Sharing Our Mobile Vision

There’s no question that mobile is a critical part of Tableau's mission to help people see and understand their data. That’s why we shipped our first mobile app more than four years ago with Tableau 6.1. We knew our approach had to be different from those of traditional analytics solutions. We focused on fast, easy, beautiful creation and delivery. And we didn't require a developer or a special server.

With Tableau, any workbook you create is automatically mobile-enabled when accessed from a device. You can pinch to zoom, swipe to scroll, and leverage other touch-optimized interactions like quick filters. You can also edit workbooks and create new views on your mobile device to answer new questions from your data. This works seamlessly in a mobile browser, with an embedded viz, and in the Tableau Mobile app.

We’re making bigger and bigger investments in mobile with every release. Tableau 9.1, our latest release, is no exception. It includes the new Tableau Mobile 9.1 app for iOS. The new interface puts your content front and center. It’s also faster than ever, and enables instant swiping between your favorites even when you’re offline. This app is the fastest and most delightful way to stay on top of your data, whether you’re in the office or out on the road. Visit the App Store to learn more and download the app.

The journey continues, and we have many new capabilities planned to help you do more on mobile. Many of you have shared your mobile use cases and plans with us. We appreciate all the feedback you’ve provided on the Ideas forum, our pre-release program, and most recently, at TC15. Keep it up!

Your input has guided our upcoming short- and long-term investments, including the following:

• Vizable: We launched a new product at the TC15 conference called Vizable. This free app turns your data into beautiful, interactive graphs that can be shared right from your iPad. It brings fun and approachable data analysis to even more people. With Vizable, you can use native-touch gestures such as pinching, swiping, and dragging to work with you data. You can sculpt data into visualizations in just seconds. If you’ve got an iPad, data, and questions, then Vizable is for you! Download it and give it a try.

• Support for phones and Android: We heard you loud and clear, and we are now investing in optimized support for phones. As announced at TC15, the pre-release program for our new iPhone app has started. Sign up now! New and improved Android smartphone and tablet apps are also in the works.

• Device-specific authoring: People want to engage with content on the device they have at that moment, whether it be a phone, a tablet, or a big-screen information display. To provide the best end-user experience for all displays and resolutions, we believe that authors need more control over how their content is displayed in each device. We believe that responsive layout alone does not provide the right set of creative controls and experiences for your dashboards. That's why we are building device-specific authoring into Tableau so that your users automatically get the right view for the device they are using at that moment. We demonstrated this feature during the TC15 Devs on Stage keynote and received a lot of positive feedback from our community.

• Secure access from anywhere: We are investing in adding tight integration with the leading Mobile Device Management (MDM)/Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) platforms so that you can deploy Tableau and be confident it “just works” in your environment.

• Native code for faster performance: Performance is always a key theme for us, and we’ll continue improving the speed of the mobile experience. We also want to take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices like location awareness, notifications, and improvements to the touch experience. We intend to use more native code so we can help you get your job done faster.

• Offline snapshots: In the new Tableau Mobile 9.1 app, we added offline snapshots, allowing you to stay on top of your data even when you don’t have network connectivity. This enables many new use cases that weren’t possible before. But we’re not stopping there! With this foundation in place, we’ll be adding more offline interactivity.

• Data-driven alerts and notifications: There are other needs that arise with mobile. For example, why do I have to go looking for relevant data? Why doesn’t my data come find me when something important happens? We’re working on a new app that helps you stay on top of your most critical KPIs and metrics right from your smartphone.

• Sharing and collaboration: We all operate in teams, and mobile devices provide a unique platform to share and collaborate with others. We think there is a big opportunity to get others involved in data discoveries, conversations, and data presentations.

We’d love to collaborate with you as we continue to invent the future of mobile analytics. We’re interested in understanding your mobile plans, use cases, and pain points, so please submit ideas and vote them up in the Ideas forum.

We also want your feedback on pre-release versions of our products. We encourage you to sign up to get enrolled in our mobile early adopter community.

Thanks for all your help and support. Here’s to the exciting journey ahead!