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The fast growing reach of the smart devices such as mobile phones and tablets to the individuals, has forced the solution experts to look for extending the accessibility of business application to these devices.
Some of us start looking for the companies who are in mobile application development, without analyzing, if we really need a native mobile application or not. We normally mistake the mobile compatible website with the mobile application.
There are two ways you can extend your application to the smart devices --through native mobile applications and through mobile compatible web sites.
Native mobile app or mobile compatible site?
The native applications usually use internal resource of the device such as processing power, storage memory, GPS, Camera, SIM & NFC and operate system specific. Therefore you need to create different versions to support different operating systems like iOS, Android, Symbian , Windows mobile or Blackberry. On the other hand the mobile compatible website is just a set of mobile compatible web pages that are directly accessed via web browser.
Practically 95% of the business applications do not need native mobile application, but a mobile compatible website. In fact some of the latest browsers allow accessing few mobile resources such as GPS and Camera. Thus you need not develop a native application just to access GPS or Camera.
To differentiate the need, let’s take some scenarios.
Scenario 1:
- You want our service engineer to access the call details and update the status
- You want our engineer to capture the photo from site and upload
- You want our management to approve your requests; it could be leave approval, purchase requisition approval, budget approval, order approval, etc.
- You want your management to access important dashboard
- You want your client to check the status of their order
If you’re looking for any such application listed in Scenario 1, then you need mobile compatible website rather than native mobile application.
Scenario 2:
- You want to track the location of our engineer while on move
- You want to capture site photograph, edit or tag photograph and upload to the system
- You want to upstream video
- You want to read encrypted document
- You want offline and standalone application such a games , personal applications
- You want offline information update and synchronize later
- You want chat and instant messaging other than email and SMS alerts
- You want to scan bar code, QR code, face or thumb impression
- You want to communicate to another device via NFC or wireless
If you are looking for any such application listed in Scenario 2, then you need a native mobile application.
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