There's been a lot of discussion about a dedicated iPhone X-Wing Squad builder and the impossibility to distribute an iOS app due to licensing restrictions on the App Store.

However it just occurred to me that there could be an alternative that comes close to a native app (although with some drawbacks, I suspect content update while retaining user data might be an issue), with Filemaker Pro.

The Filemaker Go app is free on the App Store and databases built with Filemaker Pro can be just as optimised and powerful as native apps. It's just a matter of downloading the Filemaker database file and opening it with the Filemaker Go app to use it (unless I'm mistaken).

While I do own a license for Filemaker Pro Advanced, I'm not very confident with it. I'm currently self teaching iOS app development on Xcode and I've done some tutorials on Filemaker previously, so I have some bases of programming and building databases.

I'm happy experimenting with it for now and maybe involve myself fully in the development of a Filemaker solution for X-Wing if it turns out good!

If anyone knows Filemaker well, do you think it could be a viable alternative?

Do you have any examples of FileMaker databases that would have the functionality we'd need? Just like to check it out vs battle scribe, which works well, if not quite as pretty as the online squad builders

I can't find an example clearly showcasing the kind of functionality needed, all the examples on the FileMaker website are aimed at the professional/business market. However considering it can be used for inventory tracking, generating invoices, as a POS system, for contact management and so on, while having full control over the UI, I'm quite sure it can do the job.

The only limitation I can see would be with content update, as you would need a FileMaker Server solution to seamlessly update the users' database. Since I don't have the resources for such a thing, any update would require downloading a new file and the user would probably have to recreate his squadrons from scratch. One again, as I'm still beginning with FileMaker I might be mistaken.

In any case I'll experiment, try things out and see if I can even build something usable!