Nowadays mobile apps dominate the world. Building apps is also very straightforward. However, quality remains a challenge. How to build high quality mobile apps?
Unlike the mythical cup pursued by the Knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail of mobile app development is accessible. On two conditions: determine the priority OS and have the lucidity to revisit your development scenario.
Today, there are more than 5.11 billion unique mobile users worldwide, and 2.71 billion of them use smartphones! We can expect this proportion to increase steadily over the next few years. From a strictly organizational point of view, mobility is also a formidable productivity lever for companies because it enables ubiquitous work. These are all facts that make the development of high-quality mobile applications an absolute necessity. See the Holy Grail. But unlike the mythical cup pursued by the Knights of the Round Table, this Grail is accessible. On two conditions: determine the priority operating system and have the lucidity to revisit the development scenario of its mobile applications.
Android, the choice of reason?
There is no shortage of OSes today. To make their choice, publishers have to rely on the facts. Three criteria predominate: popularity, loyalty and the range of the Store's offering. On each of these points, Android clearly stands out. With an 85.1% market share, Android is the most widely used OS in the world, its users are the most loyal - 82% of people who use it keep it - and with 3.03 million applications (as of Septembre 2020) Google Play has the richest offer. No other OS does better.
The dictatorship of quality
When the smartphone application stores were created, visibility was the main issue for the majority of brands. To achieve this, it was often enough to develop applications with a great deal of effort on as many operating systems as possible. But things have changed: the demand for quality has risen to the level of quantity. From now on, if an app is a pain when it is first used, 80% of users will only try their luck once and 34% will go to a competitor. The quality of an application must therefore be irreproachable.
In fact, the biggest economic players have understood this. An example? Facebook. Despite a controversial start on the mobile, 40% of its users now access the social network via their mobile application. However, despite appearances, the development of applications that meet the level of demand of the end user is accessible to all publishers. Under what condition? By breaking (bad) habits.
Rethinking the mobile application development scenario
For many companies, application development still means silo and autarky. The new competitive context requires the development of successful applications as soon as they are put into service for the first time, and this way of working needs to be rethought. The company therefore needs to look at a new development scenario that encourages collaboration between all the players involved: sales, after-sales service, marketing and quality assurance teams, as well as developers...Obviously, achieving this requires the use of appropriate technology, with the Cloud as the cornerstone. Only the Cloud - and more precisely an emulator designed for the Cloud - provides the necessary conditions for collaborative work.
In concrete terms, thanks to an emulator designed for the Cloud, developers would be able to instantly share the latest version of their applications with all the departments concerned. The quality assurance department would be able to detect and repair the most minute faulty code thanks to real-time quality tests.
The customer experience team would be able to communicate to developers the areas for improvement as development progresses. Even services that seem far removed from development would benefit from the combination of emulation and the cloud.
Marketing and sales teams could use this technology to develop ad hoc tools and demos to support their arguments without waiting for the final version of the application. As for after-sales service, it would benefit from more precise advice and more efficient interventions because the emulator would accurately reflect each user's experience with its own applications.
Over the next few months little will change. The level of user requirements will not decrease. Just like the number of applications available in the blinds. On the other hand, the change could come from the ability of companies to adapt to this high level of demand and competition... Thanks to a deep questioning!
