What does it cost to build offline support into Apps?

Richard Rabins

We have been covering the topic of offline support (either no signal or poor signal) in a number of blog posts.

In this post we wanted to share data with you regarding the cost implications of building offline support into mobile apps and explain why Alpha is passionate about eliminating this premium!

To do this we recently came across an article in Wired Insights (part of Wired magazine.)

The article referred to research which a vendor had done with businesses building mobile apps and it concluded the following:

78 percent plan to build apps that require data caching and/or offline support.

In today’s wireless world, network connectivity can still be an issue in some areas. End users want apps that will allow them to finish a transaction without losing data or submitting it twice – even when they lose service.

However, adding offline capabilities to an app can more than triple its development complexity. Enterprise architects need an infrastructure that can support the increased requirements of storing data locally.

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About Author

Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

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.