Investing into Mobile Application Development for your business: What’s the Gain?

Due to the proliferation of smartphones, the ways that people communicate, spend their leisure time, perform shopping, and do their work have drastically changed. As everybody was starting moving towards smartphones, both mobile applications and wireless gaming have been growing in the recent past days.

According to the statistics taken on smartphone users, around 63% of the users are playing games, and almost everybody is downloading and using mobile applications. However, around 62% of smartphone shoppers do mobile online shopping at least once in a month. In the near future, around 31% of the smartphone users are expected to do more mobile shopping.

Generally, B2C businesses are aware that mobile applications are mandatory to gain a competitive advantage, while the B2B businesses neglect some important opportunities. Let us look at a glance on the B2B marketing to find some real arguments in favor of mobile applications.

As per the research done by the “Small Business and Entrepreneur Council”, generally small businesses use mobile applications for managing their operations that conserve 725,000,000+ employee hours and around 370,000,000+ million business hours per annum. This shows that a huge amount of time saved in using mobile applications.

Now, Let us have a look at the average business owner. The use of mobile applications that can spare companies’ time spent on monotonous jobs, such as document sharing, book-keeping and travelling, can save small-sized business owners on an average of $377/month, i.e., up to $4,000/year.

As there are many mobile applications available and they can be customized based on specific requirements, businesses can use the applications and improve their business processes as well as their business efficiency globally.

So, how do you build a winning and reliable mobile application? Before investing your money, you need to make sure that you can limit the risks of failure. The very first step that you need to take is nothing but checking out which trend is up at present and coming, and finding which one will be suitable for your business model. Also, let your clients easily download your customized mobile application, and hence make the application available to them anytime and anywhere.

Also, establish a mobile application that provides great support to the users and their processes. For example, instead of making the users fill a request through email, you can provide a customer service application where it is easy for them to deal with the problems concerning your products.

You have so many mobile applications available to accelerate your business. Indeed, the applications are not only there to provide support for B2C enterprises, they do support all kinds of businesses. You need to just imagine out-of-the box and get assistance from a best mobile application development company who can understand your requirements, the needs of your potential customer, and very importantly, have a proven track record in mobile application development.

Another key to get success in your business is finding a right partner. Nowadays, companies can able to select from different mobile application development options. You have so many mobile application development companies that have a comprehensive knowledge in programming, localization, and also porting from old projects. They provide fully customized mobile solutions, and hence you can get whatever you need for your business.

As mobile applications have the capability to empower your employees, customers and partners, it greatly improves your productivity multiple times and brings profitable growth in your business.

On the other hand, ROI or Return on Investment will compensate the mobile application development costs by a significant number of times as the development is usually a one-time development with very less or no enhancement or maintenance cost.

Hence, due to the lucrative benefits of mobile applications on the market, there are many ways for mobile application developers as well as the business owners, who are in need of a mobile application for their business, to cash in during this boom of mobile application growth.

Developing Hybrid Mobile Application for Your Business

It is evident that the mobile world has been growing rapidly these past few years. With the boom of internet, the usage of the handheld devices, such as smart phones, iPhones and tablets, is also growing day by day.

Due to the increasing demand and sales of smartphones and tablets, modern businesses cannot ignore the benefits of mobile apps for their customers. It is a difficult task to create an app with the perfect mix of features and platform support at reasonable cost.

In general, these are the three technologies that are used for mobile application development: native, web and hybrid mobile app development. A hybrid application leverages both native and mobile web technologies. The development process of hybrid apps includes the qualities of both the web and native application development processes.

The hybrid app development is basically built with the native programming languages such as Java, Objective C, and web technology such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. It is developed based on the concept WORA or Write-Once-Run-Anywhere, which is nothing but it supports all mobile devices of different operating systems.

Using this hybrid app development approach, developers write important portions of their app in cross-platform web technologies, whereas, they maintain direct access to native APIs when needed.

The native portion of the hybrid app uses the operating system APIs to build an embedded HTML rendering engine, which acts as a bridge between the device APIs and the browser. This makes the hybrid app to take the advantages of all the features that the latest devices have to provide.

A hybrid application mostly uses native features of any device such as geo-location, calendar, notification, contacts, camera, and offline storage. It also supports various features that are supported by touch screen display devices.  For graphics, a hybrid app can use HTML, Canvas and SVC. Also, a number of hybrid apps support offline work such as an online game has an offline game practice features.

The hybrid mobile app development is accessed effortlessly through the internet without using any web browser, as it uses web view control to display HTML and JavaScript files on a screen. The web view control covers WebView on Android, UIWebView on iOS, and so on.

