IS IT A GOOD TIME FOR CROSS PLATFORM APPS? With the increasing number of mobile devices and reducing internet usage cost worldwide, the penetration of mobile and mobile apps has increased significantly in last few years. There are close to 5 billion active internet users in the world and more than 50% of the internet traffic is via mobile devices. This number is expected to increase in the coming future as more users will get hooked to the mobile ecosystem. The two major platforms/players which dominate the mobile market are iOS and Android. Combined they both own around 95% of the market share worldwide with almost 3 million apps on each platform. The application developed for one platform cannot run on another platform hence, separate app needs to be developed for both these platforms. But since the competition is very intense between these two platforms, it becomes difficult to choose which platform to target for Mobile App Development. Developing independent app for both the platforms is a time consuming and a costly affair, whereas leaving out any platform could be risk for the success of the app and company profitability. Hence, companies prefer to develop app for both the platforms for maximum customer reach. Technology has helped companies in developing an app using single code base which can run on both the platforms. Thus, reducing the time and cost substantially. Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks has helped companies in achieving the same with minimal cost and high quality. Let’s look at some of the mobile app development frameworks available in the market. PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are web apps with a look and feel of a mobile app. Advantages of developing PWA’s are, these apps do not required to be installed in the device and they load very fast compared to any traditional websites thus offering a seamless user experience. PWA’s offer a very good caching mechanism and hence, they offer a good level of service in the areas where the internet connectivity is very good. There are certain flip sides to all the technologies, and PWA is no exception to it. Some flaws with PWA’s are that they are not compatible with Safari browser, PWA’s cannot access some important phone hardware features like Camera, GPS, and fingerprint scanner. Also, PWA’s consume substantial amount of battery, hence, using them could drain the phone battery fast. NATIVE APPS As mentioned above, Android App Development and iOS App Development are two different platforms. Developing independent apps for these platforms require coding in their respective compatible technology like Java and Kotlin for Android platform, Swift and Objective C for iOS. Such type of apps is called Native apps and offer rich and seamless user experience as compared to hybrid apps. The downside of developing Native app is that the cost of app development and maintenance is very high. CROSS-PLATFORM APPS Cross-Platform App Development are ones which are developed using a single code base and they run very well on both Android Mobile App Development and iOS App Development platforms. Hence, the benefit of Cross-platform framework is that it helps in substantially reducing the cost by having only one cross platform app development team, and as the code base is common, the cost of maintenance is also low. Considering the constraints with PWA’s and high development costs for Native Apps, many companies/developers prefer programming apps in cross-platform framework because of the immense benefit it offers. Due to increasing demand of the cross-platform frameworks, there’s a rise in the number of cross-platforms available in the market and there’s an intense competition in upgrading the existing frameworks for the ease of development. Some popular cross-platform app development frameworks are React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin. BENEFITS OF CROSS-PLATFORM APPS DEVELOPMENT Some of the benefits which Cross-platform apps offer for the businesses are: 1. Lesser Development and Maintenance Cost: As the code base is same, you need only one team to develop the app unlike the native apps where two separate teams are needed. In future if there is any upgrade or bug fixing is required in the app, it needs to be done on a single code, hence the cost of maintenance is also low. 2. Faster Time To Market: As there is only single code base which needs to be developed and maintained, hence, it substantially reduces the development time. Also, if there is any issue which needs to be fixed, it needs to be addressed in only one code base unlike at two different places in case of Native apps. Cross-platform apps reduce the overall development time and decrease the time to market for the businesses thus, giving the competitive advantage. 3. Market Penetration: Cross platform apps have a better market reach as it caters to both Android and iOS platform which together constitutes to `95% of the total market share. CONCLUSION: It’s a very good opportunity for the companies to cash in the opportunity provided by the cross-platform frameworks. Cross-platform companies are investing huge in this framework to bridge the quality gap between Native and Hybrid apps at the earliest. Tech giants like Facebook and Google are the driving forces behind the famous cross-platform frameworks React Native and Flutter respectively, and they try and release a new version every year with it of Mobile App Developer and user-friendly features. The advantages offered by Cross platform app development frameworks is one of the major reasons why there’s a huge influx of apps in the market recently and we expect this wave to continue in the times ahead. The gap between the quality of native and hybrid apps is closing, and it’s closing fast. Huge companies like Facebook and Google are putting their money behind cross-platform app development by launching hybrid app development platforms like React Native and Flutter, respectively. Cross-platform app development is going to take a big leap in 2020 and beyond. New versions of React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin are releasing every year as the companies behind these frameworks are
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Choosing The Correct Technology For Your Enterprise Mobile Application Development
