Mobile App Development

Mobile apps are the new thing. Sort of.

Smartphones have proliferated (over 7 million iphones in the UK, android growing at 500% this year), they’re cheap, usable and well connected. That growth has opened a new, mass market channel: Mobile. It’s not that mobile is new (hands up who remembers WAP!), it’s just much better than it was, even a few years ago. 
  

Mobile Web vs. Mobile App

Good websites should work well on most mobile devices anyway. For websites which receive a high or growing number of visitors from mobile devices, it’s worth asking us about mobile optimisation and responsive design. Sometimes though, a Mobile App development is the way to go.

If your audience fits the Smartphone demographic, if they’re likely to use it on the move or somewhere they don’t have a computer or particularly, if the application is very distinct and specific, a native Smartphone app can be engineered specifically for Smartphone touchscreen use and can even be developed to take advantage of Smartphone assets like built in video, camera, GPS location fix, accelerometers and so on.

Mobile App Benefits

Mobile apps do some things particularly well and offer a number of benefits:

• Inbuilt frictionless payment mechanism
• Readymade channel to market – App stores
• Push notifications direct to device
• Highly personal
• Touchscreen
• Accelerometer – app knows device orientation / movement
• Audio – audio on smartphones is high quality, particularly via earphones
• Photo – cameras can capture geotagged photo direct to app / web
• Video – apps can use live video from the device
• Processing – typical smartphones are powerful enough even for real-time video manipulation

Native / HTML Mobile Apps

There’s two ways of developing mobile apps. The simplest is to create the mobile app in a similar way to a website, then wrap it up as an app and deploy it into the various App stores, which is cost effective, limited and best suited to simpler mobile app development.

Where time and budget allow, fully “native” mobile apps will always be more powerful, robust and generally more usable. They’re quicker, more stable and more powerful. Bear in mind that this approach means developing a totally separate app for each platform eg. Android App, iPhone App, Blackberry App. Theres more information about Mobile App Development in our infographic.

Do you need help in deciding which is best for you?  

iPad App Design & Development

iPhone apps will run well enough on iPad but it’s usually best to have an iPad version too to make best use of iPads unique form factor. The larger screen, particularly newer models with retina display beg to have iPad specific content. Would you like to discuss ipad app development?

Talk to the App Development Experts

Glow will guide you through the process of getting your mobile app into the market. Would you like to talk to a mobile app expert?