FYI: One of our partners, Scringo, is officially closing down shop. Recommend folks check out Socialize (http://getsocialize.com), and other SDK's for alternatives. ** Full letter below: "Hello, We regret to inform that the Scringo service will be terminated in 60 days. Following this notice period, Scringo's sidebar will stop functioning, users will be unable to connect to chat rooms in app, and all other Scringo's functionality will stop functioning. Also, effective immediately, we will stop accepting new apps into Scringo. Over the past 2 years we've enjoyed helping developers such as yourselves turn apps into mobile communities. The success of our developers was always a great motivation for us. Unfortunately, we have been unsuccessful in making a business out of Scringo's service. After exploring all alternatives, sadly it is time to say goodbye. We encourage you to use the notice period to deploy an alternative solution that best fits the needs of your app users. We wish you much success with your app going forward. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact us. We will do our best to help. Best regards, The Scringo Team"

That means we have to remove all scringo code from our apps? What happens if we don't? will the apps crash? I think it's an easy question, but I'm not sure.. THanks.

@Andrusito If I understand correctly: The Scringo sidebar will open, but when a user taps on one of the Scringo activities, nothing will happen. The Scringo features will be dead. Your app should still work, but there may be some exceptions.

Hello All, You apps should work fine, however with a 60 -day notice of termination, I would work to remove the Scringo SDK from your Application. Simple put, there is no reason to have it in there if it does not work. There are other SDK options that you can use and I will post some new information soon :) Hope everyone has a great weekend.... Code it up! Tony Buzztouch

Sorry to hear the news about Scringo. I have an app that I decided not to complete and publish in the fall which had a significant portion of the features presented via .Scringo. Really happy that I did not release to App Store, and now be faced with taking the app down for a redesign. It will be interesting to see the alternative options mentioned by Tony. On another front... as a developer free toolsets seem like a good idea... However Scringos demise proves that they are not going to make it up in volume. Perhaps their plan was a famiar one of build a base and position their company for acquisition Initial development tools can be priced modestly, but then require a license fee prior to sales. Either way. I am sorry that such potential is now gone.

Any new alternatives to Scringo (aside from Socialize)? I'm thinking of building one on my own :) Also: does anyone have more information on why they closed down? A more detailed postmortem, aside from what was written in the letter?

I got tired of searching for more info on this. Here´s the "conversation" I had with the owner: "Hello team, Today, I've read a sad new about your great service. I know you'll close it.. That's why I wanted to know if there is any way to keep all my users or maybe transfer them to a new service." ----- 2014-12-12 18:20 GMT-03:00 Ofer Kalisky <[email protected]>: Thanks for the kind words, Sorry, but there's no such way... Ofer ---- I insisted again: Hi Ofer. I´ve been searching and searching, but I cannot find a service like yours. Have you thought about charging a monthly subscription? Is there a way you can offer a basic version of Scringo for installing on dedicated servers? Any help would be greatly appreciated. ---- 9 feb. 2015 Hi, Sorry, but this isn't possible... I wish there was any way I could help but there isn't ;-(

It's so weird that they didn't even try to charge a monthly subscription... Could you share any experience you had with them? Did it help your app a lot? I built two apps, and I wonder how much discussion forums / user interaction can help with their marketing. I imagine users providing some interesting feedback to me using such a tool, also staying longer within my app and being more likely to promote my production. Could you say that this was your case?

Their service, as I mentioned on the email I sent, was like no other. SO simple to integrate: copy and paste. ALL the others I tried involve programming knowledge. They all suck, they charge money and do half the things Scringo did. Since I installed Scringo, I saw much more installs for all my apps, because I created a community inside the app so people could chat, share messages, etc. They all got notified when I launched a new app within the niche. Basically it helped me by promoting new apps to an audience of more than 2 million cell phone numbers. That´s the audience I had. I don´t have numbers and stats, but it did help a lot.

Thanks for the info :)