Software Engineering Insights

Did your ever so curious mind ever came across the question “why build mobile apps when mobiles have a web browser”. What exactly a mobile app can do that a mobile friendly, that is, responsive website or web app cannot? Let’s look at the apps you have installed on your smartphone. Sure, there must be WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, may be Instagram and Snapchat too. Don’t you shop online?

Interestingly today, I was going through the myriad of mobile apps on my phone, doing the nitpicking and checking out the ones that needed the axe. I have my usual set of apps, ones for shopping, travel, gaming, payment and suchlike.This is a task I do to make sure I have just the right amount of apps in my phone. But today I was held aback by the ballooning dependency I have developed on apps.

In the past few years there has been an explosion in mobile apps for healthcare. Over the next four years the market is expected to reach over $220 billion mostly in mobile health. There are a number of reasons why this is happening.

The next big revolutionary gadget which has revamped the way businesses are done is Mobile. Mobility has become ‘the’ big thing for businesses & has made web mobile seamless. To realize this fact all you need to do is to take a look around at your fellow commuters to see the importance of a smartphone in their daily lives.

User interactions have evolved during the last past years and it is really challenging for designers to keep up, making it tempting to use interaction design techniques when we build mobile apps. The manner and patterns in which we interact has changed and thus has changed the design linked with that interacting medium.

“IT Outsourcing” is the term which is directly linked to provision of technology services which saves time and cost of company which would have been spent on hiring for full time. Explaining it broadly, as the business grows, the departments increase so does requirement of IT- related functions.

We do not talk about Augmented Reality much. Till recent times augmented reality has been a fancy technology for the fancy players in mobile app development. Virtual reality was certainly raising some brows but last week we witnessed a cataclysm.

“Viva La Revolucion” the application of this phrase is too readily seen with Che’s uprising Revolution in Cuba. However, recently we have seen certain technology led industry changes that are causing revolutions around the globe, especially on mobile technology. And the industry that has been most pleasantly struck by this technological Viva La Revolucion is the Healthcare industry.

Google showed us a sneak peak of Android Instant Apps at the Google I/O 2016 which is nothing but a Google’s effort to make apps run instantly without installation. We have read the stories and heard the whispers and have finally come to understanding what Android Instant Apps are all about.

Mobile app development market was already quite warm with intense rivalry between platform specific pure native apps and cross-platform HTML5 web apps or better known as hybrid apps, that is, native Android and iOS apps going against Phonegap and Ionic web apps. A newer and very noticeable player entered the tournament, not so recently though, with full strength and heavy artillery - React Native by Facebook. The battlefield is further heated up with Telerik bringing Angular 2 NativeScript.