Mobile application platforms: Essential guide

By: TechTarget ComputerWeekly.com

Type: eGuide

One of the mantras of modern enterprise application development is that business applications should be as easy to use as mass market consumer applications. This is particularly relevant on smartphones where employees access consumer apps and enterprise apps on the same device.

Increasingly apps must be one step ahead of the user, pulling in context-specific information and providing a seamless user experience.

The enterprise can no longer assume that everyone will use just one device.  The apps must support the fast changing mobile device market, in other words different hardware capabilities and different versions of operating system software. Mobile platforms help enterprises separate the complexities of supporting multiple permutations of devices to provide a core set of cross-platform functions apps can use.

The emergence of mobile back-end as a service offerings takes this a step further, offering these capabilities as a cloud service.

Beyond apps development, artificial intelligence technology is evolving all the time, and AI-powered voice-assisted search technology such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant is seen by many industry watchers as representative of a major change in how people interact with smartphones.

Experts believe the future of mobile apps is to add intelligence to enhance the user experience. This so-called assistant technology is able to read email correspondence and understand what the user searches for on the web. For instance, Microsoft is looking at integrating its Cortana technology into office productivity. In the future, such technology could be used to understand a Skype call or gather useful information in a Word document.

The demands of mobile apps bring new challenges around architecture, agility and integration. In this guide, we examine the issues around mobile applications and the platforms emerging to help developers.