In the early years of mobile apps, the only way to ensure an app could perform optimally on any device was to develop the app natively. This meant that new code had to be written specifically for each device's specific processor. Today, the majority of mobile applications developed are device-agnostic.
In the past, if an app needed to be cross-platform and run on multiple operating systems (OSes), there was little, if any, code that could be reused from the initial development project. Essentially, each device required its own mobile app development project with its own code base. Modern cross-platform tools use common languages such as C# and JavaScript to share code across projects; more importantly, they integrate well with application lifecycle management tools, such as Jenkins. This enables developers to use a single codebase for Apple iOS, Google Android and progressive web apps (PWAs). PWAs are built to take advantage of native mobile device features, without requiring the end user to visit an app store, make a purchase and download software locally. Instead, a PWA can be located with a search engine query and accessed immediately through a browser, thereby eliminating the need for e-commerce merchants to develop native apps for multiple mobile OSes.
Just like YouTube videos, PWA content is downloaded progressively, which provides the end user with a better user experience than a traditional website that uses responsive design. Progressive web apps may also be referred to as instant mobile apps.
The cost of developing an app can range from almost nothing to millions of dollars -- it all depends on the type of app and its intended use. Following is a breakdown of the ranges you can expect to pay for building a mobile app:
3. Brainstorm and sketch out how your mobile app will solve the problems you've identified and what features and functions you'll include. Prototyping can be as simple as using a whiteboard or paper to sketch ideas, or tools such as InVision, Balsamiq or Adobe Experience Design. Keep user experience in mind when developing your vision. This includes such things as design, usability, security and performance.
7. Create your prototype so you can share the app with your investors or other stakeholders. Use their feedback to refine app development and further testing. This includes testing for functionality, performance and ease of navigation.
Mobile application development is the process of creating software applications that run on a mobile device, and a typical mobile application utilizes a network connection to work with remote computing resources. Hence, the mobile development process involves creating installable software bundles (code, binaries, assets, etc.) , implementing backend services such as data access with an API, and testing the application on target devices.
Although there are some similarities between these two platforms when building applications, developing for iOS vs. developing for Android involves using different software development kits (SDKs) and different development toolchain. While Apple uses iOS exclusively for its own devices, Google makes Android available to other companies provided they meet specific requirements such as including certain Google applications on the devices they ship. Developers can build apps for hundreds of millions of devices by targeting both of these platforms.
Each of these approaches for developing mobile applications has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. When choosing the right development approach for their projects, developers consider the desired user experience, the computing resources and native features required by the app, the development budget, time targets, and resources available to maintain the app.
Cross-platform native mobile applications can be written in variety of different programming languages and frameworks, but they are compiled into a native application running directly on the operating system of the device.
Hybrid mobile applications are built with standard web technologies - such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 - and they are bundled as app installation packages. Contrary to the native apps, hybrid apps work on a 'web container' which provides a browser runtime and a bridge for native device APIs via Apache Cordova.
PWAs offer an alternative approach to traditional mobile app development by skipping app store delivery and app installations. PWAs are web applications that utilize a set of browser capabilities - such as working offline, running a background process, and adding a link to the device home screen - to provide an 'app like' user experience.
One problem with native mobile application development is that it requires a highly specialized skill set. Although there are large and vibrant developer communities for C and Java -- the language families that are mostly used for native development --, there are fewer developers who are knowledgeable in platform-specific versions of those languages and their respective IDEs. In fact, skilled native app developers are in such demand, that many companies are hard-pressed to hire and retain them on staff, and instead they frequently have to resort to outside 3rd party design and development houses to build their apps for them.
Hybrid apps allow developers to use web technologies of HTML5/CSS/JavaScript and then encapsulate those web applications in a container that allows the web application to act like a native application on the device. Since hybrid mobile apps are just web apps running on an embedded browser environment, most of the code from a web app can be used to build a mobile app. As rendering and runtime performance of mobile browsers are ever-increasing, hybrid development is a viable alternative for web developers who want to build mobile apps quickly.
Similarly, PWAs are written using traditional web application programming technologies usually including some variant of JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS, and are accessed initially through a browser on the device or computer.
In the early days of the modern smartphone applications era, mobile applications went through a similar evolution as first websites. At first, the applications and sites where wholly contained within themselves and acted as little more than static advertisements for the brand, company, product, or service.
However, as connectivity and network capabilities improved, the applications became increasingly connected to sources of data and information that lived outside of the app itself, and the apps became increasingly dynamic as they were able to update their UI and content with data received over the network from queries to data sources.
As a result, the mobile front-end applications increasingly rely on and integrated with back-end services which provide data to be consumed through the mobile front-end. Such data can include, for example, product information for e-commerce apps or flight info for travel and reservation apps. For a mobile game, the data may include new levels or challenges and scores or avatars from other players.
The mobile front-end obtains the data from the back-end via a variety of service calls such as APIs. In some cases, these APIs may be owned and operated by the same entity developing the mobile application. In other cases, the API may be controlled by a third party and access is granted to the mobile application via a commercial arrangement.
For most of the applications, mobile developers are responsible for creating and managing the back-end services for their application. The mobile developer may not be an expert or even particularly skilled in spinning up and running a back-end infrastructure.
When a developer says they are a mobile application programmer, they are most often referring to this front-end part of the application, and they are skilled in the languages and technologies that are used to create this front-end application.
Depending on the size of the team producing the app, there may be many different people involved in the design and development of the front-end mobile app. The team size can range from a single developer who does everything associated with building the app, to tens, hundreds, and more people with specialized skills.
For example, there may be dedicated creative/graphics designers who are responsible for creating visual elements of applications like icons, backgrounds, colors, themes and other parts of the app. The team may also have user experience and user interface designs who work on the layout of the components, how they interact with each other and the user. In the case of certain types of games, a team may include motion graphics developers and even engineers who develop engines that govern the physics of how components move in the app, like a car in a racing game.
Regardless of the size of the team, a critical element of the development effort is building the app logic that is responsible for making network calls to the back-end services, retrieve data and update the data in the back-end systems with new information generated from the app.
These back-end services are typically accessed through a variety of application programming interfaces, most commonly known as APIs. There are different types of APIs, such as REST and GraphQL, and there are also a wide variety of means and styles of accessing them. While some back-end service APIs are available directly to the application through calls in the platform itself, many of the specialized services have to be integrated into the app via a software development kit, commonly known as an SDK. Once the SDK has been added to the app via the development environment, then the application can make use of the APIs defined in the SDK.
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