Best 3 Salesforce Android Apps

As we previously discussed, there are two big players when it comes to mobile – Apple iOS and Google Android. It seems that Windows Mobile and Blackberry OS fall solidly to the wayside when it comes to actual market share, and having messed about a little with Windows 7 phones briefly, I’m not terribly surprised on that one at least. But, that aside, everyone agrees on Salesforce being one of the best CRM services available. Even users of non-Salesforce CRM solutions seem to give it a nervous nod. So, last time, we looked at the iOS apps for Salesforce. It was a tiny bit depressing as most things related to iOS tend to be when it comes to business solutions. This time, we get a slightly more cheery note from looking at a few examples of how good Salesforce Android app. Android came a little latter than iOS. iOS cornered the market of “smart mobile” platform when the only real practical application for such a platform was casual use, and as a result, the identity of iOS has remained firmly casual. Android, contrarily, came around later, to address a need for a mobile platform practical for business use. This means that you have a variety of Salesforce Android app solutions that’re remarkably powerful, versus its iOS brother. #1 – Salesforce Classic The iOS version of this didn’t make the sister list of this one because it doesn’t work. This isn’t the fault of the developers, either, but rather the standard tendency of iOS to not want to run third party apps properly. Android, however, relies entirely on third party since Google can’t be bothered to build a library of first party software titles for their own platform! Nothing exemplifies this difference quite like Salesforce Classic, which is a mobile native portal for accessing all of your Salesforce records, leads, books and tasks, and editing them almost as conveniently as the full bodied browser version allows. You’ll be wanting this, because while there are many browsers for Android, and most of them work well … interacting with complex web forms from any mobile browser on any mobile platform is unavoidably an exercise in frustration. #2 – Contact Sync for Salesforce Your Android device, be it a mobile or a tablet, is likely a big source of contact information. When you get business contacts, be they phone numbers, email addresses, social profiles or what have you, you most likely jot them down first on the device in your pocket or bag, and that’s going to be your Android device, if that’s your platform of choice. Well, getting that information over to Salesforce was once an annoyance, because you didn’t even have the luxury of easy copy and pasting, due to how fiddly all mobile interfaces are by nature. Contact Sync is a slick app that can natively import contacts from your Android repository directly into Salesforce with a few taps on the screen. You’ll be wanting this too. More contacts information can be found on merging contacts in salesforce page. #3 – Salesforce Chatter Well, we all know how Chatter has made it so much easier to pool and collaborate Salesforce data in real time, to edit, share, discuss, annotate and act upon. There’s no need to go on about that here. However, until recently, getting that to work on mobile systems was a real pain, because again, complex web interfaces plus small screen real estate and the awkwardness that is touchscreen technology equals a cluster of epic proportions, no matter what platform you use. Well, now there’s an app for Android to bring Chatter to you without the fiddly bits of mobile browsing in the way. And it’s exactly that – Chatter for Salesforce, running on native mobile components for ease of use. So, there are many varieties of Salesforce Android app, and they tend to work well, all the annoyances of mobile in general factored out. For now, it’s impossible to not be a little biased toward Android when it comes to using mobile platforms for business, and this is an example why …
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Amanda is the Lead Author & Editor of Rainforce Blog. Amanda established the Rainforce blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to Salesforce usage.