As the mobile app market looks to grow by $497.09 billion during 2020-2024 at a CAGR of 21%, there is enough reason for organizations across industries to build mobile apps.
Mobile apps have transformed how the enterprise workforce operates, how data is analyzed, decisions are made, and customers are supported. However, given the pace of changing demands, it has become critical to keep the enterprise motivated towards a multichannel access model while integrating resiliency into the foundation of these apps.
The key characteristics of highly resilient mobile apps
Resiliency is important not just to enhance productivity, but also to improve efficiencies, speed intelligent decision-making, and win, retain, and entice customers through high engagement.
Here are 3 things to know about building highly resilient mobile apps:
Keep them interactive
When it comes to building highly resilient mobile apps, interactivity plays a huge role in success. Every aspect in which the app interacts with users has a bearing on the overall app experience. Therefore, it is important to introduce elements that make the app extremely responsive, easy to use, and smooth to navigate.
Matching keyboards to required inputs, clearly displaying the search field, seeking permissions, and keeping forms short and crisp are all great ways to ensure good interactivity. Integrating gestures such as touch, long-press, swipe, and even eye movements can take interactivity a notch higher – while making the overall user experience intuitive and fun.
In addition, the apps should ensure that the messages and notifications do not block the user's interactivity with the app.
Keep the behavior graceful even with poor, limited, or no network connection
Despite advances in technology, interruptions in network connectivity are commonplace – in subways, elevators, aircraft, and more. However, today’s tech-savvy mobile users place extreme weight on uninterrupted access and consistent performance of mobile apps – not just across different devices and operating systems, but also in the event of limited, poor, or no connectivity.
Assessing what features of the app become unusable in flaky connections, which users get affected, and how it impacts your business is a great place to start. This can help reveal areas where there is a need to integrate offline capabilities – instead of taking the complete app offline. Features that don’t work online can simply be resigned, disabled, or even hidden in poor network conditions.
Developers should also look at re-strategizing the caching, queuing, synchronization as well as data retrieval mechanisms to ensure the app is constantly updated in the background when there is a network connection and data is cached from a local cache to improve latency and performance.
Optimizing the code base, minimizing unnecessary app elements, and storing only as much data as needed can help a great deal in ensuring the app offers consistent performance with unreliable networks, limited bandwidth, and poor latency.
Make the upgrades or reinstalls seamless and transparent
Although mobile operating systems, devices, programming languages, and frameworks continue to evolve and mature, often at a much faster pace than other technologies, app developers must ensure upgrades and reinstalls are as seamless and transparent as possible. The introduction of a new device, a newer version of the operating system, or a completely different one should not impact the upgrade process in any way.
Instead of having users initiate upgrades or updates, developers can automatically perform upgrades in the background when the mobile device is idle and connected to Wi-Fi. It is also advisable to check device compatibility (for successful upgrades), run upgrades on a parallel server (so app performance is not compromised), and take backups of databases and more (to make restoring the system easier if the upgrade doesn’t work).
If a reboot or reinstallation is required, it makes sense to deliver a notification, so users can perform the required task at their convenience. At the same time, inform users about the successful upgrade and make them aware of new capabilities they can leverage.
How the cloud can help
For organizations looking to keep up with the pace of change, maximizing the vast opportunities that the cloud offers could be a great way to enable resiliency. Since modern cloud providers offer a range of competent services that allow for any time, anywhere access to critical resources in a pay-as-you-go model, the cloud can deliver the efficiency and flexibility needed to build highly resilient mobile apps.
Using the cloud, organizations can:
- Quicken the speed with which apps are developed by capitalizing on pre-packaged functions and APIs and achieving efficient and rapid iterations.
- Leverage the cloud’s storage capabilities and computing power to build apps with cross-platform compatibility.
- Enable easy and seamless database integration to import and sync data – without having to invest in expensive infrastructure or write complex codes.
- Ensure quick and continuous patches, updates, and upgrades, so the app is in line with user preferences and future needs.
- Enjoy unlimited scalability and performance of apps by adding and removing instances as and when the demand peaks or troughs.
- Ensure data is securely stored and regularly backed up and eliminate the unwanted eventuality of losing data.
Building highly resilient mobile apps has become a business priority today. Embracing the cloud is probably the best way to build mobile apps that work gracefully with poor connections, avoid blocking users from interactivity, and ensure seamless upgrades and reinstalls.
