The rise of Mobile App Development

Mobile application development is undoubtedly one of the most lucrative career options in the technology industry of the 21st century. Rapidly occurring digital transformation and widespread use of mobile applications are leading to substantial increase in the importance of respective skill set. Primarily, there are two major mobile OS platforms, Android and iOS. Both of them have their pros and cons, and it is a great time to carve out a career in either of them.

The focus of every developer should simply be on achieving excellence within a definite set of mobile application development programming languages and side tools. It is essential that you have a clear understanding of the end-to-end technology stack which you consistently use to create mobile applications. It would help if you focus on ensuring the completeness of the set of tools which form the basis of overall skill set.

Why is Mobile application development a strong choice of career for millennials?

Widespread digital transformation

It is evident that most of the young businesses are taking their mobile presence very seriously. Today, companies from all industries (whether small or large scale) wish to be the experience digital transformation. They wish to be seen on smartphones in the form of mobile business applications. It is a trend that doesn’t seem to have a huge loss and is most likely to carry on in the future. As the new businesses will take their smartphone-based presence more seriously, they hire Android app developers giving more and better opportunities.

A growing trend of M-commerce

With more than 52% of e-commerce related searches happening through the smartphone channel, mobile application to become one of the best ways to reach your customer. It supports you in persisting in their mind; and on smartphones. All businesses are increasingly looking to reach out to their customers through smartphone channels via mobile apps and persuasively sell their products and services. It is one of the most reasonable needs of the business in today’s time. It makes so much sense for the mobile application development companies to hire Android app developers.

New ways to monetize

The growing competition among businesses is surely shrinking their profit margins. Monetization of content and services through mobile business apps is a sigh of relief to business owners. It is undoubtedly helping them create sustainable distinct ways to monetize. It creates sustainable distinct revenue streams that are nascent and helping them compete more efficiently in the throat cutting competition. All this requires development and maintenance of mobile applications on iOS and/or Android. It gives rise to so many new opportunities in every iOS app development company.

Here are some of the most vital skills which an android or iOS mobile application developer should possess

Mobile application development is a beautiful mix of technical skills and creativity which need to be well coordinated with businesses and their primary needs. We have bifurcated the vital skills for mobile application developers into hard and soft skills.

Hard Skills

Core Programming Languages

Android mobile application developers generally have to deal with core Java while making their applications in Android Studio. It also includes in-depth use of many side tools like Gradle for rolling out APKs and XML for designing of UI and imparting a complete UX for the mobile application users. While developing the core skills, it is essential to know programming languages to an extent where your problem-solving abilities are not curtailed because of coding hurdles.

iOS developers should be entirely well versed with Objective-C, Swift and new-age programming languages like Kotlin. Knowing more than one programming languages certainly helps in building a profile that stands out while applying in an iOS app development company.

Cloud Computing/Deployment Skills

MSMEs generally hire Android mobile app developers with honed skills for cloud computing environments. You should be able to bind the functional code into applications. It is a much-needed dedicated skill which generally requires another engineer. If the mobile application developers can do this, it undoubtedly increments their ability and their importance in the mobile application development scenario.

These days there is a growing trend of serverless architecture where deployment is containerized through a Docker (CE or EE) or Kubernetes on massive scale. These are valuable side skills which clients look for while hiring an iOS app development company.

Cybersecurity

As data is proving to be the new age ‘oil’ it is crucial that mobile application developers have an in-depth knowledge of Internet-based data and API security. They should have detailed experience in securing mobile applications, users identity, and data privacy. Another critical task is to secure APIs from programmers with malicious intentions to trouble the users and make them land in compromised circumstances. It can be done by nurturing a working knowledge of all basic encryption algorithms and third-party mobile app security tools which can be incorporated in the mobile applications.

Mandatory search techniques

One of the most important and frequently used features in a mobile application is the search. Weather search is in a database or within a content delivery network (CDN). It is one of the primary indicators of how well an app works. If your search is fast, people generally tend to feel that the app is robust and performance is excellent. So to improve the user experience, it is essential to have hands deep in at least one of the prominently used Lucene based searching tools like elastic or Solr. There are some impressive efficient searching architectures like Algolia which can come in handy depending upon the use and required scalability of a mobile app.

Analytics centric development practices

Nowadays. Companies hire Android app developers who can professionally incorporate at least the necessary analytical profiling of users and also use analytics-based service log management system. The ultimate aim should be to build a sustainable back-end resource for the mobile app which gives valuable insights for customer engagement and also give statistics of mobile app performance.

Major tools:

• Logstash by Elastic
• Greylog
• Other mobile App Engagement Tools

Soft Skills

Analytical skills

It is entirely different from the analytics services discussed above. It is the analysis of core business requirements and its mapping with the mobile app functionalities.

MSMEs wish to work with an iOS app development company that map each use case with the main features of the mobile application.

Problem Solving Ability

People hire Android app developers who have enhanced problem-solving ability with an aim to make robust, quality driven tested functionalities.

There are numerous ways of approaching a single business requirement, and they should use the most appropriate data structures and coding approach for solving their particular problem.

Concise coding

Reducing the LOC or lines of code should be one of the primary points in mind while writing the functional code for functionalities.

The overall front-end and back-end. The shorter and more concise a code is, the faster it is likely to run (on a broad basis, it is not true in many conditions).

Creativity

One of the critical task for all mobile application developers is to build, curate and initially design the UI of the mobile app. A mobile app is only as good as its UI for layman.

So, it is essential to be as creative as possible while designing the flows of content and different parts of user journeys.

Conclusion

Mobile application development is one of the most popular and lucrative career options in the technology industry. It is being taken up by millions of IT professionals, and there is a growing trend of professionals from different sectors taking up dedicated skill development courses of mobile application development. It helps them in making a switchover in jobs.

There is much competition. Due to a large number of options available for everyone in the market, the mobile application developer should look to build their core differentiators in quality, quicker turnaround time and business oriented thinking. There are immense opportunities on the way as companies hire Android app developers and substantial encouragement for every iOS app Development Company in the business ecosystem.