Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADP) Classification

With the phenomenal growth of mobile app adoption, enterprises are faced with challenges to develop and maintain the apps that work on all these diverse platforms and devices to reach wider audience. Developers also face the challenge of maintaining consistent look-and-feel across device/OS.

Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP), as the name suggests, provides development tools and frameworks for building Business-to-Employee (B2E) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) mobile applications. In addition to providing the tools, these platforms also provide middleware servers to connect and synchronize the data with the back end systems, eliminates the duplicate work by allowing business logic to be written and maintained in one place. You can build tighter integration with device features by using these MADP tools.

On a broad level these MADP tools can be classified into two categories based on their support for MADP characteristics and their development framework & packaging style:

• Native Build tools: This is a standard and traditional approach being following by the tool vendors who are in mobile market for long time. Products built on this approach provide sophisticated IDE tools to build application using their propriety frameworks. In this approach it is the responsibility of the tool to make the mobile application device agnostic. Top MDAP products that fall under this category are KonyOne, Verivo, Antenna AMPchroma, Syclo etc.,
• Hybrid Build tools: As the name suggests mobile apps built using these tools depend on HTML5 hybrid frameworks for building device agnostic applications. Products in this category, primarily concentrate more on providing the middleware server features that act as a gateway between the mobiles apps and backend enterprise systems. Most of these tools use REST Web services for integration with backend systems. Top MDAP products that fall under this category are IBM Worklight, Convertigo, OpenMEAP etc.,

The support level of MADP characteristics by these tools should be more or less in line with the below definition as per the category:

More detailed explanation on this classification is provided in my thought paper published on iGate website.

Read the full blog post here: http://www.igate.com/thought-leadership/mobile-application-development-platform-tools.aspx