Get Started with Mobile Publisher

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

• Define what Mobile Publisher is.
  
• Describe the ways you can create a branded app with Mobile Publisher.
  

The Mobile Age

The ubiquity of mobile technology has transformed the way we live, work, learn, connect, communicate, travel, and shop. With mobile access so readily available, enterprise and consumer end users expect apps that help them stay productive and connected from anywhere, on any device.

Challenges to Mobile App Development

But here’s the catch. It can be hard, expensive, and time-consuming to build mobile apps from scratch. Do you want to build for Android, iOS, or both? How can you design for multiple screen sizes? What about security? How can you scale? What if your organization doesn’t have in-house mobile expertise?

Salesforce Platform to the Rescue

The Salesforce Platform can help you overcome the challenges of mobile app development. It enables you to easily create both enterprise and consumer mobile apps that are secure and work across a wide range of mobile devices. So it’s the perfect foundation for developing your organization’s mobile strategy.

Get to Know Mobile Publisher

This is where Mobile Publisher comes in. Mobile Publisher is a low-code way of creating a mobile app powered by the Salesforce Platform.

With Mobile Publisher, you can create an app in two ways.

• Experience Cloud Site: Create a mobile app based on your Experience Cloud site
  
• Salesforce App: Create a version of the Salesforce mobile app with your custom branding
  

Your Mobile Publisher app gets your app icon, your name, your colors, and—most important—its own listing in the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud

In addition to creating a mobile app that uses your Experience Cloud site’s branding and customizations, Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud offers your users a mobile-first experience by unlocking a device’s native capabilities. You can enhance your business with advanced mobile features, such as barcode-scanning or device location-tracking.

Create a mobile-first experience for your Experience Cloud site users with these Mobile Publisher features.

• Push notifications
  
• Biometric (face or fingerprint) app login
  
• Barcode and QR code scanning
  
• Location services
  
• Contact importing
  
• Calendar integration
  
• App review requests
  

With the Publisher Playground app, you can preview your Experience Cloud mobile app before purchasing any Mobile Publisher licenses. See Preview Your Mobile Experience Cloud Site with Publisher Playground (Beta) to learn more and get set up with the app.

Tip

To learn more about Experience Cloud, check out the Expand Your Reach with Experience Cloud Trail.

Mobile Publisher for the Salesforce App

We’re pretty fond of our cloud logo and that lovely shade of Salesforce blue. But we get it. You want your Salesforce mobile app to represent your company and reinforce your brand.

And it makes a difference. People respond to familiarity. If your employees can easily recognize the app as a part of the organization, they’re more likely to use it and feel a sense of emotional investment, which increases adoption.

With Mobile Publisher for the Salesforce App, you can customize the Salesforce mobile app with your organization’s branding. And your branded app gets its own listing on the App Store and Google Play.

Create a Branded App the Low-Code Way

Until Mobile Publisher, if you wanted to release a branded app with the Salesforce Platform, you had to build one yourself using our Salesforce Mobile SDK. The SDK is awesome, but it requires mobile expertise, ongoing maintenance, and costly development resources that many companies may not have.

Here’s the big question: Now that there’s a low-code way to create a mobile app powered by Salesforce, what will you build with Mobile Publisher?

Here are a few use cases for partner and customer-facing apps.

And the following are some use cases for productivity-boosting employee and partner apps.

Let’s Get Started

Ready to learn more about Mobile Publisher? Great! In this module, we explore Mobile Publisher in the context of a real-world scenario. Let’s meet DreamHouse Realty.

DreamHouse Realty is a thriving real estate business with a growing legion of brokers and customers. D’Angelo Cunningham, the Salesforce admin for DreamHouse, has already customized the Salesforce mobile app to suit the brokers’ needs. He built three custom Lightning apps to help them manage their properties and clients. He’s also built an Experience Cloud site for his customers who are prospective buyers in the hot housing market.

The brokers frequently use the mobile app when working with their clients, while the customers use the Experience Cloud site to research potential housing purchases. Michelle Smith, the CEO of DreamHouse, wants the brokers to have a branded version of Salesforce, and the customers to have a branded mobile version of their Experience Cloud site. She asks D’Angelo to go through the process of publishing the DreamHouse employee and customer apps to the App Store and Google Play using Mobile Publisher.

Wrap Up

In this unit, you learned about the challenges to mobile app development, and how Mobile Publisher can solve these challenges as a low-code way to create an app powered by the Salesforce Platform. In the next unit, follow along with D’Angelo as he gets the Experience Cloud site or Salesforce mobile app ready and prepares the necessary branded assets for Mobile Publisher.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud
• Salesforce Help: Mobile Publisher for Salesforce App
• Article: Why Branded Employee Apps Are the Future of Workplace Interaction
• Trailhead: Expand Your Reach with Experience Cloud
• Trailhead: Mobile Strategy Development
• Trailhead: Salesforce Mobile Customization
• Trailhead: Lightning App Builder
• Trailhead: Quick Start: Lightning App Builder
• Trailhead: Develop with Mobile SDK