Posts Tagged ‘mobility’

Benefits and Disadvantages of Hybrid Mobile Applications

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Mobile App Development, Software & App Sales, Technology trends, Uncategorized

Mobile marketing has become one the most important, if not the most important, parts of just about any marketing strategy. People rely on their mobile devices for just about any activity imaginable and any company that is not a part of this global trend seems to be out of touch. Traditionally, there were two main ways how to establish a mobile presence: one was to create a fully native application written in a programming language used by the targeted platform, and the other was to stick with a regular website and give up upon the native feel and look. However, now, in 2016, we have reached the point where more than 50 percent of mobile applications should be hybrid, according to Gartner’s 2013 mobile and wireless predictions.

With the imminent market domination of hybrid applications ahead of us, now is a great time to look at their benefits to see what exactly is behind their popularity. We, also, won’t avoid mentioning their main negatives, in order to get a clear, comprehensive picture of their role in the mobile market.

What are Hybrid Mobile Applications?

Let’s start with a brief background: native applications are built using a platform-specific programming language (Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android) and can use all native functionality of mobile devices and mobile operating systems, including the use of GPS, access to the filesystem, or common user interface elements. As a result, they usually have a consistent user experience, offer great performance, and are tied to just a single environment they were developed for.

One could say that hybrid applications actually have more in common with web apps than native apps. The reason is that they are actually just web apps wrapped in a native web view displayed via the smartphone’s native browser. What makes them so special is the particular framework using which they are built. This framework allows for an easy use native functions of each mobile platform using cross-platform APIs. Frameworks like Cordova require nothing more than a knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, tools which are very familiar to all web developers.

Main Benefits of Hybrid Mobile Apps

With the introduction behind us, it’s time to take a closer look at some of the main benefits of hybrid mobile apps. We are not trying to include every single positive aspect of hybrid apps; instead, we are focusing solely on their advantage over native and web applications.

Unified Development

By far the single biggest benefit that hybrid mobile apps can offer is the unified development. Companies can save a substantial amount of money that would otherwise have to be spent on developing and maintaining separate code bases for different mobile platforms. They can develop just a single version and let their hybrid framework of choice do the heavy lifting and ensure that everything will work flawlessly.

This, of course, directly leads to lower cost of development and, potentially, greater revenue. Many small businesses wouldn’t be able to afford to target all major mobile platforms, if there wasn’t the option to do so with a hybrid framework.

Fast Deployment

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach necessitates the fast deployment of functional solutions in order to be the first to penetrate the market and gain a substantial competitive advantage. Those who need to have their app in the App Store as fast as possible should seriously consider using hybrid applications.

Low-Level Access

Basic web applications are cut off from smartphones’ operating systems and built-in functionality. Even though they are getting smarter every day, they still don’t come anywhere near native applications. Hybrid applications elegantly bridge the gap between the two other approaches and provide all the extra functionality with very little overhead. As a result, developers can realize the much wider range of ideas and capture the attention of their target audience.

Offline Support

Web applications are critically limited by their lack of offline support. This may seem like a less important issue for people who live in urban areas, where the access to high-speed Internet access is ubiquitous, but potential customers from rural areas and less developed countries could be cut off from access to the application. At the end of the day, one customer survey showed that 79 percent of consumers would retry a mobile app only once or twice if it failed to work the first time, and only 16 percent of consumers would give it more than two attempts. Local storage can also dramatically enhance the overall user experience by storing personal information and preferences for later use.

Scaling

Hybrid applications are limited only by the underlying framework. Companies who partner with a good provider can instantly target all major platforms without any additional effort at all. It the platform is popular enough, it can be expected that it will quickly add support for any new mobile operating systems and their respective incremental updates.

Main Disadvantages of Hybrid Mobile Apps

It would be unfair to ignore the main disadvantages of hybrid applications and paint an unrealistic picture that doesn’t tell the whole story. Because as much as hybrid apps can help small and medium sized business reach wide audiences, they are also limited in several critical ways.

