A mobile application enables a mobile phone or tablet to connect to the internet and accomplish specific tasks like sending text messages or displaying maps. Designing or coding a mobile application entails developing an application that can be run on a specific, dynamically changing platform — such as smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices — in order to execute a certain task promptly and in line with expectations as determined by the mobile user.
Whether you are creating mobile apps, or developing solutions within other domains where legacy system maintenance is important, thinking as a whole, not just about planning and design, but about all the stages of maintaining a system against environmental change or a system’s limited impact on functionality that is crucial for your company or organization, is crucial for these solutions to last with their functionality intact.
User Interface Design
User interface (UI) design is the industrial design of something that is easy to use and looks good, as illustrated by the process from concept to research, interviews, to wireframes and prototypes, and by using standard rules such as those developed for Ben Shneiderman.
User-centered design requires the ability to clearly define the sequence of steps involved in the customer journey that a user will have with an interface (captured perhaps as an interview with a user, or as a ‘customer journey’ map). One can then ensure that the design is as intuitive and responsive as it can be, and that it looks consistent across various devices.
Another thing that wouldn’t be obvious a priori is that your application can have a common login screen to be able to log in with a single click. Another thing would be that your application could have a common layout in the sense that the average user would feel at home while using the application. Frameworks can help to provide some conventions in achieving this by, for example, using familiar icons, colours and would make it feel fast and responsive, rather than slow and draggy. Lastly, you can offer feedback to the user over what it’s doing with his input, such as informing when something is not entering successfully.
Programming Languages
Programming languages are the DNA of our digital world, and they underlie the apps we use in our daily lives. From a practical standpoint, applications would simply not exist without them. Take a situation, tell the language what to do about it, and learn from what the language has created. Eventually, users can start instructing other devices how to behave in response, creating endless possibilities. However, choosing a programming language is not a trivial matter by any stretch. Software developers examine factors such as efficiency, compatibility and scalability: how much memory a language needs to process a command? How well does it collaborate with other software? And how easy is it to extend? Unless the programming language ticks these boxes, the application can quickly become inefficient and unsuitable for the complex demands of modern technology.
Different programming languages target different kinds of applications. COBOL (common business-oriented language) tends to be used for enterprise applications and mainframe systems, while Ada (named after the mathematician Ada Lovelace) is used in ‘most aerospace (avionics and space), transportation (rail, road and maritime), military, real-time and embedded systems’, according to the Association of Ada Users, as cited by Wikipedia. Photo provided by ShutterstockJava, another pervasive higher-level language, is generally associated with the development of applications, including Android, iOS and computer games.
All high-level programming languages can be compiled to a low-level language and run faster than the low-level language by using an assembler: this is a good thing. And all have ‘a lower learning curve’.
Cross-Platform Development
A single codebase is written once used across mobile platforms with a different operating system (eg, Android and iOS) as a cross-platform mobile application. It is the only practical solution when business functionality does not require specific hardware features.
It means faster time to market than native development (app updates are delivered across all relevant platforms from a single code set) and it means simpler maintenance (bug fixes and upgrades can be applied in a single place).
Selecting one over the other depends on the skills of your development team and the programming languages you are already using. Look for frameworks that support the latest functionality offered by the platforms you are targeting.
Notice that a cross-platform solution is not recommended for apps with complicated UI/UX or high per-frame compute requirements, as it may cause lags and bugs that could potentially harm a user’s experience. Consider a further approach – use a low-code development platform to create a fully native mobile app in this instance, with Appzillon, Flutter or Progress Kinvey.
Security
The technologies involved in trying to build and deliver applications that run on smartphones and other portable connected devices are collectively known as mobile application development. The resulting software can be supplied pre-installed on the device, downloaded from an app store, or otherwise accessed from the mobile web.
Security comes as a crucial factor in mobile application development. Usually, mobile apps connect to servers to transmit data and store any sort of informations such as login credentials and financial information. Without the proper security guarantee, hackers could potentially steal these informations In other words, security most definitely cannot be ignored in mobile app design process as it is able to affect app’s usability and its reputation among users.
Secure mobile app development practices involving different techniques could include input validation, secure communication protocols, data storage such as database or files in encrypted format, monitor risky application background actions such as wakelocks, cache data, HTML5 local storage which should be removed and secured to mitigate the malicious usage of mobile apps by the hackers. Mobile app 2 Factor authentication provides a higher protection layer and securities that ensures the proximal devices being used are authorization entities that are approved by the main device or for a user to access the application.