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Develop Disposable Mobile Apps Fast


Standards Based App Development

Standards Based Rapid App Development


The best mobile apps cost many thousands of dollars to create, take many months to build, and require a complex approval process --- or so the thinking goes. But that thinking may well be wrong. A new study from Gartner, "Start Creating More Disposable Mobile Apps," says that for many purposes, you'd be much better off building "disposable apps," apps that are used only for a brief time, and then no longer used. These apps can be easily built using Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) tools.

The report says that the complex mobile app-building process in most enterprises hinder app development rather than help it. According to the report, "This legacy process has hindered the number of apps an organization could release, a fact supported by a Gartner mobile app development survey in 2014 that found that most enterprises had released fewer than 10 apps, with a significant number of enterprises not having released any apps."

Disposable Apps and Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD)

Gartner's solution: Build a disposable app, which it defines as an app "built for a specific event or a critical, single purpose and used for a short period of time, during which a highly concentrated amount of activity occurs on the app and after which it is discarded, never to be used again."

Gartner points out that disposable apps are already common among consumer apps, for example, event-oriented apps for sports events like the Australian Open. It says that similar single-purpose apps are ideal for the enterprise. It points to apps built for conferences, apps built to conduct specific clinical studies, and apps designed to manage repairing rail damage.

Before building the app, Gartner recommends putting together a cost-benefit template outlining the expected benefits for the app, and then doing a rough calculation as to whether it will be worth doing.

Once that's done, it's time to build the app. This is the key part of the process. Unless the proper tools are used to build it, the app could fail because of long development times. What's important is speed, low cost, and simplicity. That's what RMAD tools such as Alpha Anywhere offer. RMAD tools use a low-code or no-code approach to app development, allowing people with little programming experience to quickly build a mobile app. RMAD tools include backend integration and front-end app development. So even line-of-business staff and domain experts can build mobile app, including disposable ones.

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About Author

Dion McCormick
Dion McCormick

Dion McCormick, Lead Solutions Engineer at Alpha Software, is a recognized expert on agile application development. He helps enterprise development teams around the world transition from slow legacy approaches to high-performance mobile, web, and desktop development using the Alpha Anywhere platform.

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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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