Mobile Applications

In this post, we will concentrate on enterprise mobile application development best practices including notifications system and mobile application design; we are talking here about a mobile application of service to the employees of an enterprise whose main functions revolve around sharing and communicating data and / or information.

Considering that mobile applications and mobile navigation are now part of our everyday life, one should not underestimate the impact of a good design on the rapid adoption of a mobile application.

Mobile Application Development Best Practices should apply whether you are developing a mobile application from scratch to answer a specific business need or from an actual enterprise application.

Before You Even Start, Consider Your Audience & Your Business Need or Problem

Before you take any time to develop a mobile application, consider your audience and build a solid Business Case around the business need or the problem you want to solve. You’ll find more about building a business case in our recent post: You need to develop a new application?  Fine, do you have a Business Case?.

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We are talking here about the development cost of an enterprise mobile application, that which will serve the enterprise itself as part of its operations, and the impact on this development cost of design and software architecture choices therein; including interactions with the technology environment, functionality, testing and deployment, maintenance and updates.

The question is not simple and to seize its complexity, we can make the comparison with a process as complex but more familiar to us; how well to estimate the construction costs of your new house?

You got it; there will be impact choices in terms of plans, materials, land, floors, etc.

Then to estimate accurately the development cost of an enterprise mobile application, we are going to try to confine the main factors at play and especially, to highlight critical choices you’ll have to face.

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We need multi-level cybersecurity in 2019 including double authentication to better protect ourselves from threats, attacks, hacks and frauds of all kinds that have happened over the Internet these last years and which all of the major Web Services,  Applications and Social Networks have suffered from: Twitter, Spotify, LinkedIn, Windows, Apple, Android, Facebook, Gmail, Netflix, Reddit, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, etc.

It’s huge… way too much!

So, just to make sure everybody gets a fair chance at starting 2019 on the right foot; here are key excerpts from a few ZDNet articles suggesting 5 basic privacy and security measures and utilities to be installed on your 3 environments (mobile, computer and browser). And a few bonuses…

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We strongly believe that Custom Development can and should adapt to IT Legacy systems.

As an IT Consulting firm offering Custom Development Services, we have developed over the years the knack for analysing and recognizing the minutiae of IT legacy systems and designing different communications protocol to exchange data with them.

Of course, if you ask IT how to go about addressing new challenges, they will probably go with the systems and technologies in place. It’s a question of comfort and risk management because it is not usually appreciated to add other systems and applications to the existing IT environment.

But the thing is, that’s not always the best course of action.

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Do we have to remind the positive impact on both productivity and profitability of Custom Software Development and digital technologies? Not really. Nevertheless, it might be interesting to understand its nature, how this impact comes into play, at which levels.

A 2015 study from Deloitte & MIT Sloan shows that digitally mature enterprises are very much focused on globally integrating digital technologies such as Integrated Systems, Social Media, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud to transform their business process while enterprises digitally less mature are concentrating on solving specific problems with specific technologies.

The key words here being « globally integrating » ; it’s by integrating globally digital technologies that enterprises transform their business process and their way of doing business, therefore, there must be a global integration strategy of digital technologies and Custom Software Development into play.

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Lean Software Development is the extension of the Lean principles to IT Products and Services Development and Management; more specifically, it aims at eliminating any type of work that adds no value to an IT product or service.^[1]

Lean Six Sigma is a methodology that relies on a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste,^[1] on eight types of operation: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over production, Over processing, Defects, and Skills (abbreviated as ‘TIMWOODS’).

One shouldn’t underestimate, in a more and more predominant eBusiness and eCommerce environment, the crucial role IT has come to play in businesses’ primary activities of delivering value to customers.  IT often provides products and services that enable customers to find, order, and pay. IT also provides enhanced productivity and allows both suppliers and employees to better communicate, collaborate and produce / execute.

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100 times go back to your work, again, again and again… and so it goes also for your Application Development Project and your Application Development Business Case.

The fact is among all enterprises, budgets are getting scarce and their distribution is getting rare as well. When it comes to application development project, we clearly see where it starts but not necessarily where it will end and not always in a good manner for that matter; which leaves bad memories and a bitter taste in the mouth of too many C-levels.

Although the initial motivation to start an application development project seems legitimate in the eyes of CMOs, CIOs or CTOs; their Application Development Business Case not always adequately supports it. The general idea is always to increase revenues but maybe we can add some rigor to it since you’ll have to sell your project on the inside and validate your Application Development Business Case.

