PocketWGU

On this day in 2011, PocketWGU was announced to the WGU Community with the following post:

Howdy All,

Since starting at WGU last year, I’ve wanted to have an app for my Android phone that would let me keep tabs on the communities, read postings, track my degree progress, and view the CoS for whatever course I was in. As I couldn’t find an app to do this, I wrote one.

A brand new PocketWGU for Android is out and available now, get it while it's hot!  Much of the application was re-written to improve the interface and overall user experience.  The result is 4,200+ lines of Java hand-crafted with love.  :-)  Look for it in the Android Market now and in the Amazon market a few days later.

4,200+ is a significant number because this also matches the number of people that have already downloaded PocketWGU and given it a try on their iOS and Android devices.  In less than a year, PocketWGU is now in use by almost 15% of the WGU student body and growing every week.  That's over 1,700 users on iOS with the rest on Android versions 2.1 (4%), 2.2 (20%), 2.3 (56%), 3.x(4.8%), and even 4.x(2.2%).  There are WGU students running this on iPhones, iPads, Android tablets (including the Kindle Fire, Transformer, and Picasso) and pretty much every model of Android phone that has been released in the past 2.5 years.  Pretty cool!

The DevTeam wants to say thanks to everyone that has given it a try, and a special thanks to all the folk that helped test this release and make it possible.  Thanks!

Update (1/21):  an even newer version (0.9.2) is now available at the link below.

The new versions of PocketWGU for Android devices (including the Kindle Fire) is almost ready.  It's not available in the Market yet, but if you would like to give it a try (and tell us about any problems you have with it) head on over to the super-secret, experimental beta test page to download the new version.  Everything is fresh and new, so some things may not work.  If they don't, let us know! 

It wasn't too long ago that PocketWGU crossed the 1k and 2k marks.  Now at 3,600 users and growing, the PocketWGU DevTeam is pleased to welcome Kindle Fire owners into the fold.  At some point during the last week Amazon added the PocketWGU app to the app store on the Fire.  To install, simply search the Kindle Fire App Store for "WGU" tap on "Free" and then "Install".  Easy peezy!

In December, PocketWGU crossed the 3,200 user mark with over 1,200 users on iOS and more than 2,000 Android users. The DevTeam wants to say thanks to the great WGU community for continuing to make this effort a sucess. Thanks!

In related news, the Android version is now avialable in the Amazon App Store. Additionally, Amazon is currently reviewing PocketWGU for release on the Kindle Fire (quite a few requests for that!). The Amazon store has some nice features for providing comments on the app and for allowing developers to respond to those comments. Take a look at the link if you're interested.

Finally, a brand new version of PocketWGU for Android is in the works and will begin testing soon. All WGU students, faculty and staff with Android devices (2.0 or later) are welcome to participate in the testing. Head over to the PocketWGU page on Google+ to find out how.

The latest update for PocketWGU on iOS is now up in the iTunes App Store.  This update is intended to resolve a couple of bugs with posting new messages to the Community, and with accessing links from within the Course of Study (CoS).  Recent updates to the CoS for many courses now contain direct links to electronic textbooks from CourseSmart and SkillSoft.  With this new release, you should be able to lauch those texts directly from the CoS without leaving the app.  Enjoy!

The iOS version of PocketWGU has now been available for a month and in that time there have been over 400 downloads. This is a much faster early pace than the Android version, but Android is still far ahead in the race (1,300+ users). Oddly, while 400 users have downloaded the app, only 2 have reviewed/rated it on iTunes.

If you like PocketWGU, please consider rating it and writing a brief review for others that might be considering it. If you don't like PocketWGU, rating it would probably be way too much of a bother. :-)

The PocketWGU DevTeam is very pleased to announce that version 1.0 of PocketWGU for iOS (iPhone, iPad, & iPod Touch) is now available in the Apple iTunes App Store.  Many thanks to all the students and faculty that helped to make this release possible.  A direct link to the app is available here: http://itunes.apple.com/app/pocketwgu/id464673280?mt=8

This release provides a fix (hopefully) for students that were having problems viewing the Course of Study (CoS) pages since WGU implemented changes to that system.  Please upgrade and let us know how this works.  Thanks!

A new version of PocketWGU is in the Market to fix the problems that occurred when WGU changed the Student Portal.  All Android users should update to this version as soon as possible.  Please note you need "0.4.9.1" and not the old version (0.4.9) to keep things working.  Special thanks for the work of Rick Fowler who made this fix possible, thanks Rick!