Mobile App Development
In order to leverage and access the most up-to-date capabilities of mobile devices, including the built-in GPS, high-resolution cameras, accelerometer, bluetooth, and other native capabilities, and harness the full power and speed of the mobile device, mobile apps are developed in the native technologies for the respective mobile platform.
In the case of Apple’s iOS devices, which includes iPhones, iPads, and iPods, that technology revolves around using Apple’s Xcode development environment and utilizing either Objective-C or Swift as the development language.
When developing for Google’s Android devices, which includes phones and tablets from various manufacturers including Samsung, LG, and others, the development tools include Eclipse, and utilizing Java as the development language.
Finally, for Microsoft’s Windows phone and tablet devices, the development tools including Visual Studio and leveraging the popular C# development language.
Our software engineers are experts at developing native mobile apps for all mobile platforms, no matter what your mobile app needs to be able to do, whether it’s performing video streaming, or taking photos from the mobile device’s multiple cameras, to detecting motion using the accelerometer and/or GPS signals.
After many years of software engineers having to learn the specific native development environments for the main mobile platforms, it became abundantly clear that there needed to be a way to develop a mobile app with one codebase, and leveraging translators that would take that common code and make it available for all mobile platforms.
Over the course of the past 20+ years, there have been millions of websites created, leveraging a common suite of technologies that have been simple to learn and easy to master – HyperText Markup Language (or HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), and JavaScript. Using these technologies, a website can be converted to a mobile app. with the ability to reuse much of the existing code.
The leader in the hybrid mobile development world used to be PhoneGap, which was recently acquired by Adobe. PhoneGap allows the development of a mobile app to be implemented using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript and converted to each of the three mobile platforms. We also have experience with Ionic and Kony enterprise mobile hybrid development environments.
Our mobile engineers are experts at taking functionality that’s traditionally been only available for native mobile development and making those features available for hybrid mobile development. Most mobile apps developed using hybrid technologies are virtually indistinguishable from their native counterparts, as well as offering faster time-to-market.
The latest in mobile software development is to leverage a ubiquitous software development language, like C#, and leveraging powerful tools enabling a software engineer to develop a mobile application in C#, and making it available across all of the major mobile platforms.
While there are several cross-platform development technologies available in the marketplace, the undisputed leader is Xamarin, which was acquired by Microsoft several years ago. Using Xamarin, a mobile software engineer develops the mobile application using Visual Studio and C#, and Xamarin converts that mobile app to its native counterpart. Xamarin provides the power of object-oriented software development, with the robustness of the C# software language, enabling software developers to create exciting, complex, and maintainable code.
Our cross-platform mobile engineers are experts at leveraging the Xamarin software development framework and implementing complex mobile apps that look and act identically across all three of the major mobile platforms, using one code-base, written in C#.
If you are interested in any of the above services, contact us today!