Developing A Successful Mobile App iOS and Android Mobile App Development ecosystem is growing at a very fast pace. The reduction in the prices of smartphones and internet, has substantially increased their demand and so does the market for mobile apps. There are close to 5M applications on iOS and Android play store put together, and this application market is expected to reach around $400B by 2026. There are many factors which have contributed to this humongous rise in the mobile apps demand however, the prominent one is the rise in the number of Cross Platform App Development frameworks. Mobile apps help businesses to brand and connect with customers by push notifications, customized offers, and gain insights on customer behavior. To leverage these benefits, many businesses want to build their own apps in this new-age digital economy. Although Android or iOS App Development is a time-consuming process, we are here to help you with the steps involved in a successful app development. 1. Application Objective: Application objective is the actual reason why the application is being developed. It is very important to have a clear objective in mind for making the application so that the team and people involved are focused and aligned in that direction and avoid wasting effort in creating un-necessary features. 2. Feature List: This is the next step after deciding on the Application Objective. Depending upon on the application objective, you decide on the important functionalities you want to have in the application to achieve the objective. Deciding limited but all-important features is important as that will save a lot of un-necessary development time and cost and will also refrain bombarding un-necessary features to the users. 3. Market and Gap Analysis: This is one of the important steps to making a successful application. Market research helps you to understand the good as well as bad offerings by the competition. Good offerings are the ones which you cannot miss to have in your application, and bad/missing features are the opportunities to distinguish your app from the competition. 4.Developing A Wire frame: Wireframes or mockups are rough high-level sketches of your application showcasing the aesthetics and application flow. 5. Technology Selection: Mobile And Web App Development uses many app development frameworks available in the market. There is native – which is platform specific, and hybrid – which is cross-platform way of application development. Depending upon the target audience, app features and budget you need to decide which application framework to be used for a successful mobile application development. 6. Application Development and Testing: This is the actual development stage when the designing and programming of the application is done. The output of the above stages is used to develop the application. The features, technology, objective, wire frames etc. are referred and kept in mind while developing the application. Once developed, the application is thoroughly tested to ensure its bug free and works as expected providing a seamless experience to the users. 7. Application Launch: At this stage you your application is finally ready to be launched into the market. You need to upload your applications in the App store (for iOS apps) and Google Play Store (for Android apps) from where the users download the mobile app. It is always good to plan some marketing activities for the quick success, downloads and acceptability of the app. Digital Marketing, Media Campaign, App Store Optimization are some of the well-known marketing strategies. CONCLUSION: Mobile app development is an expensive, effort intensive and long process. Pixel Values Technolabs, is globally renowned and one of the top-rated Software Development Company having expertise in developing all genres of mobile applications. We help and guide our clients in leveraging our extensive end-to-end mobile app development experience in developing their successful mobile app. Author Bio: Tauseef Anwar is the CEO of Pixel Values Technolabs, The Best Mobile App Development Company In India. Tauseef believes in making customer satisfaction as the top most priority and takes care of the Business Development and operations. An entrepreneur by heart, he is always ready to speak a few words or discuss the latest tech especially if it is mobile technology. Contact Information: Call us at 0712-6611379 OR 9822367795 Skype: Pixel_values Website: www.pixelvalues.com
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Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Are Changing The Way You Do Business
Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Are Changing The Way You Do Business With the rapid increase in the advancement of Mobile App Development Company their adoption of digitization everywhere, businesses are automating the human tasks which are mundane and don’t require distinguishing or remarkably different skills to perform the task. This helps business in keeping minimal manpower, without the constraints of location and has this technology work for them round the clock. Chatterbot or Chatbot is one such example of digitization. Chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands, or text chats or both. Chatbots are also known as IM bot, bot, interactive agent, or artificial conversation entity. Some of the examples of this kind of virtually assisting applications are Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger. Chatbot is designed and developed in such way that it is widely used by App Development Companies as it interacts with customers like humans assisting them in resolving their query. There are two ways in which chatbot functions, a) with set of defined guidelines and b) with Machine Learning. Chatbot with a set of defined guidelines works only in a specific way in which it is programmed. It has very limited intelligence in place and can only respond to a set of questions or vocabulary. An example of such kind of chatbot with defined guidelines is the initial conversation / message when you call/text customer care service if any modern day business. The instruction asks you to press 1, 2, or 3 for specific tasks/queries, however, if you press 4 or asks a query which is not code programmatically, the system fails to resolve the query and would either proceed to repeat the command or transfer the caller to a human assistant. Chatbot with Machine Learning is designed and developed in such a way that it has Artificial Intelligence in place which helps it in continuous learning and growing it is also growing widely in Mobile Game Development. Such kind of chatbot is designed to self-learn by the way of new dialogues and words, and its accuracy keeps increasing with each reply. The use of such kind of chatbot has become very extensive in today’s dynamic world and its use varies from companies like Facebook to even to US Presidential elections. Depending upon the need and purpose of the business, there are different types of bots which are available and/or designed and developed. Few of the recommended AI based chatbot tools are: * Watson Assistant * Bold360 * Rulai * LivePerson * Inbenta * Ada * Vergic With the increasing financials around the human resources, and the need to answer customer queries 24×7 across locations, it is evident that AI chatbots are here to stay to benefit organizations dealing Web Application Development Services on their bottom-line. In the coming years we’ll see Chatbots getting used even by the smaller businesses, and AI chatbots will become smart enough to handle customer queries more emphatically. Author Bio: Tauseef Anwar is the CEO of Pixel Values Technolabs, The Best Mobile App Development Company In India Tauseef believes in making customer satisfaction the topmost priority and takes care of the Business Development and operations. An entrepreneur by heart, he is always ready to speak a few words or discuss the latest tech especially if it is mobile technology. Contact Information: Call us at 0712-6611379 OR 9822367795 Skype: Pixel_values Website: www.pixelvalues.com
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Xamarin Vs Flutter: Best cross-platform application development framework?
