An Ultimate Guide for Mobile App Development
Everything you should know before getting your hands dirty with mobile app development
Introduction
Mobile app development is a process for building mobile applications for smartphones and digital assistants, most commonly for Android and iOS. The software can be preinstalled on the device or can be downloaded and installed by the user later. The programming and markup languages used for this kind of software development include Java, Swift, Dart, C#, and HTML5.
Why Mobile App Development?
In 2021, mobile apps are projected to generate $693 billion in revenue via app stores and in-app advertising. What’s more, enterprise mobility is estimated to be worth $510.39 billion by 2022. An average consumer has over 30 apps installed on their device. An average user spends about 35 hours per month using mobile apps.
If we are looking at things in terms of market share, as of February 2021 mobile has taken the lead at just below 55% of the market, with desktop devices with a 42% market share. The remaining 3% can be attributed to tablets, which are not widely used but are part of the online environment.
There are over 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide, so there is no doubt that the industry is healthy and thriving. Users are growing steadily, without any indications of decline. And studies show that an average American checks their phone at least once every twelve minutes, and over 10% of these people check their phone about every four minutes.
Which Mobile App Development Platforms to choose?
Although there are multiple platforms to develop applications, one should choose a platform after considering some key factors such as cost of development, targeted audience, current technologies, business model and time taken to develop, etc.
The two most important mobile app platforms are iOS from Apple Inc. and Android from Google. iOS is Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system built specifically for iPhones. Android, however, runs on mobile devices manufactured by various OEMs, including Google.
As per stats, Android enjoys more than 70% share of the global market, while iOS holds around 30%. This gap is expected to increase over the next few years. Also, Google Play Store has fewer restrictions than the Apple App Store. On the other hand, mobile applications developed for iOS have far fewer devices that need support, making optimization simpler and user retention is typically higher for iOS applications.
Types of mobile applications
- Native apps
- Mobile web apps
- Hybrid web apps
- Progressive web apps
There are advantages and disadvantages to building an application, no matter which approach you choose. By choosing an approach that matches your strategy, you can achieve the desired user experience, avail computing resources, and build native features required for your application.
Native App Development
The app developed exclusively for a single platform using a native-to-the-operating-system language is a Native App. A native app is usually written in one programming language for a particular operating system. For instance, to develop a Native app for Android, Java, or Kotlin, while for iOS, Objective-C or Swift can be used.
Native apps acquire all possible advantages of the device and the operating system’s features. The apps leverage direct access to the hardware of the devices such as GPS, Camera, Microphone, Offline access, and many more. As a result, they are fast and more reliable, render high performance, and have a better user experience.
Though Native development looks perfect, the biggest challenge is to run the app on different platforms and this scares off startups for being cost-consuming. The reason is, to run the app on multiple platforms, requires developing and maintaining an app for each platform separately. It means Native Apps are equivalent to building two different apps with different sets of code for each platform Android & iOS.
Pros Of Building a Native App
High Speed
Thanks to the fact that native mobile applications don’t have a code that’s too complex, they tend to work faster than other apps. Many app elements are displayed quickly because they are preloaded beforehand.
Offline Capabilities
Native apps work with no issues even when there’s no internet connectivity. That makes such an application way more convenient to users as they can access all the features on the go or on the airplane when there’s no connection.
Reliable
Native apps are a future-proof investment. They are secured, user-friendly, and lighting faster than other apps. If your business obliges to serve the audience well, you should go with Native app development.
Cons Of Building a Native App
No reusable code
If a developer wants to create native apps both for Android and iOS, he would have to develop two separate native apps (just what we discussed). That would take a lot more time and effort than developing one cross-platform mobile app with a reusable codebase or a hybrid app with a shared backend code.
Involves More Skills
As native apps are language-specific to the core, companies usually struggle to find a skilled developer to pull off developing a native app back-to-back. When comparing native app vs cross-platform app, if a company wants to reach out to a wider audience, they’d have to hire two development teams for native app development. Whereas it could have gone with just one in the case of cross-platform.
Tools :
For Android:
For iOS:
Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
It is necessary to know that hybrid and cross-platform apps are not the same. The only similarity between both types of app is the “code shareability”. Cross-platform development is the best approach for low-cost custom apps with secure, stable, and easy to maintain features. Many cross-platform app development frameworks are there that help to achieve the native app-like feel and user experience.
The need by mobile developers to reach the largest possible user base regardless of their preferred platform has given rise to more value being seen in a cross-platform mobile app. The cross-platform dev approach uses a native rendering engine. They offer seamless functionality, easy implementation, and cost-effective production. Cross-Platform apps have low performance as compared to natives but are far better than hybrids. Customization is also a pain since it is limited to the framework you use.
Pros of Building a Cross-Platform App
Cost-Effective
The issue of native apps vs cross-platform apps can be debated but when it comes to cost efficiency, cross-platform apps win. It is an ideal choice when a business needs to target an audience on different platforms at the same time. In addition to most cross-platform development requires half the workforce required by companies using native hence saving the resources of the company.
