Tag: business apps

The world of technology is changing by the day, and placing bets on any new technology is risky. A new technology may be hyped up as the bright new hope for mankind, only to be shunned in a few years or less, as realities bite and drawbacks or stumbling blocks start to emerge out of the hype.

In such a state of affairs, it pays to invest in a time-tested technology. Mobility offers a safe bet, having withstood the test of time. Gartner estimates the demand for enterprise mobility apps to outstrip the capability of internal IT in enterprises to deliver such apps, by five times, by the end of  this year. Mobile phone sales are likely to touch 2.1 billion units by 2019, further fueling the demand for mobile apps. Mobile users spend as high as 86% of their time on various apps.

The high demand for enterprise mobile apps is owing to a variety of factors that are not going to go away anytime soon.

Mobile Apps Improves Internal Efficiency and Productivity

Mobility empowers busy on-the-move executives to remain connected always, from the airport, from the client’s reception, from the dinner at the hotel, from the swimming pool, and just about anywhere else, when on the move. It enables field service executives to connect to the office in real-time, top management to remain in control of the situation during business trip, the busy executive to start working when commuting to work, the marketing executive to get details of the customer even while meeting her, and a host of other live situations. The real-time decision making, accelerated processes and such anytime connectivity triggers help businesses close more deals, and do much more with available resources.

The investment in enterprise mobile app often pays back for itself just through efficiency improvements. A case in point is the app making data collection related to customer preferences and action automatically, sparing the enterprise from the otherwise slow, tedious and resource intensive process.

Mobile Apps Deliver Unmatched Customer Convenience

Mobile apps are a rage in the customer-facing space as well, where intuitive apps enable customers to engage with the company better. Customers use their smartphones to explore a product, shop, to find a business, initiate an inquiry, and more. Mobile apps offer a one-stop point for the customer to interact with the brand. In fact, a mobile app is one basic expectation from any brand worth its product.

With a customer app, the customer virtually gets all information related to the business in the palm of their hands. It boosts engagement, allowing customers to engage with the business when whiling away time on the train, waiting for the dentist’s appointment, and at a host of similar situations. In the absence of a convenient way to initiate interaction, at such convenient time, the customer may not initiate an interaction at all.

Mobile apps cater to a larger, younger audience. About 75% of the millennial generation now own a smartphone, and it is hard to engage with them through technologies that are past their sell-by date.

Mobile Apps are the Marketer’s Dream Come True

Mobile apps facilitate on-the-go marketing, allowing new customers to find about the business easily, and existing customers to get in touch for any requirement, equally easily. A user who downloads an app is as good as a loyal customer, for the downloaded app is likely to be the first point to search for a product, and make a purchase. Regular use or even visibility of the app reinforces the brand image in their minds as well. Mobile apps may also leverage location and other personal information from the mobile devices, to tailor customized offers.

Mobile apps also make it easy for regular customers to get in touch with customer support easily, and customer support to address the needs to the customers, in an informed way.

Developing mobile apps offers spill-over benefits as well. Merely creating a mobile app gets the company access to app indexing, making it that much easier to be found in Google search results. Users get the option to download the app when they search for content related to the app.

Businesses that fail to adapt to the mobile will soon go extinct, and there is no better example of this than the fate of Kodak, Yahoo and Nokia, once household names, now no more as they failed to adapt to the mobile.

However, the mere creation of an app is not enough. Only apps developed the right way, incorporating the right features, gain traction. For instance apart from easy features to browse and shop for a product, apps that facilitate social sharing, by integrating options to make comments, likes, and also in-app messaging is likely to be well received. Likewise, while demand is high, competition is equally high, meaning customers would rarely give the app a second chance. Mess it up the first time, and the odds are the storage-space starved customer would straight away delete the app and install a competitor app, thereby losing the customer for life.

