Designing Mobile Apps for Business - Make Sure It's Mobile

When designing mobile apps for business, make sure they're truly mobile apps that can work without a connection.

As companies increasingly recognize the urgent need to build mobile business apps for competitive reasons, they are also becoming increasinglysophisticated about the difference between TRUE custom mobile apps versus mobile apps that are simply web apps designed to fit on mobile devices.

We have put this diagram together to help you understand what the requirements for developing true mobile apps are.

Many of the above the above requirements, such as working offline, leveraging rich media, taking advantage of all the mobile device
hardware are only possible to meet if one builds using either of the following approaches:

1) Native applications. Native apps however don’t solve the common requirement of needing to run on multiple brands of mobile devices, normally associated with BYOD (bring your own device,) and are also typically very expensive, time consuming and require highly skilled developers.

Or

2) Enterprise-level hybrid applications. This approach offers the "build once run anywhere" benefit required by BYOD, and can be very cost effective if you are using a RMAD (rapid mobile application development) platform. This approach however is only possible if your RMAD platform has tight and seamless integration with the open source project known as PhoneGap which effectively wraps HTML5 into a native app, provides access to device hardware and lets one deploy apps from apps stores.

Please contact marketing@alphasoftware.com for a whitepaper that covers this topic in more detail and explains how Alpha Anywhere is the only sophisticated RMAD (rapid mobile application development) platform that lets you adopt option "2" outlined above.