Thanks to the reduction of prices of smartphones, which have allowed more people to access smartphones, and also to the fact that there is more access to internet, thanks to the mobile service and multitude of WiFi points, the Mobile Applications development is a specialized service of high demand at present.
The use of Mobile Apps is currently booming: banks, state entities, companies of various types, entertainment companies, and in short, there is a very high number of people interested in the development of Mobile Apps.
Whether to facilitate access to your products or services, complement your operational processes, advertise your events, offer games, sell online, do banking transactions, share photos and videos, publish articles and news, text and video chats, and an unimaginable number of other uses for all kinds of human activities.
When we plan to request the development of a mobile application, we must take into account several aspects related to the types of mobile applications that exist, what we want to use it for, if it can depend 100% on its connectivity to a central server, if it needs to store data locally if it has no connection, if it is only informative and does not need any type of central repository.
An important aspect to take into account is that a mobile application, in general terms, needs a central server, with a system that processes the information coming from the mobile devices. If we do not have either one or the other, according to our needs, we should not only think about the mobile application, we should also think about the centralized application.
That is why it is important to know what kind of mobile applications exist, to choose the one that best suits our needs, customers, current systems and budget.
We can find several types of these programs, according to the basis and construction of the development of Mobile Apps:
MOBILE APPLICATION TYPES
(i) Native Mobile Applications:
Developed specifically for native mobile operating environments, such as exclusively for Android, iOS or Windows Phone.
Generally they use specific and closed frameworks for these platforms, so for each mobile operating system, a separate development must be done. Although there are already frameworks that allow developing native mobile applications that work at the same time for iOS and Android.
Native applications can be online or stand-alone, the first means that it needs a connection to a central server all the time to work, to be updating the contents of the application; the stand-alone option indicates that the application has its local database, to work even when the system is off-line, but synchronizes them once it has connection with its central server.
This type of applications have access to all the hardware of the mobile devices, such as the camera, GPS, accelerometer, fingerprint reader, etc.
Communication with the central servers can be done via Web Services or REST APIs.
