Understanding Mobile Technology Development

 

The world becomes increasingly interconnected technologically. The use of mobile data has grown surprisingly with the rising use of the smart phones. Therefore, mobile app plays an important role for the today’s business.

There are three different approaches for developing mobile apps:

Native Apps:

The Android and iOS are the two widely used app platforms. The Native apps are developed for a specific platform.  So the native apps which are developed for Android devices will not work on iOS devices and vice versa. The native apps are built using native programming languages like Objective C, Java, etc. Each mobile platform offers their proprietary development tools for developing the native apps. (Swift, 2015)

The native apps can use the recourses of the devices effectively like camera, sound system, graphics, etc.  Due to make the native apps for specific device, it works fast and reliable to the users. The native apps offer best user experience. The main disadvantage of the native apps is that they will not work on all kinds of devices. So the organization needs to develop different versions of native apps for multiple platforms. That’s why it is costly to build and maintain.

Web Apps:

The web apps are the mobile version of websites. They are the mobile optimized apps that load within a mobile internet browser like Mozilla, chrome, etc. The users don’t need to install the web apps to their mobile devices. So the web apps don’t require any space in the devices. Several programming languages like CSS, HTML5, CSS, etc are used to develop the web apps. A web app is easy to develop and can be very simple.  A constant internet connection is required to access the web apps. It may work slow and difficult to engage with users. The financial times has a good mobile web app. (Iversen and Eierman, 2013)

Hybrid Apps:

The Hybrid apps are the combination of native and web apps. It is written by HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then warp by PhoneGap or Cordova.  The performance of Hybrid app may be reduced due to add an extra layer between the native code and targeted platform.

This app is comparatively cheaper than native app and easy to build. It is faster than web app and easy to maintain. Only the native portion of the hybrid apps needs to be rewritten to work it on multiple platforms. So an organization doesn’t need to manage a hybrid app in different platforms. So developing hybrid app is economical solution. (Swift, 2015)

The Cheswick Green House (CGH) wants to launch their own mobile app due expand their business and more engagement to their customer. A hybrid app is suitable for this type of business because the Cheswick Green House needs a wide acceptability mobile app for growing their business. From the above discussion, we have seen that the hybrid apps have the capability of running on different types of mobile devices. Moreover, this app has more user engagement capability. It is also easy to develop and economical. So I think a hybrid app is suitable for the Cheswick Green House. (McCallister, 2014)

The main challenge for the mobile app development is to make it widely acceptable so that it can reach to the optimal number of users.  The performance of the app may be reduced while developers try to make the app widely acceptable. So it’s a big challenge for the developer to keep the apps simple, clear and responsive. Since most apps run on mobile devices, it is necessary to develop an app with minimum power consumption and resource utilization. Network security is an important part of the today’s network. So it is also a key challenge to make the app secure and reliable to the users. (McCallister, 2014)

Basically, the mobile app development is a program that runs on the mobile devices like tablet, Smartphone, etc; whereas, the desktop or laptop application is a creation of computer programs that runs on a desktop or laptop devices. Most of the apps for standard computer are developed by HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript. On the other hand, the mobile app development depends on a lot of factors. Different programming languages are used to develop different versions of mobile apps. For example, Java is used to build Android apps and swift is used for iOS apps. (McCallister, 2014)

In this assignment, we have described three different approaches for developing mobile apps, identified their advantages and disadvantages, selected a suitable approach for the Cheswick Green House and finally justified my decision based on the business operation of the company. We have identified some key challenges for the mobile app development also and made a comparison between mobile and desktop apps.

Iversen, J. and Eierman, M. (2013) Learning mobile app development: A hands-on guide to building apps with iOS and Android. Harlow: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers.

McCallister, J. (2014) Mobile Apps made simple: The ultimate guide to quickly creating, designing and utilizing mobile Apps for your business – 2nd edition. United States: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.

Swift, O. (2015) Android: App development & programming guide: Learn in a day! United States: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.