Apps are essential to keep up with a customer base that is majorly mobile. You should not carry an app just because others are doing it. Ideally, your brand app must provide profits to your company’s credibility. Doing the same, your business can top the chart by providing a tailored customer experience to its tech-savvy clientele. You should only keep in mind that your app must serve a purpose.

The mobile app development platform has all the necessary components that are required to manage a mobile app throughout its life cycle. It comes packed with a cross-platform development tool to build apps containing forms, templates, code editors, integrated testing and many other features.

What a MADP offers to you?

A MADP serve well for middleware services that are important to give high-end support to different processes such as hosting, deploying and securing the apps and their data.

It also has the inbuilt features to provide connectors, plugins and standard-based APIs along with a vast range of different traits such as-

• Integrating cloud-based or third-party services
• Mobile device management
• Mobile application management platforms.

A noticeable fact is, most of these platforms makes the use of a module-based, drag-and-drop development approach called as rapid mobile application development, RMAD. It requires no coding, but developers have a little flexibility to amend the source code up to some extent.

A mobile app development platform supports three major app types, namely native, web and hybrid apps. Each of them has a distinct set of advantages and disadvantages.

Let’s know about all of them-

Native apps give the superior performance in utilizing a device’s native features in the smartest way than any other types. In creating a native app, an expert uses a common code base like C#, JavaScript or HTML5. Then, the base code is compiled into separate versions for the targeted OSes, just like the native apps built from scratch. Through MADP, an app is built with the lowest common denominator across OSes. This prevents the app to take full advantage of a device’s features.

A web app is treated as the simplest type of app among all the three. The reason is, the user is only creating a single version that can be accessed from any mobile device which is compatible with an HTML5 browser. A noticeable fact is that web apps are not capable of taking full advantage of the native features of a device. Moreover, they cannot perform just like the other types of app. But, these apps are quickly deployable and easy in maintenance. These features altogether make them an ideal platform under the right circumstances.

A hybrid app works better than a web app and easy to deploy as compared to a native app. It can be extended for more device functionality, but the features and performance are not as good as compared to a native app. Hybrid apps are built using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. This platform allows code to be enclosed in a wrapper or container. An app can be abstracted from the mobile OS to take the advantage of the native capabilities. This extra layer of abstraction can impact performance.

Why cross-platform apps are worth to use!

In this top-notch competition where different customers are using diversified devices to use any service, it becomes necessary to run a kind of app that works seamlessly on almost all kind of the platforms including Windows, iOS, and Android.

Cross-platform apps are the one such kind of business apps that work perfectly well on the multiple operating systems with a single code base.

There exist 2 major categories of cross-platform apps, namely:

1. Native apps
2. Hybrid HTML5 apps

Each mobile app contains its own SDK, called as software development kit in their preferred programming language. For example, Apple supports Swift and Objective-C for iOS devices whereas Android picks Java as the Google’s choice.

Such apps that are created by using the preferred language type from the official SDK are called as native apps. It is possible to use the API offered by native SDK in other programming languages having no compatibility with OS vendors. This API can be used with a single code base to give support to the multiple operating systems.

The mobile apps generally use the GUI applications for large part of their business logic. All phones including iOS, Windows, and Android have an advanced browser component in their SDKs. This WebView component can be leveraged to use the standard HTML5 applications.

The resultant app is composed of a native frame where HTML/JavaScript is executed in a WebView. This is the reason they are called as the hybrid with application features like geolocation.

Final Words

An optimum mobile app development platform helps an organization deploy apps faster with a lower TCO value. All the mobile app development platforms might vary in features and capabilities in terms of app types, RMAD, back-end integration, supported mobile OSes, platform implementation, and several other factors. Before picking the right product for their organization, merchants need to understand what the vendors offer and in which ways. Getting the desired type within your constraints, you can get a biz app that can best fit in your said set of requisites.

Author info: This blog post has been written by Ashni Sharma. She is an expert mobile app developer at AppsChopper and loves to write technical posts related to the hottest trends in the mobile app development. She believes in making the interested business owners aware of all the necessary skills that they can input in the expansion of their business.

Originally posted here: https://www.ruhanirabin.com/mobile-development-platform-build-manage-app/