Mobile development is skyrocketing these days. Everybody wants to be mobile. Enterprise vendors slowly discovering the power of mobile apps. However, to develop a robust and powerful mobile applications is not a simple thing. One of the biggest challenges many enterprise developers are facing these days is diversity of mobile platforms combined with high cost of development.
With high level of complexity required to deliver mobile enterprise apps like ERP, CRM and PLM, it is not surprising that software vendors are looking how to optimize mobile development. One of the potential challenges many of vendors are facing is so called “mobile web” vs. “native apps” development. I’ve been posting about it couple of months ago – Mobile PLM Native App Challenges. Mobile web can provide advantages of unified development, but limit the richness of native app development that most of users are regular to have on their iPad, iPhones and other mobile devices.
Complexity of mobile development created an interesting opportunity in mobile development space – hybrid mobile app development platforms. In a nutshell it means that you can develop your application using web development technologies (eg. HTML5) and it will be embedded via wrapper into native mobile app on iOS or other native mobile platforms. The following TechCrunch article gives you few references and examples of companies that embarked towards hybrid mobile development. Two names I captured from the article – PhoneGap and AppMobi. The last one was acquired by Intel few months ago. Take a look on the following video to get more info.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vPwf3FOMhQ
It made me think that development of hybrid mobile apps can be an ideal option for many CAD and PLM developers looking how to combine the power of rich user experience and beauty of native mobile application. Another video captured from TechCrunch article shows how TradeMonster created very powerful and rich user experience for iPad using hybrid HTML5/Mobile app framework.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpvVKzj9eIs
What is my conclusion? To optimize enterprise software development on mobile platform is an interesting opportunity. With a pressure to deliver more apps with rich user experience in short time, PLM and CAD companies can think about hybrid platforms as almost ideal choice to optimize their software development cost. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
