Mobile App Development Best Practices for Enterprises
We all know that the mobile app development market is exploding. Every interaction we make as either a consumer or an enterprise is facilitated by the Mobile apps. More than 230 million people are accessing the Internet through their mobile phones all over the world.
By the end of 2017, global app downloads will surpass 200 Billion. These numbers, or say incredible statistics have made enterprises challenged. They are trying their best to get abreast by creating high-performance mobile applications which will meet the customer’s demands faster than ever. But is it enough?
Today’s truth is, that there is not enough IT talent in the mobile app market that can develop and maintain that number of applications and meet this increasing demand. Gartner, the American Research and Advisory organization, even predicted that “through 2017, the demand for mobile application development services will outrun five times faster than the capacity of internal IT organizations to deliver them. ”
Delivering mobile applications faster is one of the biggest challenges that enterprises are facing. At this point, nothing can be more crucial for them than addressing it.
Below are some of the recommended steps that will help enterprises to achieve their app delivery goals:
Use Marketers and Designers to Accelerate Mobile App Development
In order to meet the mobile apps, enterprises can’t leave the complete development process only to developers. They have to allow their marketers and designers to get more involved in mobile app development. In place of simply prototyping an app, let the designers actually work on designing the complete app experience. On the other hand, they need to empower their marketers to use content management tools for creating, managing, and delivering powerful content to the app.
Reduce Costs by Leveraging Integrated Mobile Application Services And Reusing Content
Enterprises’ marketing strategy should no longer be an isolated affair. Creating assets for each channel is not going to work. In order to gain maximum efficiency, marketers have to leverage their CMS (Content Management System) for delivering the assets across all channels and understanding how those channels work together through integrated services such as targeting and analytics.
Reusing content is the first step toward reducing costs. Marketers have to use the tools which will let them update the content within their mobile apps without any need to re-submitting the applications to the App store.
Make Mobile Apps Connect to The Enterprise Systems And Solve Business Problems
Mobile apps have made businesses critical after plugging into the enterprise systems. They are deployed on a large scale and solve business problems. By outsourcing each part of the mobile app development process, developers have time to extend their app and achieve business criticality. They can also create custom templates and screen components for better and faster distribution of information. They are now available to leverage Operating System and native device features through Application Program Interface (API) to access a camera, GPS, and accelerometer for providing better contextual information and even build some custom plugins to access proprietary databases. By focusing their efforts on these aspects, developers will ease the pressure generated by app explosion and solve more business problems.
Along with the marketing strategy, enterprises must change their app development process too. As the demand in the mobile app market is increasing tremendously, developers need to adopt some new strategies to meet the requirements.
Here are some of the best practices to speed up the app development process:
Prioritize The App Development
Mobile app development companies are in excessive demand, thus they find it difficult to deliver the increasing number of mobile apps effectively. This results in applications being developed on a first-come, first-serve basis. This approach leads the companies to inefficient utilization of IT resources as well as degradation in the app quality.
To address these problems, the app development team must formulate the mobile app prioritization process which involves understanding the business stakeholders’ needs. It would be proven as a key feature in defining the common criteria to evaluate the mobile app projects.
Adopt A Bimodal IT Approach
To deliver an enterprise mobile application, integration requires the greatest effort. Still many mobile app development teams underestimate the resources and time needed for integration during the planning stage of the traditional waterfall approach which they have adopted.
To deliver mobile apps quickly and more efficiently, organizations must replace their traditional IT development methodology with the bimodal strategic approach which supports both innovation and agility. The bimodal approach consists of two modes:
Mode 1: It drives the development of APIs and stable infrastructure and allows the applications to fetch and deliver data to the back-end system without impacting the respective enterprise application.
Mode 2: It uses agile, high-productive approaches to deliver app features needed by businesses.
Use RMAD, Rapid Mobile App Development Tools
To bridge the gap between app demand and supply, it is crucial for enterprises to use development tools that can develop apps more quickly. Significant innovation drives this market and replaces the traditional coding approaches, like native app development tools, with more efficient RMAD tools. There are a lot of approaches to RMAD, such as code generation, drag-n-drop codeless tools, model-driven development, form construction, and virtualization.
Putting It All Together
With the help of these practices, enterprises will make efficient use of app development resources. For a faster mobile app delivery, they must have a proficient and experienced team of technical professionals. Enterprises must use up-to-date frameworks and tools, which will help them to deliver effective mobile apps in the shortest span.