The Field Guide

Yellowstone. Reinvented.

Here's a break down of all the changes, big and small, that we've been working on these past few months.

The past few months have brought a lot of change to the Yellowstone Platform. What, exactly, has been going on?

Since March of this year, we've been working behind the scenes to rebuild the Yellowstone Platform on top of a rich set of modern technologies. Namely, Ionic and Google Firebase. With Ionic and Firebase we've created a system that is sleek, runs faster and allows us at Yellowstone to iterate more efficiently as we create the best membership platform that fits in the palm of your hand.

What is Ionic, you ask? Ionic is a cross-platform framework for building mobile apps that is supported by 5 million developers worldwide and powers over 4 million apps. It's the technical glue that sits under the hood allowing us to quickly and efficiently build features specific to Yellowstone. Ionic handles the technical details of working on Android and iOS while providing a platform for creating beautiful components that fit your organization's needs. It means at Yellowstone we get to focus on features and less on the nitty-gritty details that separate Android and iOS.

We've also migrated to Google's Cloud Platform for all of our server-side needs. This means that Yellowstone mobile apps now talk directly to Google's cloud-based servers for every action they perform. From downloading the latest news and events to receiving a push notification, everything goes through Google's servers. It may not seem like a big deal, but this is huge.

Since Google's infrastructure is distributed across servers worldwide, your content is closer than ever to your members. You'll notice that the apps open and show content significantly faster than they have in the past. This is great news for your members no matter where they are as they have to spend less time navigating and waiting and more time reading and interacting with your content. In fact, since releasing this version of the app, we've already seen almost a 30% uptick in unique devices and screen views across the platform.

The bottom line is, this investment of time and technology has created a better platform for your members to consume your content. Additionally, it allows us to iterate on and expand the platform to better fit future and current needs.

There are a lot of updates to come now that Yellowstone is running on Ionic and Google Firebase. You are going to hear a lot more from us soon!