4 Things Forrester Says to Ask When Building Mobile Apps

Planning to develop a mobile application for your business? Ask yourself these four questions to ensure you create an optimal mobile app dev plan.

If you’re beginning to formulate your mobile app development strategy, you may be struggling with deciding on an approach. Should you commit to native development, use HTML5 or leverage cross-platform tools?

Forrester says it depends on what you’re building. Different approaches work best with different types of apps. Native applications can maximize performance and UI when you’re building an app to run on a specific platform. It’s faster than JavaScript and can provide robust offline processing and storage capabilities. But building with HTML5 helps to minimize costs and improve business agility, because they’re simpler to deploy and easier to maintain. Using cross-platform tools can be a nice compromise, because it combines the capabilities of the other two approaches.

Still, according to results from Forrester’s 2015 Business Technographics Global Developer Survey, only 19% of developers say that they use one mobile application approach exclusively. The importance of the UI and the amount of available investment often drives the decision.

All Approaches Have Their Place

Forrester’s 2016 report, “Native, Web, And Cross-Platform Mobile Apps All Have Their Place,” which is part of its larger strategic plan called, “The Mobile App Development Playbook,” discusses the pros and cons of each approach, providing some helpful insight. Forrester recommends asking four key questions when faced with choosing a mobile app dev approach:

1. Who will be using the mobile app? Are they unaffiliated consumers, existing customers, employees or business partners, and, importantly, what devices will they be using?
2. Why do they need a mobile app? What are their goals for using it?
3. When and how will they use the app?
4. What technologies best meet the needs of the app and its would-be users?

These four questions, says Forrester, provide a basis to begin a discussion around which approach is best for a particular mobile project. Read the full report for a more detailed understanding of the various pros and cons of each approach and how cross-platform tools can help to bridge the gap.

Develop Mobile Apps with Progress

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