Table of Contents
Introduction
Every field worker’s dream is to access an enterprise mobile app from a smartphone. Plus, having a mobile business app at your fingertips benefits everyone involved, including employees, business owners, and customers. Workflow automation, increased workforce efficiency, and the ability to stay ahead of market competition are just a few benefits of successful application development corporate mobiles.
How is Mobile App Development Different for Businesses?
Enterprise mobile application development is the process of creating a mobile application for the needs of a business. A business application’s users are mainly the organization’s employees, and their goal is to optimize business operations. Since enterprise apps differ from consumer mobile apps, their development also differs.
Like any other enterprise system, enterprise applications manage databases and frequent data transfers. For this reason, they must be designed for high security and scalability. Additionally, mobile apps for a business need to be consistent across all devices and platforms, even more so than consumer apps, because mistakes can cost the company dearly.
In addition, testing, automating builds, and integrating an application into the enterprise infrastructure are particularities. Additionally, enterprise application development differs in application distribution and legal considerations. This is because you follow app marketplace policies, such as the App Store review guidelines.
Challenges in the Development of Mobile Apps in Companies
You’ll encounter several challenges on the road to successfully launching a corporate mobile app. Let’s take a closer look at the main ones.
API Strategy
A mobile app communicates with company servers through APIs, so having the right API strategy in place is essential. Unfortunately, an API design that balances great end-user user experience and security are elusive. Still, it’s crucial for a mobile business app. Because an enterprise application’s API is integrated with business functions, it must adhere to high security standards.
Slow App Development
To start a mobile business app from scratch, you must prepare for a long-term development project. The good news is that your team can benefit from reusable components in low-code development. Or they can use MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform). It allows you to create cross-platform mobile applications and link them to business services. Also, you can speed up your software development with a dedicated development team to increase your development capacity.
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Integration with Backend Resources
Integrating a new mobile app into existing backend services can be a real challenge. The fact is that large companies often have outdated backend services, which slows down development speed and causes problems. In some cases, integrating a mobile application with the service may not even be possible.
Application Distribution
Mobile app distribution differs from regular software distribution. There is no master copy of the app, and the entire process is routed through the app marketplaces. It leads to additional legal work required for enterprise mobile app distribution.
Security
Security is a priority for a mobile application. However, the challenge is to make the application as secure as possible, from safely storing user data to minimizing vulnerabilities in the operating system.
What to Consider Before Creating a Mobile Application?
Before jumping straight into designing and developing enterprise applications, consider the following points.
Business Goals
You need to know what kind of product your business needs and how it aligns with current business goals. So, before investing in app development, you need to understand what you want to achieve with a mobile app. Then, ask yourself who will use it and how. Finally, your application’s functionality and success depend partly on how you define your business application development goals.
Management
The development of mobile enterprise applications is a complex process. Besides the development team’s efforts, it requires a lot of administrative and legal work on the company’s part. So, before looking for software developers, it’s best to decide who will be in charge of them. Also, remember that employees must be train to use the business application.
Security
Bringing business apps to employees’ mobile devices means risking company data. In this regard, you should be aware of potential security issues and create a bulletproof system. Your employees need to be able to log into the App Market and be able to transfer all information securely without compromising company information.
Integration with Other Apps
Deciding whether or not to integrate your mobile business app with other apps is a decision you must make upfront. For example, you might need to integrate the corporate mobile app with other apps that your employees are currently using. Take a CRM (customer relationship management) system like Hubspot or Salesforce, for example.
Choose Platform
It would help if you decided which platforms your line-of-business application will run on and plan your development accordingly. For example, if your employees use the corporate mobile app on their devices, you should opt for cross-platform mobile development. It is how the mobile business app works on different devices and platforms.
Conclusion
It is a sophisticated software system designed to meet the organization’s specific needs. This app should be built by a company’s overall strategy and make certain features available on mobile devices. Enterprise mobile app development process to develop user-friendly software that uses multiple complex data types and adheres to the latest security standards.