email: info@shoutfactory.net
The mobile phone is rapidly replacing the home computer for many tasks (e.g., e-mail, social media, and chatting). As mobile phones become more powerful with larger screens, this trend will only continue.
Does that mean you need a mobile-ready version of your website or application? It depends on who your target market is and how they use your site. What we have learned is that building mobile apps is really not much different than building regular applications. The primary difference is that they have to operate on small screens. Aside from that primary difference the same rules apply as with designing regular software.
A lot of companies are very interested in learning how to use this technology. We don’t think mobile apps will replace the application on your computer anytime soon. Have you tried typing a letter on your phone, for example? The relatively small screens and restrictive input options make extended data entry difficult and frustrating.
Mobile applications are best suited for quick data entry on the go and applications that retrieve data from a central server (e.g., flight information). Location-based (GPS) apps are also good for these devices, as are dedicated apps to an existing website like Facebook.
Writing mobile applications is difficult. Each phone operating system has it own development platform, and there are many such operating systems: Symbian (Nokia), iPhone (Apple), Blackberry (RIM), Andriod (Google), Windows Phone (Microsoft), etc. To create an application that would run on all of these platforms, you would have to develop a separate application for each of them.
It is not possible to create an application for the iPhone that runs on the Blackberry, for example. This raises the development and support cost substantially because you have to create and maintain a different application for each phone manufacturer.
There is an alternative to this. A website specifically designed for mobile phones could be created that would then run in the browser of each phone. The site won’t be as fast or as slick as a real phone app, but it would be lot easier and cheaper to develop. Talk to us and let us help you to decide, first IF you need a mobile app and then what are the pros and cons of the different approaches to creating one.
