Presenting our new app pretixSCAN
Ever since we first released a ticket scanning app for pretix in 2016 on Android, we've been asked why we don't have an app for iOS and it's taken us way to much time to follow up on that. However, we didn't just publish an iOS app, we completely refurbished our app on all platforms. pretixdroid and pretixdesk are now history and make room for our new app pretixSCAN.
The biggest new feature is obviously iOS support, but it's not the only one. First and foremost, pretixSCAN changes how the app is connected to the server. Instead of a configuration code that already contains event and check-in list information, pretixSCAN is configured via the new Devices menu in pretix and can be authorized to access multiple events at the same time. You can't (yet) actually scan for multiple events at the same time, but you can easily switch between events and check-in lists from within the app.
The third large improvement is the ability to print badges on the fly on Android and Desktop. If you set up a printer with pretixSCAN, a name tag can automatically be printed for everyone who checks in. Of course, you can use our well-known graphical ticket editor to design the name tags to your liking.
Of course, all the great features from our old apps are still there: You can use the app online or fully offline, depending on the quality of your internet connection. For larger-scale deployments we have built a new component called pretixSCAN Proxy that helps tackling the challenges of events with lots of attendees that can't rely on constant internet connectivity.
At the same time, we're also officially launching our hardware rental offering that we have offered for a while already: If you run an event and you need additional hardware for your POS or check-in setup, check out our rental service. You get pre-configured, pretix-compatible hardware at competitive prices for a single day or a week, whatever you need.
pretixSCAN works great with pretix 2.8, but will receive a few more improvements as part of pretix 3.0 next month.
The only thing we did not keep is the option to restrict search and statistics features in the app – for most of our customer's usecases it's not useful to have these restrictions and since there is no longer an app-specific configuration flow in the dashboard, it wasn't feasible to implement it. Since all data is present on the device anyways, it's also doesn't make a large difference with regards to data security. However, if you rely on this feature, you can still use the old apps. We have no specific plans on removing them, we just don't advertise them any more and no longer activate the pretixdroid backend plugin by default.
