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Mobile Application Development

What is mobile application development?

Mobile application development is the process to making software for smartphones and digital assistants, most commonly for Android and iOS. The software can be preinstalled on the device, downloaded from a mobile app store or accessed through a mobile web browser. The programming and markup languages used for this kind of software development include Java, Swift, C# and HTML5.

Mobile app development is rapidly growing. From retail, telecommunications and e-commerce to insurance, healthcare and government, organizations across industries must meet user expectations for real-time, convenient ways to conduct transactions and access information. Today, mobile devices—and the mobile applications that unlock their value—are the most popular way for people and businesses to connect to the internet. To stay relevant, responsive and successful, organizations need to develop the mobile applications that their customers, partners and employees demand.

Yet mobile application development might seem daunting. Once you’ve selected the OS platform or platforms, you need to overcome the limitations of mobile devices and usher your app all the way past the potential hurdles of distribution. Fortunately, by following a few basic guidelines and best practices, you can streamline your application development journey.

To learn more about the specifics of mobile application development on either platform, read our articles on iOS app development and Android app development.

Choose a platform

Many independent application development teams choose to build their apps for Android first. Why? The vast majority—around 70 percent—of smartphones run Android, and the Google Play Store has fewer restrictions than the Apple App Store. On the other hand, mobile applications developed for iOS have far fewer devices that need support, making optimization simpler. And user retention is typically higher for iOS applications.

Depending on the intended use case and target audience for the mobile application you are developing, you might have other considerations. For example, if you’re designing an app for your organization’s employees, you’ll need to support the platforms they use, which may mean developing cross-platform apps that work for both Android and iOS. Or if you’re building a mobile application for your customers and you know the majority of them use iPhones, then developing iOS applications should be a top priority. Additional considerations when developing your mobile applications include monetization strategies and anticipated user behavior, which can be influenced by geographical and cultural factors.

Enhance efficiency and tighten security by integrating the development platform and device management tool

Develop for both Android and iOS: Native apps or hybrid apps?

Let’s say you need to do mobile application development for both the Android operating system and iOS. What is the best software development approach?

You could develop two native applications. Taking advantage of native APIs and OS-specific programming languages can help you build a powerful app. Most enterprise apps, especially ones that require substantial API traffic, benefit from native development.

If you decide to develop native applications one at a time, you’ll likely want to begin with Android—for some of the same reasons that independent app developers often focus on Android. You’ll probably have better luck developing the full application as an MVP on Android and then converting and optimizing it to iOS after release.

You will still need to debug and rewrite the code for the native language and redesign the front-end user interface, because the two operating systems function very differently, making cross-platform operation impossible.

So why not start completely from scratch? While you can’t simply translate the code into a new programming language, much of the back end can be replicated cross-platform. Frameworks, libraries and third-party extensions often function identically in both environments, allowing you to avoid costly reworking. You can also use a prebuilt mobile cloud service, such as IBM Mobile Foundation, to manage the web back end.

Another option is to go hybrid, taking a write-once-run-anywhere approach. Hybrid apps use a single codebase that can function on either platform. They’re typically coded in a programming language that’s universally recognized, such as Java, JavaScript, HTML or CSS. Because you’re denied access to the operating system’s native APIs, hybrid mobile application development works best for simple web applications—three- or four-page mobile applications with limited functionality.

Think light: Building for a mobile platform

Whether you choose native or hybrid mobile application development, one of the first hurdles you’ll need to overcome is the relatively limited resources on mobile devices. Your target mobile device will have much less processing power and memory than desktop computers or enterprise servers. These constraints might seem like a significant challenge, especially if you’re more familiar with the comparatively boundless resources for conventional software development for web apps.

Limited mobile platform resources mean you need to adjust your goals for your app design.

Throughout the mobile application development process, developers must work to ensure that their mobile app is less resource intensive than a typical desktop application.

Delivering a great user experience is vital. That starts with understanding that your user interface for a mobile app should be simpler than a desktop application interface. By creating a straightforward UX design that is focused on critical functions, you can provide a better user experience while consuming fewer resources.

