Software Engineering Insights

iOS and Android are the world’s most popular mobile platforms. Relatively fewer numbers of users are using Blackberry and Windows powered devices. Your mobile app must be adaptable on all the major platforms to ensure that it can reach out to all categories of potential customers. After all, the best interests of your business can only be served when you can reach out to maximum number of users through your app.

Here is a list of the benefits that you can have by opting for cross platform applications AKA Hybrid apps.

Android Marshmallow is powering a wide range of devices and it is having a discernible impact on app development for Android platform. Marshmallow offers several new features for improving the quality of interactions that you have with your customers. But to take full advantage of the new Marshmallow ecosystem, you have to do much more than having a quick flip of the Target & Compile SDK to API 23. There are several new ideas in app development that you can bring to fruition by the optimal usage of Marshmallow features.

According to report from IDC, 82.8% of the mobile devices are running on Android, while iOS powers 13.9% of the devices. It may seem that Android is far ahead of iOS, but the truth is that the Apple devices, which run on iOS, are favoured by the premium consumers, the ones who have the real paying power.

The question of "which platform to build an app for first" has been a popular one for the past five years. Now with the rise of startups the questions has become even more pertinent and paramount.

Before we begin, let us a take a walk down memory lane. Let us go back to 2008, the month of July. Apple launched its App store with a timid number of 500 apps, majority being gaming apps and music based apps. In the same year, Google launched its marketplace with a modest number of apps as well.

Whether your business is big, small or even just starting up, mobile is the way to go. Companies from across the planet are becoming part of a global revolution of Mobile App development. If we talk in numbers then here are some statistics that will certainly make you ponder – Google & Apple both announced in June 2014 that they have a million apps in their respective stores. By the same month this year, the numbers had become 1.5 million.

Ever since Apple unveiled its 8th major release of the iOS mobile operating system - iOS 8 on September 17, 2014, mobile Application developers have started working out on major App redesign while introducing performance enhancements & user interface improvements in their newly launched iOS Apps. This is because the performance of your mobile App, be it good or bad, greatly impacts your ROI, affecting the bottom-line of your business.

With the introduction of Google's Material User Interface concept, developers have already started updating their mobile apps with advanced design components such as buttons, dialog, dropdown menu, icon buttons, inputs, switches, toolbars and more for a brand new look & improved UI. But no matter how thoroughly you read the specified design guidelines, most of us still wonder while taking the switch from Holo (the dead Android Theme Google first introduced with Android 3.0 Honeycomb) to Material Design concept.

Adopting a modern approach to software development with TDD yields tangible business outcomes. Following an agile approach, the entire software development lifecycle is broken down into small iterations in order to minimize the overall risk involved in carrying out a project.

Over the last few years we have been hearing stories of Android's tremendous growth as a mobile operating system. Recent surveys showed that Android devices account for close to three-fourth of all smartphones in the world. Now if you thought it's all about Android everywhere, here is some food for thought - Apple iOS accounts for almost as much user base on Facebook as compared to Android.  It is quite an achievement for one of the world's most popular mobile operating systems which has always been known for its classiness but has not had the numbers on its side for the last few years.