Mobile Application Development: Productivity Catalyst For The Mobile Market
Wikipedia defines Mobile application development as a process wherein application software is developed for small low-power handheld devices such as personal digital assistants, enterprise digital assistants or mobile phones. These applications can either be pre-installed on these hand held devices or mobile phones during the manufacture phase or can be downloaded by the users from the mobile software platforms.
Being a very customer centric market, there are new products developed every day in the mobile market. Enterprises that foray into the world of mobile application development needs to have a deep knowledge of the domain and should focus the development towards the areas such as Location-Based Services (LBS), media streaming, Social Networking, Messaging & Syncing, Advertisement & Ad Engines as well as Mobile VoIP and Gaming.
Mobile application development is a catalyst, which helps to increase the productivity of the mobile device. Hence, the application developer should consider all the major mobile brands and platforms while developing the application. The various mobile operating platforms, which are out in the field, are iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, JAVA, Symbian, and Windows. With the growing popularity of smart phones and PDA’s, there are a number of organizations that have entered the mobile apps market. This provides scope for the manufacturers and service providers to outsourced product development to experts in the field using the latest technology for development of mobile application.
The mobile applications which are OPD packages or developed in-house, should be quality assured. The Quality Assurance services ensure that the applications pass the various testing platforms. The mobile applications thus developed needs to be tested from various perspectives. These should pass the compatibility, interoperability, and automation test from the hardware perspective and also undergo performance testing, functionality testing, localization, OS compatibility and data exchange and synchronization testing.