Your mobile app interface should be designed for touch. Mobile users must be able to navigate your app easily and provide input without excessive typing.

Fortunately, these requirements for efficient, simple touch-based apps map well to user expectations. Mobile users generally want to accomplish tasks simply, with just a few taps. They want apps that are above all fast, convenient and easy to use on their mobile devices.

Offload processing to the cloud

What if your mobile application requires more processing than a typical mobile platform can support? Consider offloading that processing to the cloud.

Through the judicious use of APIs, you can connect your app to cloud-based services and databases to provide advanced functionality without slowing your application or straining the device it is running on. You can even offload data storage and caching to a cloud-based server, leaving very little data on the device.

Extend your app with advanced cloud services

The cloud can offer additional advantages beyond performance boosts. Connect your mobile application to powerful cloud services to add features and improve usability. Employ APIs to integrate new features, such as advanced cloud-based services that can help you enhance your mobile apps. These include push notifications, IBM Watson®-powered AI analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) smart device integration and more.

Join a developer program

Neither Android nor iOS is a completely open environment. Before your application can be officially distributed, you’ll need to join the appropriate developer program.

The Android mobile application development program lets you use your existing Google account to create a developer account, pay the USD 25 fee and submit your application. Google Play, the official Android store, does have quality standards that must be met prior to publication, but they’re more guidelines than actual rules. As part of your app development process, you can also distribute your applications outside the Google Play store and allow users to directly download and install them.

By contrast, the Apple mobile application development program sets a high barrier to entry. You need to pay a program fee of USD 99 per year and adhere to high standards. Once you’re a member of the program, you get early access to beta versions of the operating systems and proprietary frameworks or APIs. Meeting the high standards for the App Store also signifies to the world that you’ve developed a high-quality app.

Mobile application development and IBM Cloud

Mobile application development is necessary for most enterprises. When you build your application with both operating systems in mind, try to make judicious use of APIs and understand the specifics of the required developer programs. That approach will help you deliver to your users an app that’s flexible, convenient and lightweight—the perfect way to serve information or services—along with an excellent user experience.

To help mobile app developers, IBM Cloud offers a variety of solutions, including IBM Cloud App ID, which allows you to add authentication and back-end security, and IBM Push Notifications, which lets you send personalized real-time messages to mobile applications.

To learn more about the specifics of mobile application development on either platform, read our articles on iOS app development and Android app development.

To help you explore mobile application development, IBM offers a simple tutorial on building a voice-enabled Android-based chatbot.

Learn about the features and capabilities of the IBM Mobile Foundation, in addition to IBM Push Notifications through the Introduction to Mobile Foundation course in the IBM Cloud Professional Developer curriculum.

If you are ready to start using IBM Cloud today, sign up here.

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Mobile App Development: React Native vs Native (iOS, Android)

React Native is a framework created by Facebook that allows you to develop native mobile apps for iOS and Android with a single JavaScript codebase.

In 2012 Mark Zuckerberg commented, “The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native”. React Native was announced at Facebook’s React.js conference in February 2015 and open-sourced in March 2015.

With the rise of React Native popularity and the growing number of popular mobile apps (such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Uber, Discord, SoundCloud, Skype…) being partially or completely rewritten in React Native, the question arises: Should mobile developers use React Native for mobile development instead of going full native with Java or Swift?

Before we start comparing these languages and frameworks, let‘s first see how React Native builds a mobile app. React Native framework uses React.js library in order to create a true native mobile app. The important difference between React and React Native is that the latter uses native components instead of web components to create the user interface, along with JSX — a syntax that is used to embed XML with JavaScript.

This basically means that you can write mobile apps similar to how you would write web apps. Let’s show this on a simple custom component example:

We can immediately see the similarities to web development coding style. React Native components such as and

are defined and organised exactly like HTML components such as or

Also, styling React Native components with StyleSheet is almost exactly the same as the good old CSS, the only difference being the field names written in camelCase ( borderRadius ) instead of CSS dash style ( border-radius ).

React Native uses a set of components such as , , ,

, which map to their native iOS and Android counterparts, as well as some platform-specific components such as and

for iOS or and for Android.

