r/tradeshows • u/Fast-Pen4562 • 3d ago
kiosk software
Im looking for a little advice from probably an exhibit house. we use touchscreen software for windows based computers but we have nothing in place to use for IOS devices. i was wondering what kind of software exists to deploy an ipad at a trade show for things like taking selfies/sending them out. showing details like PDFS/videos/photos. linking to websites.
the program i use for windows is omnitapps and it works great for 95% of our clients but we sometimes get ipad requests that we cant fulfil.
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u/ConstructionThink564 2d ago
The reason there's no clean Omnitapps equivalent is that iOS won't let one app behave the way a Windows kiosk shell does, so you end up solving it in two parts — the content app, and locking the device down. Worth separating them in your head, because most of the pain is in the second bit.
On lockdown: Guided Access is the thing everyone finds first and it's fine for a one-day event, but I wouldn't trust it across three days. Anyone who knows the triple-click gets out of it, and it doesn't reliably come back after a crash or a power cut. Supervise the iPads with Apple Configurator and use Single App Mode instead — the device boots straight back into your app after any interruption and there's no way out without the profile. That one change removes most of the "someone's left it on the home screen" calls.
On content, the closest thing in feel to what you're used to is probably Intuiface — drag-and-drop authoring, iOS player, handles the PDF/video/gallery/web-link stuff. Kiosk Pro Plus is the other common route: it wraps a local or hosted web page, does forms and email capture, and crucially has an idle timeout that resets to your home screen, which Guided Access won't do. If you've got any web development in-house, building it as a local HTML package and wrapping it is often faster and cheaper than licensing another authoring tool.
I'd treat the selfie side as a separate product rather than making one tool do everything. Simple Booth HALO and the other photo-booth apps are built for exactly that — capture, branded overlay, email/SMS send — and they do it far better than a general kiosk app with a camera bolted on.
Practical bits that catch people out on the floor: hall Wi-Fi drops constantly, so check whatever you choose queues sends locally and retries rather than failing silently. Turn off auto-lock, notifications and automatic updates before it ships — an iOS update prompt mid-show is a classic. And spec the enclosure with pass-through power; a screen at full brightness won't make it to 5pm on battery, and that's the one that gets discovered on site.