Introduction to mobile application development

Editor's Notes

• #3: Why are we here Who am I Why Mobile Apps : importance growth statistics, different perspectives Mobile first thinking : Diff among mobile and desktop
• #5: Reach, how are they reaching Whatsapp fb iin
• #6: Rural india
• #7: Travelling time
• #11: Myntra gets about 70% of its orders and 90% of traffic comes from mobile apps and planning to go app-only in near future. Really ??? Amazon draws about 50% of its traffic from apps. In the future as more and more first-time users access the internet from smartphones rather than personal computers especially in India like countries.
• #13: Pixel density story
• #16: Choose a mobile strategy depending on the budget, project timeframe, target audience, app functionality, skillset
• #18: Once the app is installed, it interacts with the underlying operating system through proprietary API calls that the OS exposes. These are divided into 2 categories – Low-level API’s & high level API’s. Through low-level API calls, the app can interact directly with the touchscreen or keyboard, render graphics, connect to networks, process audio received from the microphone, receive images & video from the camera, access the GPS etc. Higher level services include processes like browsing the web, managing calendar, contacts, photo album, the ability to send and receive phone calls etc.
• #19: VM’s Approach :easier to extend when new features are added to the device and need to be supported by the API Runtime interpretation latency introduced when the VM is translating data and instructions to & from the underlying host platform.
• #20: Cross Compilation : Xamarin Marmlade Developers can use this API to build the application including UI, data persistence & business logic. The code is then processed by the compiler and transformed into platform-specific native apps. High performance as the app is running natively on the device & improved user experience as the app has full native access to all device-specific capabilities such as integrated camera, sensors etc.
• #21: Mobile Web Another increasingly popular approach is to develop mobile web apps which run on the user’s mobile browser. These are different from mobile-optimized websites which detect when they are being accessed from a mobile device and serve HTML pages that have been designed to provide a comfortable touch experience on a small screen size. This involves using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript to build the application & make it look and behave like a native app. It is possible due to the advanced capabilities of HTML 5 including embedded SQL databases, local storage (application cache to reduce page startup time and enable offline features), animations, canvas (avoid transferring images), websockets, video playback, geolocation services etc. Mobile Google Search uses the HTML5 Geolocation API to show location-aware results. Google Maps for Mobile and Mobile Gmail both use the canvas tag to avoid transferring images. This approach may be appealing for many applications such as ebooks, mobile banking, social interaction & email. However it may not be suited for highly interactive, CPU-intensive, visually rich applications like games, augmented reality browsers & videoconferencing.
• #22: Hybrid Apps : Phone Gap The bridge enables the hybrid app to take full advantage of all the features that modern devices have to offer. App developers can choose to code their own bridge or use ones provided by many of the cross-platform development frameworks such as PhoneGap.
• #23: Major frameworks, including Appcelerator and PhoneGap offer easy access to plugins and modules that can easily plug into other services or tools. Do not have to invest in a team or developer specific to that ecosystem. In addition to plugins and modules for specific functions, most frameworks also have the option to directly integrate with cloud services, including Salesforce.com, AWS, Box.net and others. Deploying and compiling apps is much faster in a cross-platform scenario. This is especially true with many of the new cloud-based build tools that various frameworks are starting to push out. If Google, Apple or Microsoft adds a new feature, the framework you are using will need to be updated to support those new additions. Most frameworks want users to use their own development tools and suites, and that can mean that a developer has to forgo his or her own IDE preferences and use something else. Most of the cross-platform frameworks build using their own subsets of JavaScript, which means that if you want to switch to another platform, that code you wrote before is likely not going to be reusable without a lot of work.