Based on this, one could argue that it is definitely much easier, cheaper and faster to write mobile apps in React Native instead of native iOS and Android. But is it really that simple? Let us discuss the pros and cons of each approach in more detail, based on specific criteria.

Codebase

React Native enables a single JavaScript codebase for 2 different platforms. This means that it is not just easier to maintain the app by having the same development process for both platforms and reusing the same code, but it also requires less resources, because there is no need for separate iOS and Android teams.

However, this benefit comes with a cost. It is well-known that Android and iOS have different design guidelines. Human Interface Guideline for iOS and Material Design for Android have a big share of differences, so if the project requirements dictate that these specific OS requirements should be followed for each native platform, React Native developer will need to write platform-specific code, which defeats the purpose of the single codebase. This might be a bigger issue when it comes to iOS, because Apple often updates and deprecates their technologies which can be hard to follow, while Android apps generally have more control of the system and are allowed more freedom.

However, if it is OK for the app to look the same on both iOS and Android, then using React Native will greatly speed up the development and maintenance processes.

It should be noted though that even with the factor of being allowed to write an app that looks the same on both platforms, it is still impossible to write an app without writing any platform-specific code. Some components will just look great on iOS and bad on Android and vice versa, which raises the need for fine-tuning those specific cases. Still, even with platform-specific UI in the code, having even 30% of shared codebase is big money and time save in the long run.

The programming language

React Native is based on React.js, which is written in JavaScript. This is a major advantage when it comes to the fact that JavaScript is such an extensive and popular language that it’s very hard to find a programmer who hasn’t used it at some point in their career.

What is the disadvantage of using JavaScript though? Well… it’s JavaScript.

While Java and Swift/Objective-C are strongly-typed, compiled languages, JavaScript is interpreted and often called an untyped language. This means that your variables can be anything at any time and a compiler is not going to help you, so if you’re not extra careful while writing your apps, the floor is paved for Javascript horrors to ensue. When true native apps have more control of the variables and the logic of the app is more predictable, JavaScript relies on the programmer’s experience, Lint tools and automatic tests. Does this mean that JavaScript programs have more errors by definition? No. But it does mean that you might spend a lot more time searching for that app-breaking error that your compiler would have gotten for you in Java or Swift.

Still, it is a fact that JavaScript remains one of the most widely-used programming languages in the world, and the maturity of the JavaScript community implies that finding a React Native developer for a project should typically be trivial.

Hot reloading and Live reloading

Anyone who has ever worked in XCode or Eclipse / Android Studio knows how long and tedious build time can be. This can especially be frustrating if you are working on a feature that is multiple screens away from the launch screen. This makes even trivial tasks such as changing a view color or changing a label text very time-consuming.

React Native’s solution for this problem is called hot reloading, which keeps the app running and saves the state (the data and the screen you’re on), only injecting the changes that are being made in the code. While being far from perfect, this feature works well for most of the usual use cases, saving a lot of precious development time.

Even without using hot reloading, app build time is significantly faster using React Native than on native iOS and Android, and live reloading mechanism can be used to automatically reload the app every time the code is changed, without having to build it manually every single time.

User Interface

React Native’s approach to structuring UI is Flexbox, which is already very popular in web development and enables the developer to create a responsive web or mobile UI very easily. As such, it is a technology that rivals Android’s XML / Constraint layout approach, or iOS’s Storyboard / XIB / Coding with UI libraries such as Neon approach.

One considerable advantage that native mobile has though is that you have access to all the native APIs such as Camera, Touch ID and GPS, as well as tools for creating animations and complex user interface. There is no middle layer and you are free to take advantage of everything the mobile platform has to offer. React Native does not excel at creating complex UI and animations. It does have the Animated API which is a neat solution, but is still far behind the native capabilities.

React by default re-renders a component every time its state changes. If used well, this paradigm for building UI is superior. However, if not handled well this can be a source for wasteful re-renders. Worth noting is that, in a single-threaded JavaScript environment, performance problems might arise and you need to be extra careful while building your UI.

Also, some complex mobile features are simply best done in native. One example of this is Apple’s ARKit for creating augmented reality experiences. Another example are apps that are very platform specific, such as apps for watchOS or tvOS.