Advantages of hybrid mobile app development:

• Uses of open source technologies such as PhoneGap, Sencha and SproutCore
• Flexible for both multi-platform and cross-platform development
• High-performance and cost-effective
• Easy to download and install features
• Highly interactive and impressive user interface
• Great access to device features
• Re-usable code base for various mobile platforms

Why a hybrid app is important for your business?

From a business viewpoint, developing a hybrid mobile app is the best idea, because this app development doesn’t require you to develop a full app for every mobile platform.

A hybrid app is cross-platform by design, and also it resolves some of the problems that some experience with web applications. From iOS to Windows Phone to Android to Blackberry OS, hybrid apps provide across-the-board functionality.

Some of the benefits of hybrid mobile apps are as follows:

• Standardized branding: Developing a hybrid app helps you to have an app that is basically standard on all mobile devices. This gives a great user experience for your customers who use your app on their mobile devices. However, if you want to update your app, then a single update will fix the app on all platforms. So, if your customers change from one mobile platform to another, the user interface of the app will remains the same.
• Better Integration: Similar to native mobile apps, hybrid mobile apps use the own code of mobile device to keep it in sync with other mobile applications. Hence, it works well with GPS, messaging, cameras and other device information to offer best service to your customers.
• Better Speed: Hybrid apps are not faster than native apps; however, they are comparatively faster than mobile web apps as they support various best features. Unlike mobile web apps, the hybrid apps will not require network communication which can be the main reason for slowdown.
• Accessibility: To ensure that your customers can able to easily access your products or services whenever they require, you need to have your app available for download in various mobile stores. Hybrid apps ensure that your app will be accessible across almost all app download platforms such as Android Google Play store, Apple App store, Windows Phone App store, and so on.
• Offline use: Similar to native apps, hybrid mobile apps use the device’s API, and hence they store some data offline. So, your customers can able to use your hybrid apps even though they have the problem with network connectivity.

So, it is important for every business to enrich or improve their mobile applications by adding the native device capabilities. To do this, it is time for you to race ahead and develop a hybrid app for your business.

Why do you essentially need a mobile app for your business?

In today’s mobile world, mobile apps have become an integral part of almost every business, irrespective of their industry and size. Nowadays, mobile apps are no longer just games or entertainment programs. You have so many mobile apps available in the market certainly used for eCommerce, finance and management.

Mobile apps help any business to improve efficiency and productivity. While most companies have their own website, it is undeniably more profitable for them to also develop a mobile app.

These are some of the reasons why you essentially need a mobile app for your business:

• Capture mobile commerce: One of the main reason your business requires a mobile app is to capture mobile commerce. Because, the number of customers using their mobile devices to make purchases has been drastically increasing over the last few years. A mobile app can frame the purchasing experience in a way that is reliable and consistent with the brand. Also, it allows for various kinds of sales such as micro payments from anywhere in the world.

• Customer engagement: In order to increase customer engagement and drive conversions, you need to have a mobile app for your business. You can work with a professional mobile app development company to create a program that becomes a valuable resource for your customers. 

• Better customer service: It is a fact that a good customer service will help a business to increase retention and keep customers away from the competition. A mobile app, specially developed for your business, helps you to provide a fast and easy way for your customers to contact you about customer service issues from any of their convenient locations. 

• Local business: Generally, a business with a storefront must have a mobile app to increase visibility and sales. A mobile app can use geolocation or other similar technologies to search customers who are a certain distance from your store. It also provides information about your products, coupons and discounts that you provide to your customers. Hence, by using the mobile app that interacts directly to people residing nearby, local businesses can overcome the competition in their area.

• Extend the reach of the business: Today, consumers are looking for products and services through mobile devices while they are on the move. So, to remain competitive and to extend the reach of your business, you need to have a mobile app to connect with these people.

• Manage scheduling activities: In the app store, some planners and other organizing applications are readily available for mobile devices. Those applications help you to manage your schedules and other business activities, and hence make you to avoid conflicts in your business.

• Promote business: Mobile apps greatly help to promote any business efficiently and inexpensively. As almost all businesses start to build applications and endeavor to custom their marketing strategies to fit mobile devices, you can easily expect an increase in mobile advertising through mobile app development.

• Financial management: Having the ability to monitor and manage your business’ finances anywhere around the world is very efficient indeed and is very handy. Today, mobile applications are available in the app store help you perform well-organized financial management. Using mobile apps, you can easily monitor the financial standings of your company and react accordingly in order to quickly solve any problems. 

As mobile industry is booming and continuing to grow, it is advisable for any business to develop mobile apps to promote their products and services. Mobile is undeniably the way all communication is headed nowadays and so, adopting this technology is ensured to produce the perfect results for your business.