Bespoke Mobile Development Company

Does My Business Need An App?

Across the Google play store and the Apple app store, there are over five million published apps. Here are some of the reasons why you might consider having a mobile app.

• Competitive advantage – With over 5 million apps available, if you don’t have a bespoke mobile app, it’s highly likely that your competitors do and are using it as a competitive advantage. If however, your competitor doesn’t have their own mobile app you have the opportunity to gain first-mover advantage and use your app to increase customer loyalty or improve business processes E-commerce – Mobile apps allow for a much smoother e-commerce experience and allow you greater opportunities to tailor the customer journey than through a standard web solution.
• Business needs – some people believe that if they do not have a consumer-facing business or are not part of the client interaction there is no need to consider bespoke mobile applications. However, some of the applications that deliver the best ROI for businesses are not consumer-facing but rather, they address internal business processes.
• Data collection – Does your business currently collect data through meters, equipment or any type of measurement, wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically collect that data rather than manually transfer from point of collection to your software systems.
• In field workforce – If you have staff who have to be out and about in “the field”, whether they are in logistics, appliance engineering, surveying or any other field roles, it is very likely that a bespoke mobile app will allow them to be more efficient. Imagine if your engineers could see the technical specifications for all the models in one simple app, if your surveyors could access all the relevant plans and blueprints in one digital solution when they are on site.
• New technologies – The technological capabilities of the mobile phone continue to grow at an astounding rate and if you’ve always thought of implementing new technologies such as AR (Augmented Reality) or IoT connectivity, these can be brought to life in a good bespoke mobile app.
• Business fit – There are many business process apps that are already available. However, businesses often find that these have been developed to work across multiple sectors and have a “one size fits all” approach. This often leads to either functionality that is desired by the business but not available in the app or an app that is overly complex as it tries to tick too many boxes. This is where the true benefit of a bespoke mobile application designed specifically for your business processes can be the best solution.

These are just some examples of why you might consider a mobile app for your business. If you think there are some processes that could be improved in your business through the introduction of a mobile app, either as a stand-alone solution or as part of a broader business application solution, speak to us at Imobisoft and our team can help you today.

Are all apps built the same

There are two main approaches to mobile app development, these are Hybrid and Native development.

What do these mean?

Native app development refers to developing a separate IoS (the mobile operating system on Apple devices) and Android application, in their native coding languages (hence the name). This means using either Objective-C or Swift for I phones and on Android either Java or Kotlin. As Android and Apple phones have differing technical capabilities this approach allows you to tailor the software application better for each type of device.

Hybrid apps are developed cross platform, they are typically easier and faster to develop than native apps and also require less maintenance as they rely on a single common code base. Some of the most common Hybrid frameworks are Ionic, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin and Kendo UI (there are many more).

However, there are trade-offs in speed and functionality which need to be considered. The more phone-specific functionality that an app uses, such as image capture, geo-location, external APIs, etc, the more likely that a Native application build will be better suited for your software solution. Also where load speed is of importance a Native App is most likely to perform faster than an app built on a Hybrid framework.

We work with our clients to carefully define all their desired user functionalities at the start of the project so that we can recommend the best development framework.

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