Mobile application development for the enterprise world, here are few tips, lessons learned:
- With Bring your own device (BYOD) policies across many enterprises nowadays it is very important to be able to cater for most popular platform out there like iOS and Android, If you do not have the team or resource for native development i.e. building apps for each platform separately then Hybrid or Web App approach is the way to go that will allow people with existing web development skills build cross platform mobile apps.
- Another great argument for choosing the Hybrid or Web App approach for cross platform development agains native is that the use cases you see in the enterprise world do not usually require complicated UI's or 3D effects, most of the time you will be pulling information from different in-house systems and displaying them in the mobile app or collecting information from the end users.
- Offline capability in mobile is a popular topic as we are not there yet when it comes to being always and everywhere connected. Adding offline support nowadays is becoming much easier for native, hybrid and even web app approaches as they all support storing information locally on the device. The hard part kicks in when you need to sync information and manage conflicts between data residing on the mobile device and the destination system.
- Responsive design is a very important aspect of the UI as mobile device screen sizes very quite dramatically from 4 inch smartphones to 10 inch tablets as an example. This means the UI needs to be able to scale up and down gracefully.
- If you are dealing with sensitive data, encryption is a must and adding an unlock pin for the app can significantly boost security.
- Think about deployment, where Android has the flexibility to install almost any app on any device without the need of going through Google, Apple on the other hand has things locked down a bit where you would need to use one of their enterprise deployment services or publish the app on the AppStore. Hosting your mobile app as a web application can be a great workaround, if you do not need device features that are not accessible via web technology.