Native and Hybrid Applications + IBM MobileFirst Expertise
It was with the iPhone 3G that Apple launched the concept of “smart mobile telephony” in Europe on June 9, 2008. What existed before was only experiments.
Within one decade, many manufacturers expanded their market, others were born from scratch, and those few that
did not comply succumbed in spite of a long-lasting, undisputed leading position. All evolutions have many facets, all evolutions have their own rhythms and rules, and all evolutions have consequences.
The rapid evolution of mobile telephony has been and still is subject to continuous change, lacks well-defined rules and has enormous ongoing socio-economic impacts.
In the beginning, devices were small, more pocket-sized. Then the need was felt to equip oneself with larger, non-pocket size tools – often working tools – that would allow a more comfortable and intensive use without necessarily being heavy laptops. iPads and, later, Android tablets were born. Since then, their market has been growing rapidly at the expense of smartphones.
More recently, a “middle-of-the-road” solution was launched called the “phablet”: a device too big to be called a “mobile phone”, but too small to be referred to as a “tablet”. To have an idea of how successful it was, all you need to do is have a look at the mobile phone counter of any large retail shop.
These evolutions, although difficult to predict, have rapidly changed the way we stay connected on the move, when we travel, how we stay on top of the news, find information, learn, buy – inside and outside the workplace.
Developers have had to survive this fast evolution and always find a solid compromise between user needs, available technology and development costs.
Native frameworks have undergone radical changes, cross-platform frameworks have alternated in terms of popularity and usability and the increase in device models has boosted the need to generate increasingly more universal code.
In terms of the technologies available today, there is still no failure-proof rule for determining whether a mobile application should be developed using the manufacturer’s own native framework or a cross-platform framework. There is no algorithm to determine the exact middle ground, that hybrid, prudential choice.
What is left is the best possible choice.
Thanks to the experience gained in the development of nearly 100 highly heterogeneous mobile applications, Archeometra boasts an excellent margin of certainty in making the best possible choice.
In addition to many years of experience with IBM MobileFirst, consolidated by various certifications, Archeometra integrates FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) in its coding, while always ensuring full compliance with the GNU (General Public License) open-source licensing format.