Mobile App Development
3 must-have features for your next mobile app
Feedback system
The importance of having some way for users to provide feedback on your app is critical. Give your users a quick way to report bugs, and provide suggestions or criticisms. This will help you with your app.
Social Media Login
Start the user experience out right! Use Facebook Connect or another single sign on technology solution to allow your customers to use their social media logins to sign into the mobile app (and keep them signed in).
Keep it Simple
It gets tempting to throw in a million small, frivolous features into your mobile app because you think they’re “cool” or good-looking, but don’t. Figure out the few basic things users want and build those features.
Benefits of Mobile Apps for Small Businesses
Why Going down this path sooner than later is a mustVisibility
Having a mobile app means you are visible to your audience all the time.
Direct Market Channel
Apps serve many functions: they can provide general info, prices, booking forms, search features, user accounts, messengers, news feeds, and much more. One of the biggest benefits of having a mobile app is that all the information you’d like to provide to your customers – including special sales and promotions – is right at their fingertips.
Value-added Benefits
Want your customer to have on-hand information, how about digitalizing that loyalty program you have in place? Make it possible for your customers to collect their rewards via your mobile app. The result? More downloads and more return customers.
Build Brand Recognition
Create an app that has features your customers will love, while at the same time is well branded and beautifully designed. The more you get your customers involved with your app, the sooner they will be inclined to buy your product and/or services.
Improve Customer Engagement
No matter whether you are selling flowers or spa services, your customers need a way to reach you. Having a messaging (or help desk) feature within your app can really make a difference in the way you communicate with your customers.
Stand out from the competiton
These days mobile apps at the small business level are still rare, and this is where you can take a big leap ahead of your competitors. Be the first in your neighborhood to offer a mobile app to your customers. They’ll be astonished by your forward-thinking approach!
Making money with your app
Freemium for apps and games
A freemium app or game is offered free-of-charge to the user with limited features, content or virtual goods. Users can access a premium version or additional content and feature through in-app purchase.
One-time paid apps
Users pay just once to download the app. Updates and feature additions are expected to be free.If you want to launch a paid app, it should be compelling enough for users to pay to download even without first sampling it.
Free apps with paid advertising
Many apps use this model of monetization. Take for instance the Sleep Easily Meditations by Shazzie, that costs no money to download and runs non-intrusive advertisements for as long as the app is in use.
Top 5 tools for multi-platform mobile app development
Hundreds of millions of users across the world use mobile apps on a daily basis. Developers like the flexibility of developing a mobile app in a programming language they are familiar with and have that deployed to multiple app stores with little or no effort. In this article, we look at top 5 mobile app development tools that enable developers to build cross platform mobile apps.
Article by Kinshuk Jhala.
Adobe PhoneGap
If you are a first time mobile app developer, Adobe PhoneGap is for you. As a developer you will already be familiar with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. PhoneGap takes your code and converts it into a cross platform app using their cloud based APIs. It’s an open source development framework for building cross platform mobile apps with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for iOS, Android and Windows Phone operating systems.
Xamarin
Xamarin is one of the most popular mobile app development tools and is perfectly suited for C# developers as code written in C# can be used to create apps for iOS and Android. Xamarin allows you to do performance testing, monitoring and app store deployments, permitting virtual tests on approximately 1,000 devices in the cloud helping to identify bugs before your users find them.
Sencha Ext JS
Ext JS is a popular JavaScript framework from Sencha that allows developers to develop cross platform applications targeting desktops and mobile apps. It offers a number of customisable UI widgets such as grids, lists, menus, toolbars and panels so developers don’t have to rebuild their own. It has an impressive charts package that can be leveraged to create and render various types of charts within your mobile apps.
Unity 3
Unity 3D is a powerful development platform for creating cross platform 3D and 2D games. Developers can write the gaming application code in UnityScript or C# and Unity 3D can convert it into a game that works on different platforms such as iOS, Android, PlayStation, Wii etc. It also has functionality that allows you to deploy the app to different app stores and track user analytics.
Telerik platform
Telerik platform helps build cross platform apps for Android, iOS and Windows. With this app you would be able to create a mobile development environment on PC, Mac or Linux without downloads and configurations. It uses the web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JS for developing hybrid and native mobile apps using IDE. You could also run it anywhere.Just Scan a QR code to instantly experience your app on your mobile device.
Alpha Anywhere
The Alpha Anywhere tool is a comprehensive solution for developing and deploying enterprise-level cross platform mobile applications. It provides developers with multiple options in terms of programming languages, supporting C#, JavaScript, VB.NET, C++ and many more. It comes with lots of features such as reports, charting capabilities, mapping, GPS, data connectivity, offline features and scheduling.
4 Mobile Application development stumbling blocks to avoid
Insight into common but lethal mistakes that are tripping up companies when designing custom apps
Designing apps in a vaccuum
If there is a universal theme to why mobile apps fail, it seems to start right at the beginning, usually with apps that are designed without much thought about who will be using them and what the end goals may be. According to all of the experts we talked to, this pitfall comes about when there is a disconnect between market- ing or line-of-business departments and the engineering or development teams.
Trying to make an app that does too much
One of the common results of a mobile app developed without end-user input is an app that tries to do too much, or apps that try to cram a desktop full on informa- tion and links onto a palm-sized screen. In fact, says analyst Gold, many early implementations of 'mobile' apps were simply screen scrapes of Windows PC apps, ported to the smaller platform.
Trying to make devices work everywhere, anywhere
One of the already classic mistakes is to assume that mobile apps will have the same level of Internet connectivity as a PC app used in an office situation. While cellular connectivity can be found in many places worldwide and local Wi-Fi networks are cropping up all over, mobile connections are nevertheless inherently slower and less stable than wired connections or office wireless networks.'The tool selection should be based on what the app requires,' Lopez says. 'If it’s just something that’s looking for pricing information, you can get it done in HTML5 and be up and running quickly. If it’s something that requires the deep input of the device, you might want a native experience.
Not buiding flexibilty into the app from the start
If there was a final pitfall most mobile application experts agreed upon, it’s the idea that a mobile app would ever really be 'finished' in the way that desktop or packaged applications used to be. Instead, a better solution is to develop a frame- work that allows for fast creation and multiple iterations of a mobile app, since user demands and device introductions change far more rapidly than the old one.