Can

mobile apps go hmmm mainstream?

RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILE APPS

THE STATE OF MOBILE APPS

Weve been living in mobile apps era since the launch of Apple iTunes appstore
in 2008, followed by Google Marketplace (renamed to Google Play) two years
later. Smartphones users have downloaded hundreds of apps each and mobile
apps became an economy itself on June 13th 2016 Apple proudly announced
that there are 2 million apps, which have been downloaded 130 billion times
generating a grand total of $50 billion income for app developers.

Scratches started to show up on this successful image. People start to say, they
dont need yet another app. Developers start to complain that their new apps are
not downloaded as many times as before, because it is very difficult to stand out
in 2-million-apps marketplace, especially for indie developers with zero-tolimited marketing budget. Some people say, that apps era begins to fade, some
call it App Fatigue, everybody in the tech world is looking for The Next Big
Thing.

But dont take it wrong. Smartphone is the most personal device people have.
You carry it around with you wherever you go. Thanks to smartphone you can be
productive or present or involved all the time, even at short times like riding a
bus or waiting in a queue. And I dont see any technology in the nearest future, to
replace it. No VR/AR can beat it. It will be difficult to build a device, which covers
so many use cases and needs, and has a perfectly balanced size - small enough to
fit into a pocket, so you can carry it around always with you and with screen big
enough to display large amount of data. Smartphone and apps are doomed to
stay with us for many years.

Because of crowded shelves in appstores, mobile app indeed ceased to make
sense as a marketing tool for customers acquisition. But for communication with
clients, users, watchers, viewers, employees it hell does! All those people a
brand would like to be in touch with, will continue to use smartphones and have
them always in their pockets, ready to interact, communicate, make purchases,
even more willingly than in previous years. Majority of brands or companies
serve only dozens or hundreds of clients, so more app downloads wouldnt be
even expected. But NOT having a mobile app for those clients could be
considered a serious drawback and could become a reason they start interacting
with competition.

Repeating that apps are not for customers/users acquisitions anymore, Im
tempted to say, we can forget about seeing a rise of the new Facebook. Im
tempted, but isnt Snapchat closing in fast?

THE DEVELOPMENT COST, NOT JUST MONEY-WISE

Yeah, we might see less new marketing apps. That is tightly connected with
costs. If a custom development of mobile apps costs lets say $50.000 and the
app is downloaded only 500 times, then the acquisition cost is $100 per user at
best! There are cheaper ways to do that. And faster ones, without waiting for the
app to be developed.

Lets have a look on how development processes look at companies these days:
1. First there is a need for an app. There must be. Brought by - for example -
business analyst, who has the insight and knows how to increase
employees efficiency thanks to the app.
2. Then it needs to be designed and specified.
3. Next thing to do is to find budget and developers, who will deliver. Either
in-house or outsourced.
4. In case of outsourcing, Request For Proposal needs to be prepared, sent
out to potential vendors, then there are meetings, evaluating offers and
choosing the supplier. But whatever selection is made, there is always a
risk that supplier will fail. So companies are buying a pig in the poke.
5. Then there are long weeks or months of the development process. It
finishes with tests, bugs fixing in several iterations.

In total - 2 months or 6 months or more. Plus delays. They always happen in
software development. Underestimations, changes, incompatibilities, bugs And
delays cause issues bigger than just shifting development delivery, because
probably other company divisions are waiting for the app, perhaps software
launch is linked to an event, which cannot be rescheduled Its a disaster!

The cost is high, because developers cost a lot of money. And it will remain like
that as long as everybody in the world will want to develop a custom mobile app,
but only very few people will be able to do it. Yeah, lets face it less than 0.1%
of world population can code. And it wont change anytime soon, even despite
increased efforts to teach people how to do it.

What if software could be developed also by non-coding people?


CODELESS TOOLS

Gartner, Inc. the renowned research company, predicts:

By 2018, more than half of all Business-To-Employee mobile apps will be
created by business analysts in codeless tools.

Codeless tools. Meaning you dont need to code to develop software, to build
mobile application. Is Gartner insane? How could you possibly imagine develop
mobile app without programming it?

