The Mobile App Developers Austin industry has seen steady growth in recent years. From increased revenue garnered from web application development activities to the creation of new jobs, it is evident that this industry is headed in the right direction. However, developing these applications is not an easy job considering the numerous parameters that come into place, such as the diversity of mobile devices in terms of software specifications and so forth. This makes most developers forego native mobile applications in favor of web applications since the latter has less hassle in terms of compatibility with different devices.
Granted, there are some advantages that native mobile applications have over web-based applications. For instance, native mobile applications have access to some device capabilities such as the camera, accelerometer, and the mobile device’s local storage, which mobile web applications cannot gain access to. This has resulted in developers creating a web-to-native abstraction layer in order to provide the mobile web application with these capabilities. As stated earlier, the broad spectrum of screen sizes, configurations, and hardware specifications make both mobile and web application development very hard since the developer has to design software that is compatible with those parameters. Web applications support a wider range of devices than native mobile applications since some factors such as screen size does not affect them as much as native applications.
There are some general things to look out for when designing and developing a mobile app;
Web applications should never be slow. It is one of the things that make users dissatisfied as it was found out that 60% of mobile web users cannot wait for more than 3 seconds for a site to load. This means that the developer needs to reduce the user’s wait time for maximum performance. Things such as loading of images should be taken care of as it is one of the issues which slow down response time. Another thing that is overlooked by developers is the applications’ database requirements. Most mobile devices cannot handle the number of cookies that a desktop browser can. Retrieving such files contributes to the slow performance of the application. This, however, can be fixed by server-side caching.
Mobile devices have a generally short lifespan since more and more models are being introduced. This means that more device configurations are being introduced hence requiring updating the application. Although web applications aren’t affected by these factors as much as native applications, there is still a need to achieve compatibility with different screen resolutions and also deal with landscape and portrait device orientation.
Most developers, especially those who are new in the mobile and web application development arena, tend to think that the web-based code for browsers used on desktop computers will work fine on a mobile browser. This is detrimental to the development of a mobile web application since the developer ends up incorporating non-working features into it. For instance, most mobile platforms do not support API methods. This means that application features that require such as Adobe Flash player may bring problems in the execution of functions. One must, therefore, take time to understand what can and cannot be viewed in a mobile browser but is present on a desktop browser.
So those are the different characteristics that distinguish between mobile and web application development, making developers choose to design web applications rather than the native mobile application. Contact Austin Mobile App Development for further more requirements and inquires.
