Tuesday 24 December 2013

Top 6 Leading Mobile App Development Platforms

There is no doubt that mobile has been changing the life of people by changing the way people do their work. But it is also true that without mobile apps mobile itself has no more use, it will be just like car without petrol. This is the age of apps and days are not away when it will be tough for people to survive without mobile apps. Demand of mobile applications is increasing day by day as number of mobile users are increasing. It has been predicted that by 2014, mobile internet users will overtake desktop internet (smartinsight.com).


Not only corporate professional but other segment of people are also becoming dependant on mobile phones for their regular work. The application which supports housewives with cooking new dishes, kids homework are very popular. In the recent survey, it has been bough to the attention that people prefer to use different devices during different time of the day. The prime usage of the mobile devices are prime post 9PM in the night.



Organizations all over the world are constantly looking for a mobile app development platform which is able to support their specific business needs. Number of mobile app development platforms are constantly increasing as mobile app market is growing.

However, it is difficult for the enterprises to choose the right mobile platform for their mobile application development. Lots of various kinds of platforms are available in the market which are claiming to be the best. Recently, Gartner did a survey and tested the available mobile platforms on the various protocols to understand which are best. They came with top 6 leading mobile apps development platform -

1. SAP

Compared with other major independent software vendors (ISVs), SAP bet early on mobility. Its latest mobile offering, Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP), has matured rapidly since its initial release in 2010, providing a flexible application development environment with plug-ins for Eclipse and Visual Studio, along with a proprietary studio. While it has a steeper learning curve than many other solutions, it is an excellent choice for broad mobile initiatives, especially in conjunction with SAP's Afaria mobile device management (MDM) solution. SAP closed its acquisition of Syclo, another leading vendor of mobile application development platforms, in June of this year.


2. IBM Worklight

IBM® Worklight helps you extend your business to mobile devices. It is designed to provide an open, comprehensive platform to build, run and manage HTML5, cross, hybrid and native mobile apps. IBM Worklight can help you reduce both app development and maintenance costs, improve time-to-market and enhance mobile app governance and security.



Even the recent surveys shows that IBM Worklight is gradually picking the pace in the market and it is becoming favourite of developers as well as the enterprises. In the graph given below one can see the search trend of IBM Worklight. It is clearly visible that there will be a very tough competition for first position in near future.



3. Adobe (Phone Gap)

Adobe Systems acquired Nitobi Software, maker of the PhoneGap framework, in the fourth quarter of 2011. PhoneGap is used to wrap HTML5 apps in native containers, making it a strong choice for media-rich enterprises with requirement for mobile clients, or organizations that want to wrap mobile Web applications developed with other platforms like Sencha, Dojo Mobile, jQuery Mobile and others. It's available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS platforms.



Search trends of Phone Gap also looks very promising. They are also being very constant since last couple of years. It will be difficult to say whether this technology will ever become number one preference of the enterprises or not?


4. jQuery Mobile

Part of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy's jQuery open source project, jQuery Mobile is a good fit for organizations that need an open source mobile Web framework that will allow them to leverage existing jQuery skills. The framework provides the ability to use HTML, JavaScript and CSS to build interactive mobile Web pages for an array of smartphones, and it can be used with PhoneGap to build hybrid mobile applications.




The search trend of jQuery mobile are as follow-


5. Kony

When it first debuted in 2007, Kony focused on consumer-facing applications, but has since then added B2E capabilities, through organic growth. Kony's platform is a good fit for projects that require the use of native features on an array of mobile devices. The environment can be used to build apps once for tablets, smartphones, feature phones, mobile browsers and even desktop browsers, and then deploy to all of them.



It looks like Kony was a wave of the time which has faded as soon as it came in the news. These days developers are preferring other platforms over Kony. Some statement can be supported by the screen shot given below-


6. Antenna

Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP) is a good fit for organizations that need to build multiple applications for various types of mobile devices and deploy them as a cloud service. AMP is composed of a development studio together with a scalable cloud runtime service and set of clients that run on a wide array of mobile devices. Its AMPchroma mobile software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, which was debuted in February 2012, adds more capabilities, like integration with MDM based on Antenna's acquisition of Volantis Systems.




Again the search trend of Antenna has been very constant and this technology is surviving from the last couple of years. The search trend graph of Antenna shows the following results-



Looking at each and every platform, it can be just said that each one of them has something very unique to offer to the app developers as well as mobile app development service providers. I would suggest my readers to discuss the desired platform and its advantages with the developer of your project before making the final call.

In my next blog post I will share information about how to select the right mobile application development platform. Till then, enjoy my blogs and don’t forget to leave a comment!

Note: Above search trends graph is based on google trends

1 comment :

  1. Mobile apps development improved profitability quotient and higher workplace productivity and aslo enhanced end-user experiences.Mobile App Developers in Bangalore|Brochure Designers in Bangalore

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