What impact do the varying platforms have on app developers?
From consumers to marketing directors, mobile is the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. And it’s not difficult to see why - it’s estimated that by 2014, mobile devices will have overtaken PCs. Mobile devices are not only more portable – they’re more personal and customisable too. Living in people’s pockets, they provide the ultimate communications platform. With mobile comes a wealth of almost limitless opportunity for brands to get straight to the heart of consumers and ultimately increase brand engagement.
But is developing a mobile marketing strategy worth the time, effort and investment for companies? Does mobile live up to the hype? How much impact can a killer app make?The Drum caught up with leading agencies in the world of app development and mobile strategy, posing a series of questions to discover just what it is that’s got people talking, and why developing such a strategy might not be just prudent – but actually essential for the future of your brand.Gemma Oversby, Head of Business Development, Storm IDFirst thing to note is that even when developing for a single platform you need to be aware of the growing number of OS versions and the increasingly fragmented landscape of the devices running that OS. This alone presents a challenge to the developer. Then, yes, you often need to also answer the question of how to deliver to multiple platforms and how to maintain these over the lifespan of the app.It is this range of problems that often tempts developers to create a mobile web app rather than a native app. This can often be a good idea from a development perspective but please do not think it will make all the problems go away, and will it make for a great product? In the first instance you still need to work hard to make the app feel right on different devices – there is no standard UI across platforms. You then still need to test across devices. You may be able to fix bugs in your system in one place but you still have to check the rendering and performance on each device in turn. Finally, you succeed in making your mobile web app look like a native app across devices – hooray – but your users will feel the difference immediately. The more your mobile web app looks like a native mobile app the more they will make the comparison – and that means your app will feel like the poor cousin...does anyone want that associated with their brand? No, didn’t think so.So we would recommend using mobile web apps where appropriate but not using them as a one-size-fits-all solution for mobile app development. When it comes to developing native apps for multiple platforms, do not be fooled by the promises of development frameworks which offer to code once and target all platforms. That promise turns out to be too good to be true. Really basic apps can be delivered this way but you will pay the price in terms of quality of the resultant solution for anything else. Initial cost savings will be lost and you will have a messy codebase and a handful of poor apps to show for it. You have been warned. I would recommend using the best technology and tools available to deliver apps for each platform. You get the best results and it is not as expensive as you’d think if:- You deliver one app firstThis lets you solve all the main UX problems for mobile use and gain initial feedback from users on this app. Do a bit of research, select a preferred OS and then targeting the 10% of the devices that 90% of your audience use.
- You translate your UI but do not change your UXThis ensures you have no new edge cases in your flows so your test scripts can be used across all platforms.You share the same back end servicesSharing the same APIs, datastore, user accounts, etc offers huge time savings across a suite of apps To pull this off try to work with an agency that can provide backend web services and can create apps for multiple platforms – it will mean a cheaper better solution.
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