Alpha Software Blog



Laptop Shortage Makes Mobile Apps More Important than Ever

Empty ShelvesTrying to find a laptop for remote work, video meetings, or for your kids going back to school? Good luck. There’s a big laptop shortage that’s making it difficult, if not impossible, to find the laptops remote workers and students need.

And as I’ll explain later in this post, that makes it all the more important to write mobile applications for multiple mobile operating systems and mobile devices.

First, though, let’s take a look at how bad the laptop shortage is.

A Serious Laptop Shortage

The Associated Press reports “The world’s three biggest computer companies, Lenovo, HP and Dell, have told school districts they have a shortage of nearly 5 million laptops.”

And the numbers are even worse than that, the report says. It says that Lenovo told the California Department of Education that “the company has a backlog of more than 3 million Chromebooks.”

It’s not just school systems that can’t buy laptops. Regular consumers can’t, either.

Consumer Reports warns that these days, after you add a laptop to your online shopping cart ready to pay with a credit card, you will discover “that there are four, two, then none left in stock.”

Things are so bad, Consumer Reports calls it “the Great Laptop Shortage of 2020.”

Ryan Reith of market research firm IDC warns, “What we’ll see, at least for the next two to three months, is a lot of product simply not available.”

There are many reasons for the shortage. Students need laptops for remote learning. Employees need them for remote work. People need them for videoconferencing and staying in touch with family and friends.

In addition, according to the article “A Massive Laptop Shortage Has Hit the United States,” “Slower port inspections mean longer stock cycles. The United States Postal Service has suffered unprecedented slowdowns.”

Beyond that, supply chain woes in China make it difficult for companies to meet demand.

Students may need to use more smartphones instead of laptopsWhy Mobile Apps Are the Answer to the Laptop Shortage

Because of all that, mobile apps are more important than ever for your business. People won’t be able to get to web apps via WiFi on their laptops. The user experience on web browsers on phones simply isn’t as good as the user interface mobile apps.

That means if you want to reach consumers, mobile apps are the way to go. And if you want a more effective workforce and more efficient business, you need to double-down on mobile development to give them the apps they need.

Choosing the Best Cross Platform Development Tool for Mobile Apps

It can be expensive to build mobile apps though, especially if you want to write both iPhone apps and Android apps.

The answer is to use a cross platform development tool that lets you use a single codebase for your apps.

Alpha Software’s platform allows you to quickly build and deploy mobile and web applications from a single codebase. These highly secure applications run like native applications on both personal computers and mobile devices.

Alpha Software's platform has built-in mobile app development tools. It allows developers with or without mobile development experience to rapidly create robust, cross platform mobile apps. The platform uses a single code base to significantly reduces the time it takes to build these apps versus competing methods.

With Alpha Anywhere, you will find a complete and affordable cross platform mobile development and deployment platform.

Once you build your app with Alpha Anywhere, Alpha Cloud enables one-click deployment for your apps. Easy and secure deployment keeps your business applications safe while speeding them to end-users’ mobile devices.

Alpha Software offers a range of mentoring, training and professional services to help speed and scale cross-platform mobile app development.

Learn about the power of Alpha Software products for cross-platform mobile app development. Alpha Anywhere is consistently ranked with near-perfect scores by customers on third-party product review websites.

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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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