A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Mobile PLM Native Apps Challenge

Mobile PLM Native Apps Challenge
Oleg
Oleg
4 April, 2013 | 2 min for reading

Native Apps vs. HTML5 enabled web user experience? This is a dilemma for many developers these days.  People are spending more time using native apps comparing to mobile web optimized sites. However, enterprise software companies have an additional challenges to transform their product suites into set of native mobile apps. Multipleplatform development tax and application integration are probably two most critical on the way to “mobilize enterprise software”.  PLM product suites are famous by the level of complexity and needs to integrate.

I touched the topic of mobile app and web user experience earlier in my blog Mobile PLM: Apps vs. Mobile Browsers? Facebook was challenged by the mobile development strategy long time. The original Facebook plan was to develop multiple platform HTML5 based browser support. However it seems to me, Facebook is finally moving towards “platform dedicated development” by releasing Facebook app for iOS and even hardware platforms such as Facebook phone. I’ve been reading The Facebook Phone & The Triumph Of Native Apps Over HTML5 on Readwite mobile blog yesterday. It provides some interesting data points related to “mobile vs. HTML5 web” discussion. Here is the important passage from the article:

A new survey by Compuware APM confirms that users greatly prefer native apps to the mobile web. (Compuware APM summarizes the survey in this press release. The full survey is available here, though it requires fairly extensive registration.) For example, the survey’s key takeaway: 85% of mobile device users prefer apps over mobile websites. The primary reasons users prefer native apps over mobile websites are: Apps are considered more convenient; Apps are faster;  Apps are “easier to browse”.

What is my conclusion? You don’t need to be at your desk to do the work. This is a reality in a modern business environment. However, with PLM systems available today, you need your desktop/laptop computer to do your job in most of the situations. Most probably HTML5 based web interface will not solve the problem of usability and won’t satisfy modern customers demand. PLM vendors will have to rethink their strategies regarding mobile app development. Today, every PLM vendor did “something mobile”. This strategy won’t fly anymore, in my view. Vendors will have to provide a complete story for all enterprise users. The question is how to provide mobile applications to all people involved in product development and manufacturing. Re-phrasing Apple – if you have PLM task, we have PLM app for that. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
5 November, 2011

Cloud conversation is taking a sharp turn. Private cloud vs. public cloud. This is actually can be a very interesting...

14 July, 2017

Graphs are fascinating.  They represent the power of connection and intelligence. I’ve been following Microsoft Graph development for some time....

30 January, 2010

This post was born as a consequence of on-going conversation with Jim Brown of TechClarity. Jim and I have a...

9 January, 2020

Companies and businesses need to grow. If they don’t, businesses will die and investors won’t get their money back. According...

16 September, 2016

I’ve been attending Autodesk Accelerate 2016 event in Boston earlier this week. Originally focused on PLM, the event was expanded...

10 June, 2020

Yesterday, I attended the first-ever LiverWorx event delivered fully digitally online. The recent pandemic situation made many companies to switch...

7 April, 2019

One of the topics of my special interest at SuiteWorld 2019 last week was around Manufacturing. NetSuite is growing in...

8 July, 2010

Almost two months ago, I had chance to read a blog article by Mobile Beat with some intriguing name “Open...

26 July, 2015

TechCrunch article Software for the full stack era speaks about brutal reality existing business software platforms are going through. From the...

Blogroll

To the top