What are the peculiarities of mobile application development? Professional’s answer
The main peculiarity in mobile application development is the form factor of the devices for which we write programs, because they are smartphones, tablets, which have a small or non-standard screen (square, rectangular).
Also, if we take a smartwatch, it has a 2×2 cm screen, or a round screen in general.
Therefore, a very important aspect of creating a mobile application is the so-called User Experience, i.e. the interaction with the user.
The next important point in mobile application development is the wide variety of devices for which we want to create an application.
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That is, when creating an app, it can be designed only for smartphones, or for smartphones / tablets / watches, for various augmented reality devices, or it can be designed for interaction between several screens at the same time.
For an app to work across the range of different mobile devices, we have to provide for different ways of interacting with that app, and different ways of displaying information in that app.
Another important feature is the constant interaction with the Internet. Historically, mobile applications are fairly lightweight applications that don’t carry a lot of computational logic. In the beginning, mobile devices had fairly modest processing power, but now they can rub the nose of any computer from a decade ago.
But even taking into account modern multi-core processors and a huge amount of RAM, performance is still the main factor when creating mobile applications.
That’s why most of the computational logic in an app is interaction with the Internet and cloud services.
Mobile application development methods
There are two methods of mobile application development: native development and cross-platform or hybrid development (ReactNative, Flutter, Xamarin). Native development means creating an application for a mobile device in a specific language for a specific platform.
Native apps are quite productive and have no development limitations (Java and Kotlin for Android, and Swift for iOS). The advantages of this type of development include fairly fast response to user actions, the ability to have direct access to the hardware and to develop the most familiar interface for the user of a particular platform.
Disadvantages include a fairly high cost of development and support, and long development time. Developing the same application for different platforms (iOS / Android) is time-consuming and expensive, moreover, its testing will also take quite a long time (for example, compiling updates for Android takes about 30 seconds), so if you need to create a single application for two platforms at once, resort to a hybrid method of development.
Cross-platform development is done with the help of web technologies – HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which allow you to develop an application for several platforms at once.
But in order for the application to work according to its platform, it has to be “translated” into a language understandable for the platform, or an intermediate link-translator has to be added.
Among the advantages is the low development cost, because sometimes the participation of a single specialist will suffice. But the disadvantages include possible difficulties in the work of all functions and delays in the reaction to the user’s action (the application may be slow), also the interface will be rather simple and will need further development.