Mobile Application Development

Mobile application development is the process of creating software applications that run on a mobile device, and a typical mobile application utilizes a network connection to work with remote computing resources. Hence, the mobile development process involves creating installable software bundles (code, binaries, assets, etc.), implementing backend services such as data access with an API, and testing the application on target devices.

Mobile Applications and Device Platforms

There are two dominant platforms in the modern smartphone market. One is the iOS platform from Apple Inc. The iOS platform is the operating system that powers Apple’s popular line of iPhone smartphones. The second is Android from Google. The Android operating system is used not only by Google devices but also by many other OEMs to build their own smartphones and other smart devices.

Although there are some similarities between these two platforms when building applications, developing for iOS vs. developing for Android involves using different software development kits (SDKs) and different development toolchain. While Apple uses iOS exclusively for its own devices, Google makes Android available to other companies provided they meet specific requirements such as including certain Google applications on the devices they ship. Developers can build apps for hundreds of millions of devices by targeting both of these platforms.

The Mobile Application Development Lifecycle.

There are two interlinked core components of a mobile application:

1) the mobile application “Front-End” that resides on the mobile device, and

2) the services “Back-End” that supports the mobile front-end.

Front-end vs. Back-end

In the early days of the modern smartphone applications era, mobile applications went through a similar evolution as first websites. At first, the applications and sites where wholly contained within themselves and acted as little more than static advertisements for the brand, company, product, or service.

However, as connectivity and network capabilities improved, the applications became increasingly connected to sources of data and information that lived outside of the app itself, and the apps became increasingly dynamic as they were able to update their UI and content with data received over the network from queries to data sources.

As a result, the mobile front-end applications increasingly rely on and integrated with back-end services which provide data to be consumed through the mobile front-end. Such data can include, for example, product information for e-commerce apps or flight info for travel and reservation apps. For a mobile game, the data may include new levels or challenges and scores or avatars from other players.