Member Article

4 Ways To Resolve Cost V/s Functionality In Mobile App Development

Mobile app development is important for every business to gain a strong foothold in the competitive market. With the smartphone market size of close to one billion people globally, you can’t afford to miss out. Cross platform apps have completely changed the way app functions since they came into market. They are user-friendly, rich in graphics and deliver a highly interactive user-interface.

But before you plan to develop your next mobile app, two questions will arise in your mind straightway – the app functionality and the app development cost. How do you develop an optimum app that is highly functional plus adds brand value to your business? More importantly, how do you keep the development costs low? Both seem inversely related as low cost often means compromising with the quality, but is there a better way? Luckily there is and the optimal solution is to adopt new development techniques that we will discuss below.

1. HTML5 – It is a platform independent language and the same app can work across iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and other mobile operating systems, reducing the cost of development. It also offers many additional advantages like memory management, threaded performance and hands-on graphic control. It is easy to program but cannot handle large volumes of data or make use of hardware specific features. You also cannot send push messages which are a must in today’s world to increase use engagement.

2. Hybrid App Container - It is a native application that has been designed to process generic function calls from an application. The container allows an application developed in HTML5 to perform functions that are exclusive to a device’s hardware. To simplify, it makes the HTML5 app function deliver native app functionality on different devices. PhoneGap is one the most widely used hybrid app container, plus it is also quite easy to implement. A Phonegap expert helps to achieve rapid enterprise mobile app development, enabling businesses to manage their daily operations smoothly and get new customers with their apps. With PhoneGap, you can deliver native app-like experience to each device using HTML5 which helps cut down on costs. Hybrid app container also offers you back-end data, data access and authentication features.

3. Making Use of Low or No Cost Tools - Cross-platform tools like PhoneGap act as frameworks that facilitates the development of multi-platform apps using the same codebase. It not only reduces the app development cost but also makes it easy to create multi-function apps with knowledge of HTML5 and JavaScript.

4. Mobile App Development Lifecycle - Another important aspect to consider when comparing cost versus functionality is the lifecycle of the apps. On an average an app would take three months to develop, and also needs to be upgraded on timely basis. Thus for the app to be successful commercially it needs to offer better return on investment in terms of sales and should also have shorted mobile app development lifecycle. PhoneGap resolves the challenge and helps to save costs occurred during subsequent upgrades of your app.

Apart from the above four points, do you think we missed something out? Please tell us about it in the comments below.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Technoblogger .