A big challenge with regards to rolling out mobile apps is the overburdened internal IT team, and the difficulty in hiring competent developers. However, at the same time, the mobile app development space is not the one for experimentation or trial and error. It pays to partner with an experienced and strategic partner like us, who have a wealth of experience in rolling out highly intuitive and well-accepted apps, cutting across niches, industries and sectors. Partnering with us allows your business to leverage the wealth of knowledge and best practices inculcated by us over time, and also gives you access to an extremely competent talented pool of professionals who are adept in rolling us highly customized and innovative apps that pass the test of high performance and usability, to perfect suit your business requirements.

Over the past few years, the one trend that we saw throughout was the rise in the use of mobile devices. The number of smartphone users in the world has now surpassed 2 billion according to E-marketer, which is an increase of about 12.6% over the past years. Now if that doesn’t say we are moving rapidly towards an increasingly mobile future, I don’t know what will.
While on one hand, it makes all our lives a lot easier, on the other hand, it means things are a little more difficult for the developers. Businesses these days demand more mobile based solutions, while at the same time, do not do away with web based applications. As the trend these days is, businesses want web applications that can also work on mobile devices – the best of both worlds.
Hence, developers these days are throwing up their hands in frustration trying to create interactive content through applications that are accessible from both desktop and mobile devices for businesses. A major shift towards HTML5 is now becoming more essential in order to satisfy industry demands. The future may well be in the hands of HTML5, considering the rising need for all pervasive applications.

The mobile world that we live in

As of this year, we have around 4.61 billion mobile users in the world and it is expected to reach almost 5.07 by 2019, considering the pace at which it is increasing every day. And another interesting fact is that since 2013, we have had as many mobile phones in the world as there are users. That means there is likely to be not a single individual now, who doesn’t own a mobile device, thereby increasing the chances of applications being viewed on mobile devices more.
This makes it all the more necessary for developers to create and deliver complex apps that work on all devices faster.
TMCnet contributing writer, Steve Anderson, mentions in an article that, the increasing popularity and use of mobile devices across business enterprises “will leave many developers looking for a way to develop for desktops that also allows for use on mobile devices.”

For all these reasons and also because of it’s rich features, it is no wonder that HTML5 is rising high in popularity.

A large majority of developers are now using HTML5

Almost 153 Fortune 500 companies are using HTML5 now. And a survey of more than 3400 developers conducted across the U.S, Europe, and Asia this year shows that more than 50% of developers are now developing HTML5 web apps for mobile, closely following iOS which are used by 61% of developers.
What’s more, as part of a recent Strategy Analytics survey on mobile application developers’ preferences and attitudes towards application development, researchers have also proved that, out of all the technologies used for building native or web apps, HTML5 showed the strongest predicted growth rate at 20%. They also found out that almost 63% of all business apps are being created in HTML5.

Always the developer’s choice
HTML5 offers a whole new range of possibilities and powerful capabilities to its developers when compared to native apps development. Syntactic features like audio, video and canvas elements, for example, are some of the new and effective features provided by HTML5, all of which make it much easier for developers to integrate multimedia or graphical content on the web app or web, without the need to rely on APIs and plug-ins.

Another key attraction for developers towards HTML5 is its open standards support, which enables them to fulfill application requirements in the face of fragmented mobile devices, form factors, platforms, and operating systems. They can basically use HTML5 to create and deliver rich content without having to rely on the device or its Operating System, which again makes it more preferred than native.

Besides, developers have always preferred coding in a language that can be used across different platforms, so as to ensure good quality user experiences on multiple devices and screen sizes. Also, because it helps them maintain a skillset that can be applied for different kinds of requirements as well as companies or employers. These days even JavaScript programmers are moving to HTML5.

In the future

Looking back, it is indeed surprising to see how much of an impact HTML5 has had on mobile app development. It has literally been a revolutionizing force. Now, it has come to be the perfect blend of developer preference, business requirements, and technological advancement. In the coming years, it is definitely going to be adopted by more number of enterprises, as they are slowly moving from their usual administered use of Internet Explorer, to Chrome or Firefox browsers at work, both of which have high-level HTML5 support. Further in future, with the growth of Windows 10 adoption and use, the use of the new Microsoft Edge browser will also increase, which will enable business enterprises to make full use of the power of HTML5.

Want to develop a smart Mobile Application for your Business?Contact us.