The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact : Developers

This post is a follow up of The Use of Mobile App Exceeds Web Usage and The Potential Impact..

According to the article, Flurry: Mobile App Usage Up To 94 Minutes Per Day, (TechCrunch Article) there is a big paradigm shift in how more people are starting to spend proportionally more time on smartphone apps than traditional browsers. Following the trend, many of the software developments will be and are being done in either mobile first or mobile only manner, but exactly how would this actually impact the developers?

More work

There are many(super-many) products that are accessible through both desktops and mobiles, which implies that a lot more work had to be done compare to the traditional 'computer-only(used to be windows-only)' development. To add a support for mobile access, developers not only have to design the system for wide range of support, they also have to throw in middlewares, libraries, analytic tools, platform dependent UX designs, etc, across all their products to ensure the synchronized user experience and data. This creates an enormous complexity in designing the system, in testing, and in maintaining.

More specializations

With the new platforms and their boom, more specialists are needed from everywhere. Some of the examples are mobile UX specialist, android developers, window phone developers, iOS developers, mobile-web developers, and of course, the tablet app developers. Also, because a large portion the apps have to be connected to the servers in the back end, there is a greater need in the backend developers that can design and write scalable systems.

Things will be done differently

Backend will have to add in supports for mobiles and optimization will become a key aspect since mobile phones lacks in performance compare to desktops. Also, the time needed to develop any products will be largely expended and therefore will come with greater cost.