Reusable
With the cross-platform app, developers no longer have to write unique code for each operating system. They can instead use a common codebase to transfer the code to different platforms.
Cons of Building a Cross-Platform App
Complex Development Process
It takes a skilled developer to create an application that would be well-adapted to a few platforms. There’s a need to keep all the little differences between operating systems and the hardware they run on especially when it comes to implementing a complex interface and features.
Challenging Integrations
Developers can experience difficulties while integrating cross-platform applications to local settings and engaging a third-party cloud service provider.
Tools :
Hybrid Mobile Apps
Hybrid apps are the golden mean between native and web applications. They consist of two parts — backend code and a native viewer that can be downloaded to display the backend in a web view. For example, Android uses WebView, and for iOS, there is WKWebView that displays a Hybrid app. Unlike web apps, hybrid mobile apps don’t require a browser for access and can take advantage of plugins like Apache Cordova or Ionic’s Capacitor. The plugin allows developers to access the native features of platforms.
Hybrid app development is quite a time savior and cost-effective than native apps. You can write the code once and use it for multiple platforms. It renders user experience and performance close to native apps. However, it is a challenge to achieve a great UX and navigation pattern from a visual perspective.
It requires less time for development and allows for code sharing. The downside is sluggish performance and suboptimal user experience. Theoretically, it is possible to achieve great UX and navigation patterns from a visual standpoint. This is, however, a challenge to put into practice. They are cheaper in development than native apps but their performance is slow and user experience is suboptimal.
Pros Of Building a Hybrid App
Faster Development
Since the app uses the same backend code for all platforms, it doesn’t take too much time to create a hybrid app. However, that hybrid apps with lots of features can be even more time-consuming so it’s better to keep it simple.
Simple Maintenance
As hybrid apps are based on web technology, they are easier to maintain compared to native.
Cons of Building a Hybrid App
Impossible to access Offline
As hybrid apps are essentially web-based, they don’t work without an Internet connection. Moreover, as all the elements of the app have to be loaded, the performance speed is generally slower. Network Connectivity is an important factor in the development of native and hybrid apps.
OS Inconsistencies
Since hybrid apps share a codebase, certain features might be supported by Android and not displayed on an iOS device and vice versa. It takes more testing time to identify inconsistencies and a lot of alterations to fix these issues.
Tools :
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
A Progressive web app is a website that acts like a native mobile app. To some extent, progressive web apps or PWAs resemble hybrid ones. As PWAs operate in a browser, so there’s no need to download them from an app store. Still one can access the app on the home screen. Their progression is based on the user experience that is optimized for each platform.
Though PWA works offline, provides GPS access, push notifications, and many more for Android, for iOS (latest 12.2 release), there are limitations such as no camera access, no default launch image, no installation API, and other issues.
There are no dedicated languages or frameworks for Progressive Web Apps, so there is no need to hire a special type of developer. They can be done in Angular or React. This type of app coding is most popular in e-commerce projects.
Pros of Building a PWA
No Installation
A great advantage of PWA over other apps is that they’re independent of app stores. Customers don’t need to download PWA, all that’s required is a web browser.
Offline Capabilities
A PWA can work in offline mode, giving users access to the online store at any time and keeping them always up to date.
Security
PWAs have rock-solid security since they are based on HTTPS, which allows browser-to-server encryption.
Cheap and fast development
PWAs are cheaper, faster, and easier to develop than other apps. You don’t need a large budget to develop a PWA. You can save your money and resources since it is developed only once. As PWAs only require HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for any platform they are faster to develop.
Cons of Building a PWA
Feature restrictions
Since PWAs are only half apps, their functionality is limited on some OS. There are some features that PWAs can’t use like no access to calendars, contacts, browser bookmarks, and alarms.
High Battery Consumption
PWA drains the battery faster as it requires more CPU. Also, PWA cannot be optimized like Natives.
Limited web browser support
PWAs are not supported by all web browsers. Progressive web apps are Android-oriented, and they don’t work on Safari. As Safari is the leading browser in the US with 51 percent of the market share, there’s a risk of losing a large mobile app audience if only a PWA is used.
Limited iOS access
With PWAs, push notifications aren’t available for iOS users. In addition, when iOS users install a PWA, the offline data will be available for a maximum of two weeks, after that the cache will be cleared automatically. Hence user data is not preserved for a long time.
Tools:
How to learn the necessary skills for the above-listed technologies?
As everything is available for free on the internet there is no need to spend any extra money on skill build-up. Following are the links to some of the best tutorials for learning different technologies.
For Android
For iOS
For Flutter
For React Native
For Xamarin
For Ionic
For Apache Cordova
For Angular
For React
Resources mentioned in this tutorial are the sole property of their creators. I have not created them and do not gain any benefit from these resources.
Hope it helps you. Thank you :-)
If you want to talk more or any queries are left unanswered you can connect with me via -
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