Trends Driving Enterprise Mobile App Development In 2016

With advancing mobile technologies and development tools, even the methods of mobile application development are changing.

There are various ways to develop mobile applications for enterprises, but the way the enterprises generally choose to develop their apps depends on their business needs.

For example, depending on the business needs, an enterprise can opt for either native apps, apps developed on HTML5 platform or hybrid apps.

Trends Driving Enterprise Mobile App Development in 2016

However, in 2016, its enterprises looking for these five exceptional ways to develop business-specific mobile applications for their needs.

Enterprise-Specific Native Applications

Since the dawn of the mobile era, it has been always required by the firms that they should have custom apps developed for a specific business need. Custom native apps built on iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows have always been on demand among the enterprises.

The native apps have complete access to the hardware resources of the mobile devices and hence, can render superior performance for creating engaging user experiences.

As they can be distributed directly through the app stores, they can also take the benefit of app store’s monetization features and help enterprises to rightly capitalize on the opportunity for more profits.

But, however, native apps are just not the right choice for the enterprises looking to build mobile apps targeting number of platforms.

In this case code would be required to develop for every OS being targeted and hence, would take more time and costs for development.

Hence, as per modern trend in mobile applications development this year, most of the businesses have opted for platform-independent applications which are faster and easier to develop.

However, this does not mean that businesses are not at all looking for native applications. Native enterprise applications have their own significance in specific business requirements and can be beneficial to the firms if opted to accommodate for a right situation.

Cross-Platform Applications

The modern trend in enterprise mobile apps is to go with cross-platform development. This is because cross-platform development helps enterprises to overcome all the drawbacks associated with native, HTML5 and hybrid apps.

With HTML5 apps, there is an issue of lack of ability to leverage all the device capabilities while this is not the case with native apps that can effectively use all the capabilities of devices on which they run.

However, with native apps, there’s a bigger issue of lot of time required for developing mobile apps for multiple platforms. Therefore, eliminating all these problems is cross-platform mobile application development using tools like Xamarin and Titanum.

This cuts down the time required for developing individual native apps as here single code can be shared to develop apps for various smartphone operating systems or mobile platforms.

Hybrid apps are the combination of both native and HTML5 apps. They provide advantages of native apps without hassle of maintaining spate code for every device or OS.

Even, hybrid apps can be developed with cross-platform tools like Apache or PhoneGap. Here the code of one app is generated and executed on different platforms without generating separate code for each platform.

Hence, most of the enterprises today are going for cross-platform mobile app development in order to save time and costs.

Integrated Mobile Application Development Platforms

Enterprise apps can also be developed using integrated application development platforms that are built specifically for development of the enterprise applications.

This platform is good for developing integrated mobile apps that provide easy integration between the mobile app and enterprise applications.

Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS)

The integrated mobile application development platforms are built on legacy software architectures and hence, are limited to their proprietary technology.

This means that building and maintenance of apps would require hiring specific developers who are well aware of the technology. Hence, these development platform based app building methods are rather very laborious and time consuming.

So, as an alternative to this many vendors have switched over to BaaS. This technology solves enterprise integration problems involved with the cross-platform development methods.

It enables enterprise app integration with mobile apps along with security and user authentication without having to worry about the backend.

Model-DrivenPlatform-As-A-Service (PaaS)

Last but not the least, one of the emerging and popular trends of mobile application development methods adopted by the enterprises is PaaS.

This method enables efficient development of integrated enterprise mobile applications with a model-driven platform, where the apps are built by modeling a business logic and platform would generate code at the backend.

Hence, apps can be developed easily without any coding required even by a normal tech-savvy individual. This method requires less resources and would be easily integrated with the enterprise apps.

So, in the 2016, enterprises are adopting these methodologies to focus on the development of their mobile applications. While each of it has it’s advantages, there are associated disadvantages as well.

Hence, if you are looking to develop mobile application for your enterprise, look out for your needs and consult an expert who can guide you to the right method of developing mobile apps for your enterprise.