There are a few posts in #DoctorCX about Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) for mobile devices, the last one shared in Jan 2017. And lately there has been many people asking about it on the comment boxes. Mainly due to the fact that the Oracle Mobile Agent App (Oracle TAP) has suddenly disappeared from App Store and Google Play.
The truth is, as we suspected, it was discontinued. It is now official, and Oracle announced it, that from May 2017 release Oracle TAP is deprecated. However, Oracle will still leave it available for at least 2 years before the removal of the functionality.
The main reason Oracle is giving for the deprecation of Oracle TAP is that it “doesn’t meet customer needs due to the limited availability on iOS and the lack of extensibility and configurability“… and, in all honesty, I agree. Even though it was an easy way to provide mobile capability out-of-the-box.
The recommendation or suggestion for customers who are using it, or for those who are looking for a mobile interface, is to start using the Agent Browser UI (which will only really render well in tablets) or use the Mobile Accelerators to build their own mobile apps.
The Mobile Accelerator is based in the principle that the customer, or a specialist partner, would develop a mobile app using the Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF), which is a Java/HTML5-based framework, that allows developers to create apps for Apple iOS and Google Android devices from a single code base.
I believe that this is why Oracle is aggressively re-developing the TAP app into HCM Mobile Cloud now