Mobile Application Development- More Questions and Answers Part 2

Mobile application development is one of the most revenue generating branch of the information technology industry. More and more people around the world are either using a mobile app or developing some app. Hence, there are queries among the people and technical experts worldwide answer the questions about mobile application development. This has prompted Vardhaman Infotech, a world-class tech company to take the questions asked on the internet and answer these adequately. Already, the tech company has published a blog on the topic answering several frequently asked questions on mobile app development. Alone, a blog post is not able to answer large numbers of questions on the topic. We, therefore, decided to write a second part of the blog to deal with more questions and answers on mobile application development. You may start reading from the first part of the blog and then come back to this second part.

Mobile Application Development Questions and Answers Part 1

Question

What is a mobile application development tool?

Alternative question

What are mobile application development tools?

Answer

A mobile application development tool is a development tool allowing the creation of mobile applications. An SDK or software development kit also referred to as Devkit, is typically a set of software development tools. As mobile application development is also software development, SDKs are used for mobile app development. Platforms and frameworks are similar words to tools and often used in a similar sense.

Here are a few of the well-known App development tools. These are besides, already listed in the question and answers for platforms and frameworks. Most of these tools are used as hybrid mobile development tools. We will give a separate list for Native App development tools.

Hybrid Mobile App development tools

BuildFire

BuildFire.js

jQuery Mobile

Salesforce1 and Lightning

Mag+ (Good but very expensive)

Xojo

Corona Labs

Cocos2D with different versions for different mobile types of mobile applications; cocos2d-obj C, cocos2d-x (C++), cocos2d-XNA (which uses C#), cocos2d-JS ( JavaScript), cocos2d etc.

Unity, especially for 2D and 3D game development.

GameSalad

Cordova

Kendo UI

Appcelerator

Sencha Touch

Drop source

Native App development tools

CocoaPods

Screenhero

Sip

Zeplin

Fastlane

 

Question

What is mobile application development life cycle?

Alternative questions

A. What are the main steps in developing a mobile application?

B. How do you develop mobile app projects?

C. What are the steps to create a mobile app?

D. How mobile application development?

E. How mobile apps development?

Also, people ask these alternative questions along with the question “What is mobile application development life cycle?” The answer below can satisfy all these queries.

Answer

Mobile application development life cycle means the different stages or phases involved in the development process. Further, Mobile App Development Lifecycle is nothing but a representation of the conventional Software Development Lifecycle. However,  this SDLC is from the perspective of mobile devices. The process of developing a mobile Application following a detailed is called Mobile App Development Lifecycle. Nowadays, developing a mobile App is no mystery and nothing is hidden about the process. However,  creating a successful Application is a process involving extensive pre-planning.

We have seen a spectacular rise in the Mobile App market in the last two decades. What have we seen? Simply, one can see millions of Apps in the two prominent App stores, Google Play Store and Apple Store. One has to be really thorough with the basic concepts of App building in such a scenario of very high competition. Obviously, you have to stand out in function to be visible in these days of fierce competition. Not only that, you have to come out with a better design to attract the consumer’s attention.

Video: Mobile App development process or app development life cycle 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tClRHOnHveY

Mobile Application Development Life Cycle Phases

Idea and initiating

Pre-planning and market research

Mental Prototyping

Technical Feasibility Assessment

Designing

Creating a prototype

App Development

Testing

Deployment in the App stores

The launch

These are the major steps, we follow, at Vardhaman Infotech to develop world-class mobile apps. In addition, each phase has several sub-phases or steps. One small step at a time approach in a mobile application development lifecycle keeps Vardhaman Infotech ahead of other tech companies. Also, it helps us to build outperforming mobile apps both in Android and iOS.

Question

What is a Hybrid Mobile Application Development?

Answer

Definition of hybrid is anything derived from heterogeneous sources. It has a composition of elements of different or incompatible kinds. Technically, a fully functional web browser that is embedded inside a local application framework. Hybrid apps work on an architecture where speedy local desktop User Interfaces deeply marry to dynamic online content and services. A hybrid app serves fresh content from the standard Web servers and locally stores it in standard files. This architecture works on the principle of interoperability. The benefit of interoperability is long-term access to the content and Software developers have been hunting for the technology for ages.

In other words, a hybrid app is an app written with the same technology used for web and mobile implementations. Moreover, it is hosted and runs inside a native container on a mobile device. A hybrid application is the marriage of web technology and native execution. When a developer develops a mobile app using hybrid technology or hybrid platforms, it is called Hybrid Mobile Application Development. This is a short answer to the question What is a Hybrid Mobile Application Development? If you want to know more about and to know about the different platforms/frameworks for hybrid app development please follow the link.

The best hybrid app development frameworks

Video: Web vs Native vs Hybrid mobile applications

Question

What is a Native Mobile Application Development?

Answer

A native application is a software program developed for use on a particular platform or device. Native applications are eligible and capable of using device-specific hardware and software. Native apps can have optimized performance. Also, it can take advantage of the latest technologies while comparing to a generic web or mobile cloud apps. However, generic applications work across multiple systems.

In the context of Mobile Applications, Native Application means any mobile application programmed to work on a specific mobile device platform. There are, mainly, two types of operating systems for mobile devices. First is, Android and second, iOS for Apple. Developers preliminarily, use Objective C or Swift for coding the iOS operating system and Java or Android Studio for Android Native Apps. Native apps perform faster working with the OS of the device. Moreover, these apps provide more flexibility than hybrid applications.

Question

What is an Android mobile application development?

Answer

Android is an open source operating system (OS) developed by Google. Device manufacturing companies, worldwide, adopted Android as their OS. Hence, most of the smartphones, nowadays, have inbuilt Android OS. This, therefore, made Android development so important for the developers.

Android mobile application development is the process by which developers create new applications for mobile devices running on the Android operating system. Android Studio/Android SDK is primarily used to develop Android apps. Google extends support to Android developers through Google services for Android. In addition, one can take advantage of the latest Google technologies through a single set of APIs for Android. Google delivers this set of APIs across Android devices worldwide as part of Google Play services.

Video: How to make an Android Application?

Read also:

What are the most popular business mobile apps?

Question

What makes the mobile application development complex?

The complexity of a mobile application depends on a variety of things. However, it mainly depends on two, first Entities and second, features. More of entities and features make a mobile development complex whereas a lesser number of entities and features make it simpler. Also, this is a major factor for a mobile development cost. To know about the complexities of a mobile development first, we need to know what are entities and features.

So, What are the Entities?

Defining entities is really difficult to even for the technicals. However, we try to keep it simple while defining entities for the purpose of understanding of a layman.

The user, in mobile applications, interacts with different sets of information for different purposes. For example, ‘Location’ is a collection of information like city, state, country, and ZIP/PIN code. It may also have latitude and longitude.  A weather forecast can be a collection of information like temperature, moisture, etc. Each of these collections combined into is called an entity. Each application may have different types of entities.

There are two types of entities, Static and Dynamic. For example, the date of birth of a specific person is a static entity. However, the age of the same person is a dynamic entity that changes continually. The complexity of mobile application development depends on the dynamic entities and not on the static entities.

What are the features?

Simply, features are the functions of a mobile application. A developer decides of the features keeping in mind that what the user wants to do with or be able to do with the application. Hence, the developer designs most of the features of a mobile application for the target users. However, some of the features are oriented towards the owner. Features depend on the purpose of an application. For example, a banking app must have a payment option whereas a geolocation app needs a map feature.

In a nutshell, a mobile application with more features and entities enhance its complexity. There are other complexities too.

Read this blog too: What questions to ask before developing a mobile app?