Mobile apps are going under a tremendous shift this year. From the way they are built to the way they are maintained are undergoing a shift this year. New technologies and architectures are constantly arriving in the market which has greater support for flexible, speedy, collaborative development and offers modular apps. Whether you are building apps for enterprise users or for external customers, the process is iterative. Demands of the modern mobile users, requirements of the mobile app developer and need to update the apps are constantly changing and waterfall development practices are unable to support these needs and requirements. In order to support flexibility componentized and agile architectures and practices are needed.
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The time has come to think about how to divide the system so that pieces can be quickly and independently updated because this is required if the organization wants to keep up with this constant pace of change.
Below are the three emerging trends in this direction which will make you rethink the organization’s mobile development strategy.
Using micro-services in the backend enables the development team to operate efficiently and allows them to create flexible apps. These services are not bound to some specific technology instead they are used to provide small backend services which can be developed independently and then can be joined via APIs.
Each micro-service is built to implement a certain function of the mobile app. For example, a flight reservation system might contain the following micro-services:
Creating customer profile
Checking fight availability
Calculating fares
Transaction processing
Allocating seats etc.
Since developers can maintain and update these services individually and independently; this makes it easier to maintain and scale apps.
Card-based UI is gaining popularity. This is the design scheme where data and images can be presented in rectangular shapes and can be layered. The biggest advantage of this layout is that it allows brands to experiment with the ways in which the most relevant information can be displayed on desktops, mobiles and on other devices. Similar to micro-services each card can be thought of as specific thought or action and like micro-services are used for providing various services each card can be linked to another card or to a specific page in a different app.
These developments will change the mobile experience as the wall between various apps goes from becoming porous to completely invisible.
Component-based architecture is also being used in native JavaScript frameworks as mobile OS vendors are opening access to JavaScript engines in their platforms. This allows developers to call native UI features and APIs JavaScript.
These bits of code are then wrapped with the declarative language so they can operate without any dependencies. With this developers will no longer have to choose between performance and ease of development.
With flexible technologies like this, it is easy to test the user experiences from every perspective which will result in more app engagement.
The mobile app development and technologies supporting them will never be done and end. So, build your infrastructure and strategy around the same assumption.
