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What to Consider When Choosing a Development Platform

You’ve made up your mind. You want to build a mobile application. Cool.

But if that’s the extent of your plan, I’d recommend putting some time aside to consider all of the individual details relevant to your project. One of the most critical points in the process of app development is that of selecting an appropriate development platform. To many, these technologies are essentially dream products; providing developers of ranging experience, with the tools to easily and quickly assemble powerful and functional mobile applications.

There are a ton of development platform companies out there, each proclaiming to be the greatest. To distinguish between the cream and the crap, you’ll need to assess your own goals. Below we’ve created a list of the top factors to consider when looking for a mobile application platform.

Steer Clear of Black Boxed Code and Heavy Frameworks

Development platforms typically save you countless hours by removing much of the coding trench work for you. This can be great, but the platform should also provide you with the ability to manually edit certain code. You should be wary of platforms that prohibit you from accessing the application’s source code.

Can Your Service Keep Up?

Mobile application innovation is moving at ludicrous speed. New developments are on the market almost everyday and operating systems seem to be always in need of an update. It can be tough keeping up with this as a developer, but it can be even tougher when you’re reliant on third party software. You need to ensure that your development platform is able to handle the latest operating systems.

Don’t be Limited by Templates

Templates give developers an easy way to quickly give applications a trusted structure, but it can also be a bit confining. The best templates provide a jumping off point that provides inspiration. The provided templates should be customizable and shouldn’t limit you brand’s identity to fit a certain mold.

Don’t Compromise your User Experience for Convenience

In the same way that you shouldn’t let your template determine the look and feel of your application, you also shouldn’t allow the functions of the development platform determine the user experience. Your application’s users should be your priority. It may be okay for a platform to have limited design elements, if those are the only design elements that you’ll need. If the platform doesn’t compare to the design that you’ve envisioned, you’ll probably be able to find a better platform.

Assured Efficiency

The end goal for mobile application platforms is to cut back on the work and coding needed to build an application. If your development platform is requiring you to do so much work that you may as well just code the app from scratch, this isn’t the platform for you. Platforms should be designed to cut out redundancies and the most time consuming parts of app development. Additionally, if your platform is saving you time from coding, but requiring you to check back through to debug, you may need to find another platform.

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Doug Atkinson

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