Mobile Applications: Unit - I

Preliminary Considerations Reasons to Build a Mobile App Costs of Developing a Mobile App Importance of Developing a Mobile Strategy Dif iulties in Mobile App Development Mobile Application Development Today Myths of Mobile Application Design Explanation of Third-Party Mobile Frameworks

WHY YOU MIGHT BE HERE Your competitors have mobile apps, but you don’t. Mobile apps make good business sense. Your services would add value to a user’s Mobile experience but your website isn’t Mobile friendly. Do you need a mobile application or a mobile website?

WHY YOU MIGHT BE HERE Your competitors have mobile apps, but you don’t. Mobile apps make good business sense. Your services would add value to a user’s Mobile experience but your website isn’t Mobile friendly. Do you need a mobile application or a mobile website?

Elaborating the concept Competition Do your competitors offer products or services that you do not? Is that why they have an app? Is that a market you want to expand into? If you are already in that market, can you add any features to an app that will have more draw than your competitors? Quality vs. Time to Market Sometimes, a bad mobile application or website can be worse than no mobile app or website. Legacy System Integration Limitations to overcome when developing inside the company intranet bubble. Enterprise Level Development. Mobile Web vs. Mobile App

COST OF DEVELOPMENT Each developer will need hardware and software to develop the applications on. The team will need devices to test the software on. And if you want to deploy your application to any public market, then your company will need accounts on the various markets (these often renew annually).

Hardware BlackBerry (6 or 7): BlackBerry Bold 9900 Android 2.2 (Froyo): Motorola Droid 2 Android 3.0 Tablet: Samsung Galaxy Tablet Apple iPod Touch: iPod Touch 3rd Generation Apple iPhone (versions 3.x and 4.x) (cell service): iPhone 3GS Apple iPhone (versions 4 and greater) (cell service): iPhone 4 Apple iPad (WiFi or 3G for cell service testing): iPad 1 Apple iPad (with camera): iPad 2 or iPad 3 Windows Phone 7: Samsung Focus

Software

Licenses and Developer Accounts

Documentation and APIs

The Bottom Line Total cost per developer to create, maintain, and distribute mobile applications for all the platforms you can expect to pay a few thousand dollars just for the minimum infrastructure. Given the opportunity to upgrade making these upgrades you will incur a higher initial cost, but the speed increase compared to the bare bones will recoup that cost. It is difficult to quantify the savings from these upgrades, but developers without them are at a distinct disadvantage.

The Bottom Line Total cost per developer to create, maintain, and distribute mobile applications for all the platforms you can expect to pay a few thousand dollars just for the minimum infrastructure. Given the opportunity to upgrade making these upgrades you will incur a higher initial cost, but the speed increase compared to the bare bones will recoup that cost. It is difficult to quantify the savings from these upgrades, but developers without them are at a distinct disadvantage.

WHY IS MOBILE DEVELOPMENT DIFFICULT? The apps are not defined solely by what they do or how they look, but rather by how they fulfill a need and codify it for the user. Nature of mobile application (I touch this and it does what I told it to do), and the more rigid (fixed size) UI design patterns of the mobile device. with proper planning and research, you target your potential clients and start imposing your own parameters on the problem at hand, and the rest can be accounted for within that scope.

Screen Size and Resolutions FIGURE 1-1: Screen sizes and densities per Google research

Screen Size and Resolutions FIGURE 1-1: Screen sizes and densities per Google research FIGURE 1-2: Resolutions available to Android

MOBILE DEVELOPMENT TODAY As it stands, there are really four major development targets. Each of the native frameworks comes with certain expectations and a user base. BlackBerry is often used in education and government, whereas the iPhone and Android user base is far more widespread. Windows Phone 7 being the newcomer iOS, the technology that is run on Apple mobile devices, has benefi ts and limitations specific to its development cycle. The base language is bjective- C, with Cocoa Touch as the interface layer. At this time iOS can be developed only using Apple’s XCode, which can run only on a Macintosh. The Android framework, on the other hand, is written in Java, and can be developed using any Java tools. The specific tooling recommended by Google and the Android community is Eclipse with the Android toolkit, and that is what the examples in Chapter 6 use. Unlike iOS, it can be developed on PC, Mac, or Linux. Like Android, the BlackBerry device framework is also written in Java; however, it is limited in that the Emulator and Distribution tools run only on Windows at this time. The newest native framework on the market is Windows Phone 7 and its framework sits on top of the Microsoft’s .NET Framework. The language of choice is C# and the framework lies in a subset of Silverlight, Microsoft’s multiplatform web technology. It also has the limitation that the Microsoft Windows Phone tools run only on Windows.

MOBILE MYTHS There are many myths associated with mobile application development. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s unnecessary, you can’t do it without a large team, and you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Myth #1: It is inexpensive to develop a mobile solution. Myth #2: It’s easy to develop a mobile solution. Myth #3: We don’t need a mobile presence. Myth #4: You need a large development team. Myth #5: Sweat equity can pay for the application.