While fundamentally MedImage, and it’s parent company & Foundation, AtomJump, build apps, we are pleased to report that the organisation has now completed it’s transition to being “app-store free”.

The old approach for app building companies is to target the popular app-stores from Apple and Google, which have become ‘de-facto’ standards for phone apps. This has some advantages, particularly if you wish to have processor intensive functionality on the device (such as with games), but it also has some disadvantages (see this post for the reasons why we switched).

However, there is now a new way to publish apps, and to do so without the middle man: sometimes called “progressive web apps”, or “browser-based apps”. Once installed via a button inside the phone’s browser, these apps can be started as an icon on the phone’s home screen, much like ‘app-store’ based apps. However, the app itself is streamed from a web server, directly from the supplier of the app (i.e. us, in this case).

Our approach with this capability, and with our new apps, is two-fold:

  • We “host” our apps, for your convenience. The hosted version will usually be open to try-before-you buy, or be free.
  • If you wish to have more independence from our hosted servers (or a backup option should your network connection to our servers ever cut out), we give full access to the source code of the app, and you can freely download and install it on your own servers.

MedImage now consists of the ‘Standard’ version, which includes chat and remote-patient functionality, and the ‘Professional’ version, which is the app that most of our existing users are more familiar with, and is a more dedicated photo app.

Our ‘app-store’ apps have now been retired, and while users with the apps can continue to use them, there will no longer be any updates or security fixes, so we recommend transitioning your doctors to the new apps as soon as you can. They should work just as well as the old apps, once installed, and hopefully better, as we continue to refine them (incidentally, ‘web apps’ are more easily refined than ‘app-store’ apps, in general).

Look for the ‘Start App’ buttons on our Download page, or our Guide pages, which both have short videos to help with the installation process.

Look for this icon:

A note for ‘Direct-Wifi’ MedImage Users

Some of our practices have used the MedImage ‘app-store’ app to send photos directly over their LAN (local area network) to the MedImage Server. While an ‘app-store’ app allows this, a remotely-hosted, browser-based app (such as our hosted apps), will not, for security reasons. You do have two choices moving forward:

  • Transition to having your own MedImage Cloud service on your own servers. This is our recommended option, as both the ‘Standard’ and ‘Professional’ apps hosted from our website will work, and all photo data in the Professional app is sent directly from the user’s own browser to your own Cloud servers. The only time AtomJump’s servers are ever touched is during the initial app-pairing process. You can still choose to use your own installations of the apps with this method, too, but either way, there is never any doctor’s photo data stored on AtomJump’s servers with the Professional app. (Note: If you want to be completely free from AtomJump’s hosting, you can also potentially set up your own pairing server: the core source code is in the Notifications add-on to AtomJump Messaging, though this would be a more challenging project)
  • Install a ‘server’ of the MedImage Professional app on your local network. Provided the server of the app is on the same LAN network as the MedImage Server, the browser will have permissions to send photos over the local network directly to the MedImage Server. The disadvantages of this approach are that people likely won’t be able to send photos when they are physically away from the network, and the ‘Standard’ app won’t be available as it currently only supports a Cloud-pairing based option. However, you do have a slight speed advantage transferring data, and there are no ongoing costs of hosting a web server.