Top 5 Mobile Application Development Platforms For 2015

There have been many market releases for mobile application development platforms and apps over the past couple of years. However, many developers lack the basics regarding the processes to build mobile apps - they are used to the desktop which means they leave a lot of white space or screen which is inefficient.

Experts do agree that developers should focus on eight key steps: focus on the user experience, determine memory and bandwidth constraints, carefully choose between app and web development, utilize location, use server-side data synchronization, include touch interfaces, don’t depend too much on hardware performance, and to expect users to make mistakes. Regarding user mistakes, they may press the wrong buttons, and coupled with small screens or agile-sensitive calibration, the touch screens may present additional concerns with respect to the user experience - the smaller the size, the more difficult the navigation.

According to Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders in the Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADP) report, there are five industry leaders - IBM, Adobe, SAP, Kony, and Salesforce:

Adobe - their platform, the Adobe-® AIR, supports runtime development for coding into native apps for iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, and other Android devices, reaching the mobile app stores for over 500 million devices. As an extension, it also supports cross-platform runtime system for building desktop applications and mobile applications, programmed using Adobe Flash, ActionScript and optionally Apache Flex. Most favorite platforms for most application developer such as Pattern Limited.

IBM - this solution is the MobileFirst Platform Foundation - an open and comprehensive platform. The platform is used to launch the build, test, and running and management of native, hybrid, and mobile web apps. The platform supports Hypertext Markup Language revision 5 (HTML5), cascading style sheet (CSS), and JavaScript programming languages.

Aside from mobile testing and app development, the platform can support development of Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS). The MBaaS enables fast integration of security-rich, backend, cloud storage with full data synchronization, user management, push notifications, integration with social networking services, and file-handling.

Kony - their solution is based on an open standards-based, integrated platform for supporting mobile app development. They can support the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) to quickly build, design, deploy, and support multi-edge apps. Additionally, they support HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS programming languages.

Salesforce - this is the number one customer relationship management (CRM) platform in the industry and one which is solely dependent on the Internet. The platform is for developers, end users, customers, admins, and more who are moving to the social, mobile, and connected cloud for building custom apps. These apps are supported with Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, and JVM languages.

SAP - their platform is the HANA Cloud Platform which supports user-centric app development for mobile devices, based on an open model from SAP so that developers can bring their own tools and framework. Their platform is ideal for developing apps for mobile devices, wearables, desktops, and hybrid solutions. The supported programming languages include HTML5, JavaScript for dynamic applications, and Open Data Protocol.