Why should we learn Mobile Development?

In this technological era, more than half of the world's population have smartphones which they use on daily basis and the amount of mobile users around the world is skyrocketing. They very much depend on it and put a lot of their daily routine informations like booking an appointment, groceries lists, order a food etc. In every smartphone, whether it is a phone or tablet, you always find a mobile app on it. All thanks to one of the software development's division - Mobile development. It also gives you the power to earn money. After developing your app, you can publish your app in the market and make it available to the consumer at a reasonable price. You can also join a company as a mobile developer, or you can do freelancing.

What is Mobile Development?

Mobile development is not only developing mobile apps but it includes developing apps for mobile, tablets, smart watches or some kind of wearables which run on mobile operating system. Mobile application development is also about the strategic process of designing, building and launching a successful app.

Platforms

Platform is mobile's operating system which manages all the functionalities of the device. Two important mobile application platforms are Android and iOS. iOS is Apple's mobile operating system built specifically for iPhones. Android runs on mobile devices built by Google and various OEMs. There are some similarities between them when building an application but they use different SDKs and different development toolchains.

Types of Mobile applications

Mobile applications are designed and developed with various frameworks, which are defined as follows:

Native apps

Applications that are built for single platform only and written on programming language for that particular platform (i-e: Android and iOS). Android platform uses Java and Kotlin code whereas iOS uses Swift and Objective C. Because of platform specific, native apps are faster, more reliable and offer offline capabilities. It is more easier to maintain for future updates on Android.

Cross-platform apps

Applications that are built for multi-platforms with single code base. You simply write one code, that runs across multi-platforms. The programming languages and frameworks can be different but they are compiled to native application that runs directly on mobile device. These languages include React Native, Flutter and Xamarin etc. Maintaining the app for future updates is always a challenging task.

Hybrid apps

Hybrid applications are at core website package wrapped into a native wrapper, they look and feel like a native app but outside the basic frame of the application, they are powered by company's website. They are built with web technologies such HTML, CSS, JavaScript and they are bundled as app installation packages. Contrary to the native apps, hybrid apps work on a 'web container' which provides a browser runtime and a bridge for native device APIs via Apache Cortova.