Performance

Hybrid apps add an extra layer between the source code and the target mobile platform: the particular hybrid mobile framework, such as Ionic, Cordova, Onsen, Kendo, and many others. The unsurprising result is a possible loss of performance. It really varies from application to application just how noticeable the difference can be, but the fact that Facebook migrated their mobile application from HTML5 to native shows that there really can be a significant difference, at least for large-scale applications. Mark Zuckerberg even went on to say that “The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.”

After all, 84 percent of users consider performance to be an important or very important factor, according to A Global Study of Consumers’ Expectations and Experiences of Mobile Applications by Dynatrace, an American application performance management (APM) software company with products aimed at the information technology departments and digital business owners of medium and large businesses.

Debugging

That extra layer also makes debugging a potential nightmare. Developers have to rely on the framework itself to play nicely with the targeted operating system and not introduce any new bugs. Since developers are not likely to have a deep knowledge of the targeted platform, figuring out the exact cause of an issue can be a lengthy affair.

Features

It’s hard to believe that the first iPhone was released just in 2007. We have come a such a long way since then, and the mobile industry is showing no signs of slowing down. Mobile operating systems keep evolving at much faster pace than their desktop counterparts, and many people now use smartphones and tablets as their primary computing devices.

Companies who want to stand at the very apex of progress and use all the latest and greatest features and hardware capabilities are probably going to experience difficulties trying to achieve their goals using hybrid frameworks. It can take quite a bit of time before new features are implemented by providers of these providers of these frameworks.

Conclusion

Hybrid mobile applications have their place in every situation where fast development is the main priority or where the high cost of targeting each platform with an individual native application would be downright prohibitive. Big players and companies who need to stay on top of the latest development are not likely to sacrifice performance and control. However, it may be just a matter of time before hybrid application frameworks reach such a high level of maturity that all previously mentioned negatives will simply disappear.

Enterprise Mobility in the Cloud Era

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Mobile App Development, Software & App Sales, Technology trends

Mobile devices and their use for business and personal purposes have transformed our lives and changed the way we work. Companies that allow employees to bring their own devices to workplace have first-hand seen many advantages of this approach to personal computing, but they also have noticed a handful of potentially serious issues. In this article, we are considering the current state of enterprise mobility, and what kind of transformation it will have to undergo to successfully enter the cloud era.

As described by Tech Target in their extensive handbook on mobile application management, work habits are shifting, as more employees work from home using their own devices and the power of the Internet. Indeed, one in every five people are estimated to work from home at least one day a week, and the total share of remote workers could reach 63 percent by the end of the year 2018.

That’s because telecommuters are, again and again, shown to be able to accomplish more in less time and greatly decrease the total overhead cost. A great example is when Washington accidentally saved approximately $32 million during 4 official snow days, which forced federal employees to work from home.

But it’s not all about cost and effectiveness, either. One of the main reasons why employees themselves prefer to avoid office environments is the much lower stress level, according to a study by PGI, the global leader in web conferencing and collaboration technology. Employees who are not dreading their daily trip to work are 69 percent less likely to avoid work, they feel more connected with their work and colleagues, and can feel good about their positive impact on the environment.

With such amazing benefits to enterprise mobility, it’s paramount that businesses manage to overcome all current problems and allow customers and employees to seamlessly interact with the company using their own devices. Cloudbook suggests that “As 70% of the North American workforce is now mobile, cloud-based environments require a transparent mobile policy management strategy.”

Currently, most employees who are allowed to work remotely use a mixed approach, which combines company-provided tools and technologies with employees’ own infrastructure and habits. For example, an employee can use pre-configured remote desktop application to connect to his work computer, download company files on his or her own hard drive, transfer these files onto an USB flash drive, conduct the actual work from a desktop computer, where it is automatically backed up to the employee’s personal cloud storage solution, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

Not only is the company put into a vulnerable position in terms of privacy and data security, but they also rely on the employee’s technical ability to navigate the vast jungle of technological solutions. Enterprises will need to go beyond the now traditional “mobile first” approach, and conduct a deep assortment of users’ needs, while placing the highest priority on data protection and security.

