Mobile application development is the set of processes and procedures involved in writing software for small, wireless computing devices, such as smartphones and other hand-held devices.
Like web application development, mobile application development has its roots in more traditional software development. One critical difference, however, is that mobile apps are often written specifically to take advantage of the unique features of a particular mobile device. For example, a gaming app might be written to take advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer or a mobile health app might be written to take advantage of a smartwatch’s temperature sensor.
Today, the two most prominent mobile platforms are iOS from Apple and Android from Google. Phones and tablets from Apple come preloaded with essential applications, including a full web browser and the Apple App Store. Android devices also come preloaded with similar apps and you can install more using the Google Play Store.
Types of mobile applications
In the early years of mobile apps, the only way to ensure an app could perform optimally on any device was to develop the app natively. This meant that new code had to be written specifically for each device’s specific processor. Today, the majority of mobile applications developed are device-agnostic.
In the past, if an app needed to be cross-platform and run on multiple operating systems (OSes), there was little, if any, code that could be reused from the initial development project. Essentially, each device required its own mobile app development project with its own code base. Modern cross-platform tools use common languages such as C# and JavaScript to share code across projects; more importantly, they integrate well with application lifecycle management tools, such as Jenkins. This enables developers to use a single codebase for Apple iOS, Google Android and progressive web apps (PWAs). PWAs are built to take advantage of native mobile device features, without requiring the end user to visit an app store, make a purchase and download software locally. Instead, a PWA can be located with a search engine query and accessed immediately through a browser, thereby eliminating the need for e-commerce merchants to develop native apps for multiple mobile OSes.
Just like YouTube videos, PWA content is downloaded progressively, which provides the end user with a better user experience than a traditional website that uses responsive design. Progressive web apps may also be referred to as instant mobile apps.
Before developing an app, you need to determine which type you’ll be creating. Here’s a breakdown of several types of mobile app development technologies with information about each.
- Native applications. These applications are built using integrated development environments (IDEs) and languages for mobile OSes such as Apple iOS or Google Android. Native apps enable you to customize necessary features, but they can be more costly than other technologies.
- Hybrid apps. These are web apps that act like native apps. They are developed using technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Hybrid apps are more cost-effective to develop than native apps and can be created faster, but they aren’t as feature-rich as native applications.
- Progressive web apps. A PWA is a website that looks and behaves as if it is a mobile app. These applications are developed with web technologies such as Facebook React.
- Encapsulated apps. An encapsulated app runs within a container app. Products such as the Microsoft Power App drag-and-drop app creation tool enable less experienced developers to build a mobile application rapidly. But the lack of isolation from the core OS, OS lock-in and the relative newness could pose problems.
- Frameworks and libraries. You can use this reusable code written by someone else to accelerate your development of a mobile app.