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Survey: Top Execs are Unsatisfied with Their Companies' Mobile Apps

Survey Finds Top Execs Are Unsatisfied with their Companies’ Mobile Apps — and Blame ITA global survey of more than 1,000 line-of-business executives found the execs believe problems with developing mobile apps stifle innovation in their companies. And they blame IT for it. The survey notes the exec’s “trust in IT is dismal, with fewer than one in five of respondents saying they would work with their in-house IT department” to solve the problem. Here’s why top execs are unsatisfied with their companies’ mobile apps…

Survey Finds Top Execs Are Unsatisfied with their Companies’ Mobile Apps — and Blame IT

The survey, “The App Dilemma: Meeting the High Expectations of Business,” was done by mobility company Kony in partnership with Wakefield Research. Summing up the results, Kony’s chief marketing officer Carlos Carvajal, said, “Enterprises recognize the importance of apps for their business. Unfortunately, as this survey reveals, hurdles around app user experience, cost, and management are stifling innovation. The challenge is organizations that fail to innovate quickly become irrelevant in this digital era.”

Unsurprisingly, the survey found that executives universally believe mobile apps are vital to their businesses, with 98% saying their company would benefit from well-written ones. But the execs are extremely unhappy with their companies’ mobile apps and the way the apps are developed, whether done by IT, or by outsourcing.

Sixty-five percent of executives who have invested in doing mobile app development internally in the last year reported they’re not completely satisfied with the way IT managed the overall user experience within mobile apps. And a whopping 92% who outsourced app development “didn’t feel their outsourced apps met expectations.”

Despite being so unhappy about outsourced mobile apps, executives don’t believe IT can solve the app problems. The survey found “Only 19 percent (one in five) of business leaders feel that working with their in-house IT department is the best solution to develop their apps.” And 27% believe their “IT department deprioritizes the mobile app strategy.”

Executives who don’t manage app development internally cite three primary reasons they believe their IT staff can’t adequately handle app development: 42% cited a lack of skilled staff, 40% pointed to a limited IT budget, and 37% mentioned security.

A full seventy-three percent of the executive outsource app development. But they cite plenty of challenges as well: 43% say the cost to develop apps was higher than they expected, 41% say it was more costly to maintain the app than they expected, and 39% pointed to problems with getting customizable options into their apps.

So what’s a company to do if its executives are unhappy with both IT and outsourcing? At Alpha Software, we have an answer: Put the power to develop mobile apps into the hands of line-of-business experts (called citizen developers), and also give IT better tools for developing mobile apps. Alpha Anywhere does both. It’s a low-code, rapid mobile application development (RMAD) platform built for the enterprise that lets non-developers and developers alike quickly and easily build great mobile apps.

Gartner’s study, “Market Guide for Rapid Mobile App Development Tools” found Alpha Anywhere to be one of the most robust products it evaluated. To read how Alpha Anywhere helps citizen developers to build and deploy business apps, read our white paper on democratizing app development

Want to build better mobile apps?

Download Alpha Anywhere Community Edition and start building mobile apps for freeView a tutorial on how to build mobile apps.

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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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