discovery

* Commenting and rating, to get direct feedback from our users

* Push Notifications, to inform users of new versions of an application

* Role-based Access Control, to ensure that users only see apps that they are allowed to install

Beyond that, what types of features should we include? Obviously we'll have the basics, like displaying app details and screenshots. But I'm curious what other features and functionality could be beneficial for our users.

As I mentioned, we currently have a dozen or so apps deployed. We are iOS-only for right now, but are in the process of porting several of our apps over to Android. We also plan to grow the number of apps we have deployed to > 25 this year, maybe even more.

I'd love to get your thoughts on the matter, and hear any real-world experiences and insights you might have.

[pedalpete]

I'm not going to answer your question, as I think you've got the majority of the items covered, and you probably don't need more 'features', rather a focus on excellent execution of a small set at first, and then see what your users need.

However, and please take this with a grain of salt because I don't know your business, my bank has separate apps for my bank accounts and my investment accounts. This means I open one app, do something with it (often transfer to my other account), then open another app and do whatever I wanted to do there.

I think banks think we structure our lives similar to their corporate structure, which is completely incorrect. Personally, I don't want to look at my homescreen and see three different apps from one brand, all using a very similar logo, try to guess which app I need for what task, and then jump back and forth between apps.

What I DO want, is a nice clean app that does one thing very well. If I have both a banking and an investment account, I want it to do two things very well, but those two things don't need to be different apps, just an extension of the first app.

I've been building a very modular app in Angular.js and am really starting to appreciate how we can extend app functionality with modules, rather than writing big honking apps for each feature.

App discovery doesn't need to mean 'app store', it could be a group of plugins for your app. Hope that helps.

[pharaohgeek → pedalpete]

Thanks for your insight. These apps are geared for our internal employee usage, and are designed to be more task-specific. A customer service rep has different needs from an HR person, for example. Hence, we have several apps designed to handle various job functions, as well as a couple that are geared towards all of our users.