A page for every Rutba app, drawn from the app itself

Picture somebody comparing Rutba’s point of sale with a dedicated till product. Their questions are specific: does it handle returns? Can it do a cash-up at the end of the day? Split payments? Our product page answered with a sentence per app — "the counter till: scan, sell, take payment, and print" — which is true and does not answer any of them.

The honest answer to "what is inside" is not a sentence we write. It is what a customer actually sees after signing in.

The app already knows what is in it

Every Rutba app declares its own menu — the sidebar a customer uses to get around it, grouped under its headings. So the site now reads that menu straight from each app and publishes it: every screen in the app, in the order the app itself shows them.

That gives forty apps a page of their own, each with:

• What the app is, and its availability — including where it is early access or not built.
• A screenshot of it running, where one has been captured, and a gallery of more.
• Every screen in it, from its own menu.
• The product it ships with, that product’s price line, and the other apps in the same product.

What is inside an app is not a sentence we write. It is the menu a customer sees after signing in.

Why read the menu instead of writing a feature list

A feature list written by marketing drifts. A screen gets added and nobody updates the page; a screen gets renamed and the page keeps the old name. A list read from the app cannot drift that way, because it is the app’s own description of itself — and a check fails when the published copy has fallen behind the apps.

It also cannot flatter. If a screen is not in the menu, it is not on the page. That is the same discipline as labelling what is not built yet, applied to the whole catalogue at once.

Screenshots of the real thing, running

The screenshots are taken of the apps running, rather than drawn. A screen that does not exist cannot be photographed, which makes a screenshot a stronger claim than a mock-up — and where there is no screenshot yet, the page offers a way to see it running rather than inventing a picture.

One address per app, even when it ships in three products

Some apps ship with more than one product. Rutba’s Comms app, for example, is part of Chat, Meet and Calls. It has a page under each, but one of them is the address search engines are told about, so the same app is never three competing pages in a search result. An app with nothing to show — an engine running behind another product — has no page at all.