Several possible solutions already exist and include the use of virtual mobile infrastructure (VMI) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. The goal is always the same: to run all applications remotely and store their data in a remote data center, rather than on computers and mobile devices of individual employees.

Companies can greatly decrease their informational technology spending by using pre-built tools as the foundation upon which they can expand and create their own custom-built tools and solutions. These can benefit from integrated monitoring and statistics gathering services to allow for Big Data analysis and subsequent optimization of all internal processes.

What’s more, with everything neatly stored under one roof, access control can be easily managed by a very small team of skilled support staff members, and employees can enjoy a much greater level of protection against their own mistakes, which could otherwise lead to security breaches and costly data leaks.

Given that the latest IDC report  indicates that mobile technology spending is likely to reach $1.2 trillion by 2019, we can expect to see a profound transformation in a very short period of time. Entire company networks are likely to migrate to the cloud, and employees will be given a tightly restricted access to a consistent set of platform-independent tools and applications to do their job.

The obvious winners are third-party companies like my firm OpenArc who specialize in providing and managing the necessary infrastructure and platforms. However, progressive businesses can also expect a great return their investment and high employee satisfaction and productivity.

Enterprise Mobility: Security Risk or Worth It?

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Sales Strategy, Technology Tips & Tricks, Technology trends

For the first time in computing history the enterprise is being influenced by its employees and consumers technology through IT consumerization.  IT consumerization is the blending of personal and business use of technology devices and applications.   Many companies have embraced a mobile-first strategy. But when employees are left to their own devices, InfoSec experts face unchartered territory. However, enterprise mobility can be and is in my opinion is absolutely a strategy enterprises cannot continue to ignore.

The trend towards enterprise mobility can indeed add to concerns over BYOD (bring your own device) security. And even though such systems are key to business operations, they’re not regularly maintained or tested for vulnerabilities, mainly due to availability concerns.

Enterprise mobility really is a double-edged sword: it helps provide broad data access along with communication capabilities for a great deal of the workforce, often at little to no direct cost. It also aids in opening up security issues that can range from vulnerable apps to security issues and employees accessing sensitive corporate data via unsecured networks.

Many CISOs and CIOs tend to realize that while security technologies and mobile device management do play a role, clear policies are essential to harnessing the benefits of BYOD. The aim of such policies needs to be to increase user productivity and satisfaction while ensuring compliance and the utmost security.

It Is A Risk Worth Taking 

So where do you start building a mobile security policy? Simple: start with what makes you uncomfortable. Devices need to meet “trusted device standards” in order to comply and employees should use VPN clients to gain access to the company network. What’s more, employee-owned devices should support security policies and frameworks that keep enterprise data secure at rest and in transit.

The trend towards enterprise mobility with critical systems and data can add to the concerns over BYOD security.  While some security policies are indeed standard procedure, you need to identify which functions, data and applications need protection most in order to understand how enterprise mobility could expose them. Some companies, such as Cisco and Oracle, use MDM (mobile device management) and MAM (mobile application management) to do application installs / removals, containerization and encryption of enterprise data, and in some cases remote wipe for loss prevention.

BYOD does bring many benefits when it comes to empowering your staff with timely information, offering flexibility and increasing productivity. Enterprise mobility also have many customer benefits such as improving consumer loyalty, streamlining customer support process and reducing support costs.  The benefits far outweigh the risks, but every company has unique situations and that’s where BYOD security technologies and policies should be focused.

Take the First Step

Enterprise mobility necessitates partnership with business leader involvement coupled with the understanding that not all risks are bad. The first step should be to establish a committee of business and tech leaders to identify the data and critical systems that should be considered when formulating the BYOD policy. The next step should be to review policy and technical controls based on potential risks and threats to your current operations.

Based on this sort of analysis, security officers and CIOs will be able to determine how to enhance and enable their enterprise mobility programs to moderate business risks.

Learn more about Oracle’s Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)

Looking for a partner to help your enterprise mobility needs, check out OpenArc.