What's the future for building mobile applications? A survey says that hybrid mobile apps, rather than native ones, will dominate, as will the mobile Web. The reason is simple: Building hybrid apps is less expensive, less time-consuming, and faster than building native ones. Hybrid apps allow you to target multiple mobile platforms without needing to build separate app for iOS and Android. Using rapid mobile application development tools such as Alpha Anywhere reduce the time associated with building apps that work on both mobile and desktop environments.
The survey, done by TechValidate for OutSystems, questioned more than 200 enterprise IT decision makers worldwide about mobile enterprise applications they planned to build this year. It found that 65% of enterprises will build hybrid mobile apps this year, compared to only 26% who will use native mobile architectures. And 65% will develop for the mobile Web.
The report sums up the reason for the popularity of hybrid and mobile Web development this way: "Hybrid and mobile web enable developers to build one application for use on multiple platforms. This is a benefit for IT organizations that have lengthy development queues and need to satisfy a diverse user base."
Other findings
The survey also fleshed out exactly how important mobile development has become in enterprises. Some 43% of organizations surveyed said that mobility is now their top business functionality. More than half of the companies said that they would build mobility into between 51% and 100% of all their new enterprise apps.
One surprising finding is that despite the vast number of packaged apps and SaaS-based applications, enterprises continue to build their own custom applications.
What apps are enterprises planning to build? The top one is process automation, with 53% of companies saying they would build one this year. That's followed by reporting and analytics (36%), executive dashboard and scorecards (31%), CRM (26%) and collaboration (24%).
Making development more complex is the need to integrate new apps with existing systems, and just as important, to integrate them with cloudbased, packaged on-premise, and custom-developed systems. The survey found that 79% of enterprises had to integrate with at least one to five cloud-based applications, 66% needed to integrate with at least one to five on-premises application, and 61% needed to integrate with at least one to five custom-developed application.
We at Alpha believe as well that hybrid apps are the future of mobile development, which is why we've invested in making the best hybrid app development platform in Alpha Anywhere.
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