Xamarin Vs Flutter: Best cross-platform application development framework? In the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth in the mobile industry especially regarding the Mobile App Development, and this is increasing. According to one of the reports, there are more than 3 billion smartphone users in the world and this number is increasingly rapidly every year. Majority of these smartphone are based on either iOS platform backed by Apple, or Android platform backed by Google. There are number of programming languages which can be used to develop the mobile application in these platforms. Xamarin and Flutter are such cross-platform development frameworks, which can be used to develop a cross-platform application. As these are most trending and growing technologies, we have done a quick comparison of them to help you with the best choice for your next Cross-Platform App Development Framework Overview: Xamarin is one of the leading open source cross-platform development framework which uses C# as the programming language is backed by Microsoft. Xamarin was founded in 2011 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, which later made it an open source platform, and now it has become an integral part of the Xamarin Visual Studio IDE. Flutter is also an open source free cross-platform development framework tool which uses Dart as the programming language and is designed by Google to create high performance Android and iOS Mobile Applications. It provides a single code, which is also the case in Xamarin. Technical Architecture: For its iOS and Android platforms, Xamarin uses Mono as it execution environment. In iOS platform, Mono runs along with the Objective-C on UNIX kernel, however, in android it runs along with Android run time on Linux. As its backed by Microsoft, Microsoft has provided a detailed documentation to technical architecture used for Android and iOS in Xamarin.The Dart framework of Flutter uses Skia engine which is bigger in size as it has most of the components inbuilt and hence, usually doesn’t require a bridge to communicate with the native modules. The architecture of Flutter is explained in detailed in GitHub wiki. Overall, Flutter has a better technical architecture in place than Xamarin as it has most of the native components inbuilt in its framework itself. Community Support: Since Xamarin is an old cross-platform framework, it has huge community base all across the world. There’s a huge number of developers who uses Xamarin and hence, it is has a huge community forums to discuss the issues, problems, events, updates etc. Xamarin also actively organizes events like Xamarin development summit to keep its community active and strong. Though Flutter is new, but the growth it is shown is very promising. It actually started gaining developer’s attention only after 2017. Even Flutter is organizing events like meet-ups, conferences and Flutter Live to keep increasing it developer base. Though rapidly growing, Flutter has a developer base which is lot lesser than Xamarin. UI Design: Xamarin uses platform specific native UI components for the platform specific apps using Xamarin.android and Xamarin.iOS. Advantage of this approach is it provides greater amount of flexibility and native like look for the cross-platform apps.Flutter uses two different widgets for each of the platforms, for Android Mobile App Development it uses (Material widgets) and for iOS it uses (Cupertino Widgets). Using Skia graphics library, Flutter creates its own GUI components and hence, doesn’t use any native GU components. Hence, this is more advantageous to the developers for customization.Looking at the current rate of growth, undoubtedly Flutter is the future considering its feature richness and ease to use. The only advantage Xamarin has at this point in time the existing huge developer base and the strong community support, which we are sure Flutter will catch-up with in the coming years. Author Bio: Nimish Gupta is the Director (PMO) at Pixel Values Technolabs, The Best Mobile App Development Company In India. Nimish has over 13 years of experience in the Information Technology & Telecommunication industry. He has done lots of projects for the Government of India. He is very determined to ensure that solutions presented to the clients adopt the right technology and are scalable to adapt to new platform requirements of the ever-growing Information Technology industry. Contact Information: Call us at 0712-6611379 OR 9822367795 Skype: Pixel_values Website: www.pixelvalues.com
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