Everything you need to know about Mobile Application.
Overview
A mobile application , or a mobile app is a type of software designed to run on mobile devices such as smartphone or tablet. Mobile app mostly saves the data locally on the device, compared to websites that generally use web servers. As a result information retrieval are much faster in mobile apps.
Types of Mobile Applications
Mobile Application are divided into three types :
Native App :
Native Apps are built for a single mobile operating system. They are downloaded from Play Store for android apps or from App Store for iOS apps. Android and iOS are the major platform of Mobile Applications. An android app cannot run in iOS platform and vice-versa.
Building, testing and maintaining a native app takes the coder to know both the development environment or there should be two development teams dedicated to each platform.
Web App :
The working of web apps are not so different from native apps. But there’s a huge difference between them in general. Web apps are hosted on a server and run on a browser. They are mostly written in CSS, HTML5 or JAVASCRIPT. Web apps are not saved on our devices, however we may bookmark them for easy access.
The major disadvantage of web apps are that they need internet connection to retrieve the data or personal database as they are saved on a distant server. One another drawback of web apps are that developers don’t have enough available API’s to work with, the API’s of web apps are very few compared to the API’s available for native apps. Also the performance of the web apps mostly depends on the internet connection.
Hybrid Apps :
Hybrid apps are installed in our device like a native app but are actually built using web technologies such as JAVASCRIPT, CSS and HTML5.
Since its a one codebase app its easy to manage for both the platforms at a time. But the main disadvantage is again the performance and speed. On top of that even the design may sometime not look the same on two or more platforms.
Mobile App Development
Mobile app development means the process of developing mobile apps for mobile devices. While developing a mobile app, it is mainly focused to take advantages of the features already built in mobile devices. Modern tablets and phones have inbuilt features such as GPS, Camera, Bluetooth, Gyroscopic sensors, etc. Developers take advantages of all these inbuilt features while building the apps. For example, GPS feature is used in mobile apps which are location-based services.
Mobile User Interface(UI) design is as important as the development of the apps. The main goal of UI is to be user friendly , and easy to understand. The UI mainly contains constraints, contexts, screen, input, and mobility as outlines for design.
Mobile App statistics
The current statistics of mobile app at present :
- Mobile apps are expected to generate over $935 billion in revenue by 2023.
- The Apple App Store has 1.96 million apps available for download.
- There are 2.87 million apps available for download on the Google Play Store.
- 21% of Millennials open an app 50+ times per day.
- 49% of people open an app 11+ times each day.
- 69% of all US digital media time comes from mobile apps.
- The average smartphone owner uses 10 apps per day and 30 apps each month.
Conclusion
Due to rapid growth of digital industry the growth of mobile apps has increased a lot. As the engagement of users are more in mobile devices compare to desktop, mobile app development is yet to grow more. A lot more innovative mobile apps which will use technologies like IOT, Virtual Reality and many more are yet to be seen in the market.
Statistics source : https://buildfire.com/app-statistics/
Image source : https://www.google.com/
Reference websites :
- https://www.thedroidsonroids.com/blog/what-is-a-mobile-app-app-development-basics-for-businesses
- https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/native-web-or-hybrid-apps
- https://yourstory.com/mystory/importance-of-mobile-apps-in-todays-world-08ou5wgu7g#:~:text=Today%20mobile%20apps%20render%20a,make%20services%20more%20user%20friendly.