RAPID DEVELOPMENT AS PROCESS AUTOMATION

Process automation has happened everywhere, to all industries, as the demand
turned out to be repeatable: miners were digging coal with their hands and axes,
now heavy machines do it, cars were build manually, now they are produced in
bulks in huge factories, people poured water from rivers and wells and brought
it home in heavy buckets, today nobody can imagine not having a faucet in the
apartament.

Digital is no different. Innovative software automates everyday life non-digital
processes, e.g. ordering taxi, communicating or making appointments, but it also
automates the digital itself. There are plenty tools for image editing, video
editing, managing data

For example PowerPoint. Managers all over the world use it today to visualize
their ideas, plans and reports in a easily-acceptable form. Also adding
animations, links and other means to emphasize the message they aim to deliver.
Before PowerPoint creating multimedia presentation required hard work of
designers and programmers to reach nice result.

Or Excel. Excel is nothing else but codeless tool. Enabling to build calculation
sheets from very simple to complex data analysis. Before Excel was launched,
managers calculated numbers on a sheet of paper or using hand calculators,
what was very limited by design. Or they asked programmers to create
calculation databases, but it required a lot of time, money and knowledge. Today
not just managers use Excel, actually nobody in business can imagine living
without Excel or its reproductions


USE CASE SCENARIO

Ok, so how people are going to use codeless tools. Imagine a company takes part
in an event. It doesnt have to be a conference or trade show pick any possible
situation where company employees interact with other people (clients,
potential clients, users, product testers, etc.) or with objects (imagine devices,
which require periodical routine check). Company employee should take notes of
these encounters, maybe enrich them with photos and deliver to company
systems for analysis by other employees, entitled to do so. Such processes should
be digitized, optimized and be as convenient as possible these days and
smartphones equipped with an app delivering data straight to company
databases are the best way to do it in vast majority of cases.

As described in one of the previous paragraphs, suddenly the whole
development process of such app takes months, what is very often too long.
Probably this event or opportunity to collect data will pass in the meantime. Very
often such good ideas for optimization get ditched even before the specification
phase, because those innovative employees consider their concept would most
probably get killed during fights for approvals or take too long to implement to
actually be useful.


What if they could just do it themselves? Not asking for approvals or resources,
not fighting with IT, not programming on their own Just launch their laptop,
use a dedicated tool for a few minutes or hours and have the app designed,
developed, ready, tested and deployed!

This is what rapid development is all about.


THE ABSTRACT

The apps are using over 90% of the same components: lists, images, maps, etc.
only customized and combined in unique forms and that is most important
differentiator using different data.

So Rapid Development Platform is a tool providing components and ways to
combine them. Not templates set for a particular scenario with very limited
customization possibilities. A good rapid development platform should be a
complete alternative for manual coding, allowing to create the same apps, but
with 2 advantages of the process:
- without using coding (even without using XCode, Android Studio or other
tools typically used by programmers)
- in express time

Good rapid development platform should define a new Visual Programming
Language.


RAPID DEVELOPMENT VS. RAPID PROTOTYPING

Rapid prototyping is very popular these days. Using web-based tools anyone
can easily design an app. There are good internet tools for that, like InVisionApp,
Axure RP, UXPin, Balsamiq Mockups. But you end up producing
concept/sketches/mockups/wireframes, which you still need to deliver to
development team, who will send the next several weeks to months actually
building your app.

Rapid development means a comfort of not working with development team at
all. After you are done designing you just click one button and the app gets
instantly developed. Without spending development top-dollar, long wait and
fighting with bugs.


BUG-FREE

Yeah, thats another thing to add to a pros list no bugs. Each time a developer
writes a code, he makes mistakes. There are no bug-free developers in this
world. I worked with many of them, I love them all, also for mistakes they make,
as every human being. They will forget an if condition, they will skip one

scenario, they will not take no-data situation into consideration This is way
different when putting an app together from bricks, which have already been
tested by millions of users.


THE RISE OF CITIZEN DEVELOPERS

Gartner, Inc. even came up with a definition of codeless tools user: A citizen
developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by
others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate
IT. As everything Gartner, Inc. is doing this definition is very corporate-centric.
But we should rather say citizen developer is anyone who creates software
without using coding skills at all. Because this motion is much wider, because
millions of non-corporate people would like to create mobile apps today. A few
years ago there was an experimental survey sorry, cannot find the source
anymore proving that girls find app developers sexier than novelists. Having
said that lets build apps everyone J