“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents a wise choice, not chance.” – Aristotle
From visions to initiatives and from initiatives to digital success, enterprises that lead the vanguard in adopting and embracing the mobile and mobile applications have reaped the benefits of the $220bn+ market and stand at the precipice of writing new chapters in technological history.
In their saga, like in many stories, their main reason for success was asking the right questions that offered the answers with greatest results.
Adopting a mobile development application platform on an enterprise or any kind of business level isn’t all that different from buying a house or a car on an individual one. According to an IBM study of more than 3,000 CIOs, 75 percent of respondents say mobility is a top priority in their business strategy.
The ramifications are profound and the decision must be carefully thought out. In virtue of this crucial choice, enterprises and companies who want to adopt a mobile development application platform solution must take into account these fundamental factors:
A key element when adopting a mobile strategy. In some areas, more people use iPhones while in other they might prefer tablets or Android and so on. At the moment Apple and Android are carving up a healthy slice of the market, while players such as Windows Phone or Blackberry getting a smaller piece of the pie. These two main protagonists have been at the vanguard of mobile developments and innovations for quite some time and will most likely remains so. Keep this in mind when opting for an efficient mobile app developing platform.
When needing complex apps that can be tailored to every enterprise/customer requirement, try to avoid mobile development platforms that use the word template based apps too much. A vital part when designing apps is the ability to create a mobile application quickly and cost efficient for multiple coding languages, such as Objective C (iOS) and Java (Android). Developing, managing and updating an app for multiple mobile devices and OS can cost quite a lot.
Thus it’s crucial that an application development platform can bring to bear developing resources (CPT’s or frameworks for example) that offer versatility, code reusability and powerful SDK’s to enhance, improve and lower costs in the development process.
An age old question. To sum up the answer : it depends on what’s your product and what you require to make it available.
Native apps access the device’s native features such as camera, gps or microphone for example. They take the longest time to develop, are more expensive, but they offer the best performance and the most organic feeling for users. Another quality of native apps is that they rarely require a wi-fi connection and so they offer more reliability.
Web apps aren’t apps at all, but customized websites tailored to have the look and feel of an app. This is by far the simplest approach, but performance is debatable, yet costs are cheap. Because the entire app lives on the Web, you can update it at will without having to redistribute the app itself. A key advantage of web apps is when your product needs to be updated constantly (i.e. online shopping) and you need to offer information and news regularly.
Hybrid apps are what the name implies. A combination of both web and native apps. More precisely hybrid apps run inside a native container, and leverage the device’s browser engine to render the HTML and process the JavaScript locally. At the moment native apps overshadow hybrid apps because HTML5 is far from being ready. Another drawback to hybrid apps is that it’s hard to track data on what’s happening within your hybrid app or with the traffic that is flowing between your mobile experiences.
Consider the choice of what kind of app you need carefully. Natives are harder to develop but the results are worth the effort. Mobile web apps don’t require installation like natives do, are cheap and cost efficient but encounter problems in performance. Hybrid apps are built with an ever increasing amount of tools for improvement, but at the same time they combine the best (and the worst) of native and web apps.
The ability to leverage the resources of a mobile application development platform is key when creating and managing an app. With features such as managing customer accounts, content management and customizing the administration panel logo, all of these under your own branding and company logo is a necessary criteria when shopping around for a mobile dev platform. It shows that a development platform has become mature enough to handle all aspects of the application lifecycle. This goes beyond the classic approach when you buy a product and find yourself lacking support in dealing with it. Whitelabel solutions are a must.
Ever logged on a website and suddenly it crashed? Although crashes are inevitable with dense user traffic, cloud servers can overcome such problems.
As your company grows and your app is getting more and more attention and traffic, you should never worry about whether your app is going to croak when you have thousands of users at the same time. Mobile development platforms that offer cloud scalability and can adapt to growth, have a leading edge that should never be overlooked.
The ability to monitor, analyze and track app-specific usage data is vital to know in which direction your app is going. From in-app purchases, customized tracking (such as videos or audio content), geographic info and activity gives a company a distinct advantage in gathering info to improve the application’s results.
And so we’ve reached the final scene. In a world where possibilities in the mobile landscape have mushroomed all over the place, so have the possible mistakes when making a choice.
Any company that wants to make a wise and informed decision when choosing the right mobile application development platform should never loose sight of these 6 tidbits. All of them are essential to make sure you’ve made the right decision in starting out on your mobile app adventure.
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