Mobile Application and Cloud Strategies » App Development Strategies

Yankee Group shares analyst insights on industry news daily in our free Mobile Now e-newsletter. Our Directions reports review the insights from the past month and provide an overview of the trends we see emerging in the space. The mobile applications and cloud ecosystem certainly heated up in April, with a raft of interesting and important announcements. Mobile cloud momentum, enterprise vendors intensifying their mobility focus and mobile CRM all fell at the top of the bill.

Facebook is looking to generate more revenue from its app developer community, so the social media giant has announced it will be acquiring Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides backend services for data storage, notifications and user management.

In 2012, mobility escalated onto the C-level executive agenda as companies began to think about how to leverage it more strategically. Correspondingly, innovation in the vendor and service provider marketplace is heating up and promises to be one of the most hotly contested of all enterprise software markets in 2013.

Cloud service providers offering mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) are emerging with a raft of cloud-based backend integration capabilities. These mobile cloud services provide a new blueprint for mobile application development, shifting the traditional paradigm while offering significant opportunities to companies to overcome traditional application obstacles and accelerate application innovation.

Ireland-based mobile application platform provider FeedHenry has secured another U.S.$9 million in investments, led by Intel Capital. The new funding will allow the company to double its 40-person team.

Lucent Mobile, an investor-backed company that provides enterprise mobile solutions across varied platforms, has acquired Proxomo, a mobile backend as a service provider based out of Dallas.

Kinvey, the maker of back end as a service (BaaS) and mobile BaaS (MBaaS) solutions, has released its first mobile app that supports the Salesforce CRM platform. The company says its app delivers an improved user experience.

With companies looking to be less opportunistic and instead leverage mobility to greater strategic effect, they need to move beyond simply managing mobile assets. To accelerate business innovation, they should look to combine the best of enterprise mobility management (EMM) and cloud deployment by considering adopting an integrated mobile platform deployed as a service.

The first five years of the app era provided limited returns for operators. In the second wave of app usage, operators should use apps to transform the interactions between their core business units and customers. Mobile operators are also uniquely positioned to influence the future evolution of key enabling technologies for mobile application development.

Once again this year, tens of thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors descended on Barcelona for Mobile World Congress (MWC), the largest mobility show in the world. In 2013, it was clear that those who attended MWC are concerning themselves with pushing mobility to the next stage--whether with high-speed networks, the best possible customer experience, innovations in machine-to-machine (M2M) or ways to manage the explosion of enterprise mobility.

As companies look to mobilize their myriad business processes with applications, the potential for business transformation is huge, but so are some of the technical, policy and process challenges. Suppliers of developer tools need to help these companies create and manage more apps and their associated complexity by unifying the back end and solving front-end diversity.

In 2012, companies will choose HTML5 technologies over native coding for customer-facing mobile applications and will begin to look at it more closely as the technology underlying their longer-term mobility strategies.

App lovers have more choices than ever when it comes to finding and downloading content, but players across the value chain want to maintain a direct relationship with customers. Although Web browsers appear to provide an attractive alternative, few consumers use this route to find apps. The big changes in distribution will be the emergence of Facebook and modifications to the stores themselves.

Public safety applications are going mobile, and new tablet-based apps are already delivering increased mobility at affordable price points. But will future tablet-based public safety applications be delivered natively or by cloud-centric HTML5 user interfaces?

A deluge of product launches is fueling demand for apps that operate seamlessly over multiple devices. Tools providers that move quickly will profit from a bumper year.

HTML5, once considered the savior for developers facing mobile fragmentation, is undergoing fierce scrutiny. As the mobile landscape consolidates and the Apple-Google duopoly strengthens, HTML5's advocates must act to ensure the standard becomes a mainstream source for developer tools.

Which is best, HTML5-based or native OS-focused development? While both have their supporters and detractors, and strengths and weaknesses, the truth is todayâ??s platform makers and app developers are realizing the two go better--and generate more profit--when used together.