I think apps are useful if they provide something unique to the user experience.  Apps for websites rarely do.

There's a lot of duplication of effort, a lot of work to make sure the branding is consistent and you can do most of the same things you can do on the site proper.  There are security concerns, where once you had to be concerned about security of your site, now you have to be concerned about the security of your site and the security of the app.  If one is compromised that could affect the other.

That said, there is a lot of demand for such apps.  At Arck we've developed a few and are getting into it more heavily just due to demand.  I believe this demand is purely marketing driven.  Even the work we've done in this area I don't see the value of.

So I say down with website apps!  Get a haircut and get off my lawn.

Guys thanks for your response. I agree that there is going to be duplication but the reality is elgg is a social networking site and mobile is the best way to target socially active people. Look at whatsapp and facebook apps. I understand there are going to be issues but I am going to to try to take a stab at it. 

Does anyone know who maintains the webservices plugin? I think there are security shortcomings with the existing implementation like you cannot use json post for submitting data, only query strings and form posts work. Anyway I am going to use the next few days to clean up my code an make it free of customization as possible. Hopefully it is going to be a New Years Gift!

Apps make sense if they provide additional benefits, such us offline access, push notifications, integration with OS, but those are achievable with native apps, not hybrids that just wrap html.

No one is interested in maintaining the web services plugin. I have made a stab at making it easier/safer to use, but due to BC and other concerns they never made it into core, hence I built my hypeGraph. I think the core team intends to rewrite web services, but I am not sure who and when and how is going to do that.

If the handlers are triggered by the cron daemon there's no user involved, so you can't check for an admin or any other user logged in. You could add some "secret code" to the url you use in the cronjob

http://url.to.trigger.job?secret_code=12345

and then check for existence and correctness of the code within your handler's callback

$code_given = get_input('secret_code');

if ($code_given == '12345') {

...

You can create an Elgg plugin to do just about anything, so if there's something wordpress does that you want done in Elgg it can likely be done.  There's no simple porting path though, because they're completely different systems with different APIs and different uses.

Yes, elgg can be used for this. Each team & tournament can have its own group & publish its own stats. Events can be shared including maps, written reports, audio & video.

Yes, sure it is possible and I have already created such a social network. You can have a look at http://www.ergasiako-basket-chania.gr/. A customized plugin is used for handling tournaments, scores etc

@nikos, Is this plugin free or did you make it? 

Tutorial Developper App Android Elgg by link: http://engap.org/document.html

An app is not needed. A quick search of the community plugin library here will offer plugins which automatically mobilise elgg for users depending on what device they are using.

@ADC, Plugin that provides mobile device users for elgg, MOBILIZE plays this feature.