Your challenge consists mostly in answering a few questions and validate your initial assumptions. So, here’s a basic pathway and a few useful arguments.

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To Start, usually I used Coda but for 3 or 4 months I have left it over. It’s not so fast and it doesn’t adapt to new html or other standards. I’d like to have something fast, stable but with sacrificing features. Atom which is created by GitHub looks like interesting. With all the community plugins , it’s not the case anymore; I LOVE IT!

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Mobile Banking Services, or Bank on-the-go if you prefer, is getting so strong in some countries and with some segments of population like the Millenniums that Banks must now act quickly to understand its trends and become key players to profit from it.

One of the key factor of Mobile Banking Services growth is the high penetration level of Smartphones in Western countries where 50% of owners have been using a mobile banking application. All major Banks in North America have deployed or developed Mobile Banking Services in recent years which a large part of their Clientele is using.

In countries where a large proportion of the people is unbanked, cellular phones are being used as a commercial vector of all sorts!

“Banking is essential, not Banks,” famously said Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, in 1994.

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Major disruptions in Banking and Financing on the horizon; thanks to new technologies from Big Data Analytics to Mobile Apps that are reshaping this sector at a fast pace, resulting in new ways for companies and customers & consumers to interact, to manage their money and to conduct transactions.

Global investment in Fintech ventures hit $5.7 billion in the first quarter of 2016, and about half the funding went to projects in Asia, primarily in China. “The reason funding is taking off now is that the four platforms – Mobility, Big Data (IoT) and Analytics, Blockchain Technology (Bitcoin) and Machine Learning (AI) – are in their infancy,” said Catherine Wood, CEO of ARK Investment Management (US) at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in 2016.

The fact is that Banking and Financial Services is one of the largest industries that is still not fully digitalized. In this field of activities, the technological revolution has just begun.

So let’s see what we’re up to and what major disruptions we may foresee.

Overview of upcoming disruptions in Banking and Financing

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Part 1 – The design before Xcode

Here at Analystik, we have done a case study for the creation of an iPhone application using the Xcode development environment. We searched online and couldn’t find a good step by step tutorial of the process, so we decided to create one for you. Here it is ! At first, this part concentrates on the early stages before you get into Xcode, so these steps are the same for an iPhone, Android or Windows (with some differences in the exportation of files).
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The new cross-platform application development paradigm has confronted developers with a multi-OS and multi-device heteroclite environment (iOS, Android, PC, Web). And of course, everyone was looking for high-performance cross-platform multi-device deliverables!

Saying that the application development landscape has greatly evolved over the last few years would definitely be an understatement, be it mobile or back-end and front-end. And always the performance challenge remained central over time, both in terms of development (to develop the fastest possible at the lowest cost) and in terms of application performance.

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Imagine not to need your Laptop with you on the road any more whether for work or in weekend because you can use your Smartphone as a computer PC simply by connecting it to a screen and a keyboard. How about that? Welcome to Microsoft Continuum, the UX counterpart of Universal Windows Platform.

This vision encapsulates the concept of « Mobile Computing » or if you prefer, a « computing experience » in which the user can not only access its information (networks, applications, contents) but also deploy a fully functional working environment, anywhere, on any device.

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Microsoft made quite an important acquisition starting 2016, Xamarin, which reveals the strategic direction the Redmond Giant is taking and how it intends to capitalize on the cross–platform application development concept to materialize its vision!

What is that strategy? Well, Microsoft has created strong versions of Office running on Android, iOS and Windows 10 Mobile, and moreover, it comes up with its Cloud Services, from Office 365 to Azure, presented as a platform for any mobile client rather than just Windows.

Windows 10 is supposed to take us in the era of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), where developers can write but one application and run it on all devices; IoT, Smartphones, Xbox consoles, Tablets, PCs, etc.

So with Xamarin, all of a sudden, the Microsoft can be attractive to more that just .Net / Windows developers but also to iOS and Android developers.

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Well, Windows Universal Platform (UWP) should provide all Microsoft aficionados a few very good reasons to rejoice and be happy.

Your enterprise has been relying on Microsoft technologies forever and some of your critical applications are close to life cycle finale or they have been developed with obsolete technologies or maybe some of your data and some of your back-end applications and CRM’s Business Intelligence need to be accessible on different devices!

Then you might be asking yourself if your IT department would profit from developing your new apps under the new Microsoft Development Architecture ; Universal Windows Platform (UWP)?

BENEFITS FOR DEVELOPERS

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