React Native simply does not provide the amount of user interface power as native mobile does, so for apps that require a highly complex UI or sophisticated animations it might not be the best choice. But for simple-looking apps it is a better option because of the way Flexbox handles responsive UI layout, as well as the simple and intuitive structuring of the XML components.

Native modules

While React Native can handle a large amount of cross-platform use cases, it is impossible for it to cover all the native mobile ground. This means that there will always be a need for native modules. Native modules are basically code in native language which handles a specific native feature. Examples of native modules are modules for camera, native image picker, push notifications, deep linking, and third-party services like Auth0 or Amplitude.

These modules must be linked with react-native link command, but in most of the cases this will not be enough, and the developer will need to follow specific instructions in order to link the native module so it could work on both iOS and Android.

So, while this means that basically any native code can be written in native language if React Native cannot handle it, it also means that React Native developer is forced to dig in native IDEs (XCode / Android Studio) in order to enable the modules. An experienced native mobile developer will usually quickly find a way to link the library, but someone who is purely a React Native developer and has never made a true native mobile app will hit many walls before finally connecting everything together.

In addition, it is worth noting that if the team uses a cloud service for Continuous Integration such as Azure, even more native linking problems might arise, because XCode and Android Studio on the cloud might have a different version and configuration than your local one, so even if everything works well on your machine, it might not build remotely and the developer will need to do more fine-tuning in order for the linking to work on both sides.

The same goes for publishing the app. If the team doesn’t have developers that are experienced in native iOS and Android, they may struggle to release the app. This is more of an iOS problem, with Android release workflow being more straightforward. In order to release an iOS app, React Native developer will still need to use XCode in order to configure release-related data such as provisioning profiles and certificates, which can be overwhelming at first.

All of this leads to a very important conclusion: React Native is much more effective if used by developers who already have experience with native mobile development, because it doesn’t completely remove the need of going native.

The Future

While native iOS and Android are here to stay, and they will remain with us in the foreseeable future, the future of React Native is uncertain. It is true that React Native community is growing and expanding very quickly, but with the current React Native version still not being 1.0 (the most recent version at the time of writing this article is 0.56), we are yet to see the best from React Native.

It is developed by Facebook, so the React Native developers are at its mercy, because it is possible that at some point Facebook decides to stop maintaining it. This has happened before with Facebook’s backend as a service platform called Parse, which shut down on 28 January 2017, forcing all current users to switch to a new service. The thought of this happening to React Native is scary indeed, but it could happen.

Also, while React Native tends to keep up with the native trends, there will always be a time gap between some new feature (Face ID for example) emerging on the native platform and the same feature being included in React Native. This means that developing anything using fresh technology will take more time.

Another thing worth noting is that Facebook does regularly update React Native, but they are not very interested in fixing bugs that don’t directly involve the Facebook app. The way react native compiles XML to native code is a black box process. So, if there is some kind of an error in a React Native component, you will either have to wait for Facebook to fix it, or fix it yourself, which requires going into native code.

Conclusion

In the end, is React native worth it? The answer is: It depends on your project.

• Do you need to make an iOS-only or Android-only app? Go native.
• Do you have a small team with limited time and resources, and need to make an app for both platforms? Go React Native.
• Do you need to make a highly complex app that utilizes a large portion of platform-specific code? Go native.
• Do you want to take advantage of fast build time, and features such as hot reloading and live reloading? Go React Native.
• Do you plan to maintain the app over a long period of time, without fear of Facebook quitting React Native? Go native.
• Do your developers have a strong React / Web development background? Go React Native.
• Does your app need to support new mobile OS features as soon as they are released? Go native.
• Is your app going to look and behave the same on both platforms? Go React Native.

The key thing about React Native is that it’s still in development and we are yet to see its full potential. In the future, it may be more powerful and efficient and allow for even more use cases, but for now it cannot fully replace native mobile development. However, its write once, use everywhere paradigm can be a tremendous time and money saver if used on the right projects.

Needless to say, I am very excited to see how React Native will evolve and how it will affect the mobile world!☺️

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