How Organizations Can Address Mobile App Backlog without Mobile Developers

The Mobile App development challenge:

Today’s organizations are being inundated with increasing customer and employee demands for customized enterprise apps. These apps must be robust and integrate with corporate IT systems.  They must also work on any mobile device that customers or employees may use. App development requires that developers learn many new programming languages and tools. Objective C, for example, is only used on iOS devices and was not popular until Apple mobile devices became popular, so few programmers know the language. This is the same with Java for Android, even though it is a little more popular, most programmers are not Java programmers. Therefore, the big issue is that 97% of developers in enterprise-size businesses do not yet have mobile programming skills, which is a key reason why app requests are being addressed so slowly.

Another reason mobile app development takes so much time is because there is no single mobile platform. Developers must develop apps to work on each platform separately with different languages and tools. SDK’s provided by Apple and Google only work for their own platforms.  Additionally, the development tools provided by Apple and Google require very low level programming. Some enterprises are leveraging more productive web-based tools but even with technologies like Java, Scrape and Mobile J Query, app development is still too time consuming. As well, with no single mobile platform, app development requires programming knowledge in Android and iOS SDK’s, Java, Javascript and Objective C. These are time consuming and costly development methods and present significant challenges for ongoing app management.

The glut of app development issues leaves companies faced with hiring in-house mobile programmers or outsourcing. Mobile developers are costly, scarce, and in high demand and outsourcing can often mean giving up project control. Additionally, the majority of existing enterprise developers have not yet had mobile app training nor is the time or money available for that to happen. Most organizations do not have many trained developers in mobile programming technologies. This limited resource should be used to enable other programmers in the company to create mobile apps. As a result, organizations are now faced with a huge backlog of app requests and the challenge of somehow building and delivering apps with their existing programming staff.

The solution to the mobile development challenge:

SnAPPii is an online mobile app building platform created to allow companies of any size to easily and quickly make custom apps for their business without requiring any mobile programming skills. Utilizing the SnAPPii platform developers can now build native apps without needing any training or experience in mobile programming. The visual drag, drop and configure method lets developers build apps once and deploy across all major mobile platforms. It also provides a rich library of pre-built features and functionality for building sophisticated enterprise apps that access data from back end and cloud based servers. This allows development of integrated, feature rich native apps easier and 30 times faster than using SDKs and Frameworks. Organizations can leverage developers trained in mobile programming technologies to extend the Snappii platform even further with capabilities specific to their enterprise. What takes mobile app developers months to do using SDK’s can be done in days on Snappii. App updates and changes can also be immediately tested, submitted and distributed to all user devices with a click of a button.  

One of the biggest challenges with mobile programming is that app requirements are not known up front. This requires a lot of prototyping and validation with users, which is very time consuming using SDK’s and Frameworks.  Developers can quickly release new versions and enable QA and business users to immediately see the prototype apps on their devices. This saves huge amounts of time and enables design, build and test work to proceed in a parallel. The Snappii platform also acts as a content management system allowing continuous updates, with immediate distribution, and monitoring of performance and usability.

Using the Snappii platform, organizations can address their mobile app backlog by leveraging their existing programmers to provide faster, cost effective, cross platform app builds and easy app management. The Snappii platform is open to all developers online and we encourage you to begin building your enterprise apps now. You will shock yourself with how easy and quick app development can be. In a matter of hours you will be able to build a cool app and show it to your boss! Build an app today and be a hero in your organization!

 Alex