Is Your Business Going Mobile? - You should read this -

Mobile device market fragmentation is a reality, while some business would like to think that everyone is an iPhone user, not everyone does or will; reality is that in order to maximize your potential of impact into a mobile audience you need to target multiple mobile devices. The mobile device market is currently fragmented and it is clear that has evolved and will continue to evolve, how many Blackberry users that you now are now becoming iPhone users? even purchasing decisions at the corporate level are changing.
Faced with this reality many businesses that were early adopters of mobile apps for their clients now realize the need to have a Blackberry, an Android, a Windows Mobile among others.
Even if the audience was composed, exclusively, by users of Apple produced products, there is an indisputable change here. Such businesses that had an app developed for an earlier iOS version of the iPhone, now they want it updated for the latest release or to see it taking advantage of all the features available in a device such as the iPad.

While manually porting an iPhone app (or other) to all the other mobile devices is feasible, it is not a minor challenge and you may have to deal with different companies that are specialized in each platform. Recently some mobile development companies have started providing multi-platform development, but internally development at these companies it still means multiple development efforts. While this approach allows releasing an app simultaneously to many devices it does that at a cost of maintaining multiple concurrent development efforts (i.e. more people programming an app that what it should be required.)

Is the need for efficiency only applicable to Small or Medium businesses, not quite, even a large corporation that might have a budget large enough to support multiple development efforts (in-house, outsourced or combined) for each mobile device can be helped by optimizing budget utilization and focusing in building features with a business value as opposed to cloning functionality across mobile devices.

Furthermore, for many businesses, the need of a mobile app does not come in isolation but normally combined with the need of a Web App that either exists or is anticipated as future requirement given the new mobile app.

Take for instance the case of a regional company, a home services provider, they have a mobile app to allow clients to schedule recurrent home services and track the appointments for these services, it features as well the ability to send immediate feedback to the user when the company provides a service and the home owner is absent.
While these features can only been seen on the mobile device, other parts of the relationship between the company and its clients do not require to be done on the go, such as receiving invoices, making payments, sending marketing material related to services provided to the client, etc.
For these parts it does make sense to provide a web app that can further complement and enhance the functionality of the mobile app.
In many cases a mobile app will need to be closely integrated to a web app, this integration is lacking or deficient for many platforms out there.

The good news is that, there is a solution that addresses many of the above shortcomings around mobile development. Keep reading.

IT’S NEW ALL OVER AGAIN

In technology as in many other areas, cycles occur and this time is no different.
Akin to the 80’s “PC revolution” or the late 90’s “Internet Revolution”, now we’re living another cyclical change of equal magnitude. We all are going mobile and you may be doing the same soon.
These big revolutions don’t occur in isolation, but run combined with other cyclical changes of equal importance, this is detailed further in this post on “Surfing technology waves”.
Why this matters? Because in the same way businesses that were early adopters of a web site – yes there was a time when not everyone had an online presence -, there was a need to scrap those initial efforts and re-build them correctly. For the mobile revolution, is not different. Hence businesses should get it right this time around.

SEARCHING FOR A SOLUTION

If we were to think about how an ideal solution would likely be, I believe it would have some of these characteristics:

1. Building a single Mobile App – You would want to have a single app that can then be deployed into multiple devices. In other words if your app requires to show a list of products from your company, this functionality should be coded once and only once! Having to copy code from one mobile device and adapt it to another device is wasting efforts (time & cost). While for some features in the app, it may be augmented to make use of a device-specific feature (sensors, GPS, etc); it all should be part of the same app.

2. Simpler maintenance – The process of maintaining an app such as adding new features, extending existing ones, should be part of your project for a mobile app strategy from the beginning. Ideally every time you update your app with a new feature you should be able to deploy it to all your target mobile devices.

3. Reduce dev costs to adopt future mobile devices – As mobile manufacturers release new mobile devices, you want to bring your existing app into the new device. Starting to build the app in the new device from scratch (even if it is ‘just copying’ code) is not acceptable.

4. Built on standards – The technologies used for development of a mobile app should be based on open standards such as when a great web app uses internet standards, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

Whether your business has a mobile app or is in the process of moving towards building one, it is worth considering a solution that will provide answers to these problems can set you in the right path for your move to the mobile platform.

THE SOLUTION – OVERVIEW

At our company we are providers of development services for Mobile and Web apps. We have a coherent technical strategy that bridges the web and mobile worlds and addresses these issues.
We are able to do that by means of using the Ruby programming language to write both for Web and Mobile apps this gives the tremendous flexibility of moving our code from one platform to another with few changes.
In the web platform we specialized in the Rails framework and on the Mobile realm, we are specialized on the Rhodes framework.

Our experience with these two frameworks, position us uniquely to become a giant leap in advantage to businesses requiring development for both web and mobile platforms.

THE SOLUTION IN-DEPTH

The Rhodes framework shares many similarities to the Rails framework starting with the same core language: Ruby.
When an app is developed with Rhodes, it is possible to make effective and efficient code reuse towards the Rails platform. Effectively allowing business to bring the Mobile App as a Web app. This works well in either direction a business chooses to move (mobile to web or vice versa).
Internally, the application structure is similar in both Rails and Rhodes, this supports the ability to keep a standard code structure in both development frameworks.
For users of your business app in both platforms, it means the their user experience is more consistent in appearance and functionality as they are both built using similar methods. The only differences will exist only due to specific hardware limitation of a particular mobile device.

When an application is build on Rhodes we only build one app, then we set which targets will the mobile app be deployed to and for each target (iPhone, Android, RIM, etc) a standard completely native app is produced.
The target app produced then will follow the same process for deploying into each of the Apple App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World or other independent app stores.
We build one app and deploy to multiple platforms.

The implication of building a single mobile app and deploy to multiple platforms, is that each feature being build for the app, is in fact built across all mobile devices.
Adding to this benefit is that all the functionality in the app is built using Ruby, which poses significant benefits by itself when building apps for either platform, as we wrote in this past article.
We do simplify maintenance.

Maintaining apps can be performed as result of changes or additions to functionality but many cases are for adapting to upcoming release of mobile devices. When a mobile app is written using Rhodes, the app maintenance required to adopt new mobile devices is minimized.
We Reduce dev costs to adopt your app into future mobile devices.

Open standards and open source adoption is part of our company DNA, furthermore, more than simply a purist approach, we see the pragmatic aspect of having a larger lifecycle for the apps we build; by building them on these we create the possibility of having more avenues of extension, integration, porting, etc. for the last part of the SDLC in the app.
We build on open standards

CONCLUSION

As the number of devices grows, not just within vendors a particular mobile manufacturer but across the entire mobile market even creating new categories such as tablet devices, in addition to these new mobile apps being closely tied into web apps, we understand we need to provide our clients with a roadmap for such. We have it.
Even in the hypothetical case of a market monopoly of a single vendor, those current development tools do not provide a Rapid Application Development environment that is demanded for businesses today.

We invite you to get in touch with us to learn more about how we enhance your mobile/web development strategy to get you there faster.