Mobile app development has emerged as an essential part of every organisation’s digitalisation strategy. Thanks to the easy availability of feature-rich and affordable devices, there has been a humongous growth in demand for tablets, phablets and smartphones. With consumers as well as business professionals becoming increasingly dependent on the mobile internet, the need for mobile apps has been on the rise across industries.
App development roadblocks
App building delivers a host of benefits. These include speeding up of operations, ability to introduce new products and services (and doing that fast), improving customer satisfaction, and outperforming the competition. While organisations are aware of these benefits, two key obstacles—high costs and talent shortage—seem to be hampering their progress.
It is said that of nearly 15 app development requests that an enterprise CIO receives, just one gets approved with budgetary support. This happens due to the readiness constraints of cost and talent shortage that CIOs experience.
The success decelerators
According to a study by research and consultancy firm Clutch, the calculated median cost at $100/hour for iPhone app development stood at $25,275.00 to $114,300.00. The median cost at a higher rate of $150/hour hovered between $37,912.50 and $171,450.00. An estimate by Business of Apps places the total average cost of developing an Android app at $23,000. Whichever survey estimate you look at, app building appears to be an expensive affair.
The availability of app development skill-sets is another challenge faced by the organisations. The App Association discovered in a survey that there were more software developer openings in the United States than qualified people to fill them. The US market alone had nearly 2.23 lakh openings for software developers.
Crossing the chasm
A few forward-thinking organisations can be seen employing a new type of solution, a low-code rapid app development platform, also known as low-code/no code platform or low-code platform (LCP), to address the app development issues successfully.
The online IT glossary WhatIs.com defines LCP as a visual integrated development environment which allows citizen developers (i.e. business users with basic HTML knowledge) to drag-and-drop application components, connect them together and create a mobile or web app. This modular approach allows business analysts, office administrators, small-business owners and other people who are not software developers to build and test applications quickly.
As LCP allows citizen developers to build apps without much coding, it reduces an organisation’s dependence on developers, thus addressing the talent shortage issue to a great extent. Not having to hire specialised app development resources also means the other major hurdle—of development costs—also stands eliminated effectively.
Hassle-free development
A good low-code platform product usually comes with all the essential integrations to ensure seamless communication of the new app with the existing internal and third-party applications used by the organisation. It comes with built-in support for adding custom-code, CLI, user authorisations and security controls. The modern container app architecture that generally comes with a good LCP product also eliminates the hassles of updates, upgrades and app visibility issues that an organisation faces, thus improving user adoption rates.
As business teams can develop the apps they want without taking too much of IT department’s effort and without incurring additional hiring costs, the organisation can authorise nearly every app development request, thus expanding the scope of mobility-led digital transformation by leaps and bounds.
Suggested reading: Speed-boost your digital transformation with API gateway
A word of caution
With low-code platform, users are empowered with a tool that promises to eliminate several hassles. However, the users must have the clarity in their minds about the specific purpose that every app is expected to serve. The CIO’s team can play the role of a guide helping citizen developers speedily navigate to successful completion of their app development projects.
Guest Author: Jinen Dedhia, Co-founder & MD, DronaHQ
Jinen heads Sales, Finance and Operations at DronaHQ. He is a passionate techie and is constantly evolving DronaHQ features and solutions to address enterprise customer needs. Prior to co-founding DronaHQ, Jinen was with Wipro Technologies where he worked on wireless VOIP technologies, VOIP switches, IVRs, anti-phishing solutions and m-ticketing among other technologies.
Jinen is a computer engineer from Sardar Patel College of Engineering, Mumbai. He enjoys playing chess and table tennis.
Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinendedhia/
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