We are living in an era of digital transformation and technology disruptions in almost all the walks of life. With the smart phone revolution, we are experiencing dramatic changes in the mobility arena. Mobile apps are getting released every day, changing the way we do business and transforming Customer Experience. The approach to Mobile application development differs largely from the desktop application development because of the fundamental low memory foot print and single user centric nature of the mobile platform. In this highly competitive scenario, the differentiator lies in leveraging the development approach tactically easier, faster and hence faster GTM (Go-To-Market) with a highly optimized performance.

Developing an application on a mobile platform is not a heavy task now days. The platform itself provides the SDK and it will expose the features pertaining to the API. Well explanatory documentation along with sample/code snippets makes the job easy too. By knowing how to assemble the code structure with respect to that particular platform and by following the life cycle of the SDK, we can definitely make an application.

In traditional approach of developing an application on any mobile platform (be it on android/iOS/windows) the focus is to get onto the screen based development approach. You have got an application to develop and customer has provided the use cases. Quickly, business analyst’s defines the use cases and transforms those use cases into screens. The next phase is the development of the application. If a project has got 3 developers assigned, project manager quickly assigns the screens to individual developers where every individual developer starts developing his or her own assigned areas. Each developer makes their presentation layer to the controller to model layer till the data end points. The code gets merged, the application is done and it goes to build.

What we will achieve?

• Tightly Coupled code all around
• Duplicate code throughout the application
• Largely unstructured code
• Unreleased Resources

What are the challenges?

• Problem in Unit Testing
• Unaccounted increase in effort while modification of features or data point and patchy code
• Performance issues due to unwanted memory leakage
• Maintenance issues – huge line of a stub. More than recommended line of code per stub and hence per classes
• Build – test cycle increases
• Delivery goes over run

These are some of the serious challenges that cannot  be overlooked in the case of mobile application development.

In this age of digital transformation using disruptive technologies, the approach to mobile app development is experiencing a sea of changes.