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Here's Who Made Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant For Mobile App Development Platforms

Vendors Doing Well With Mobile App Development

As mobile apps become the main driver of accelerating digital transformation in businesses, more vendors are coming out with cutting-edge mobile app development platforms.

According to market research firm Gartner, mobile app development platforms will become widely adopted in the near future: By 2020, Gartner predicted, more than 75 percent of enterprises will have adopted at least one platform to accelerate their digital business transformation strategies, up from 33 percent in 2015.

Gartner highlighted the major vendors in the mobile app development space this year in its Magic Quadrant. Following are the 17 vendors that made it into Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms.

7 Reasons for taking assistance from custom mobile app development service providers

These days, smartphones have replaced PCs and laptops in such a way that people don’t prefer to do online work on them. Instead, they use smartphones and tablets. Mobile technology also advances as the number of mobile users increases. In such scenario, it is difficult for companies to say ‘no’ to it. In order to leverage the benefits of mobility, enterprises all over the world adapt the concept of enterprise mobility.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept of enterprise mobility capitalizes on mobile technology advancements. Companies can just install “off-the-shelf” apps on employees’ devices to gain benefits from those advancements.  Such apps can serve many purposes like:

In brief, tailor-made mobile apps become the necessity for the companies. Numerous companies come forward with mobile apps these days; as a result, it is necessary for newcomers to take assistance from custom mobile app development service providers.

The Explanation Behind The High Costs Of App Development

Why is app development so expensive?

I get this question a lot, and it often comes from a shell-shocked CEO or CIO who discovers his five-figure-budget project ends up being six or even seven figures. That’s crazy. Why is app development so expensive?

The easiest explanation is that apps are cheap; it’s the engineering and design talent that’s expensive. If you look in the App Store, you’ll see over a million different apps. These were all built by independent developers, yet the bulk of these apps will never earn a penny.

Using Hundreds of Developers

A different set of apps serves as the foundations of million- and billion-dollar businesses. Solo developers typically don’t build these apps; instead they’re built by teams of developers and designers. These teams range in size from nimble three-person teams to large enterprise organizations that employ hundreds of engineers.

Open source framework enables native mobile app development

Although HTML5 has allowed apps to work across platforms, there's still demand for companies to develop native apps for the major mobile platforms.

Progress Software is launching the latest version of NativeScript, an open source framework on the Telerik platform, enabling developers to use JavaScript to build native mobile apps running on the major mobile systems.

With the release of NativeScript 2.0, developers using Google's Angular 2 JavaScript framework can now write native mobile applications for iOS and Android. They can reuse existing skills and code from the web and achieving time and cost-efficiencies.

"Angular integration first shipped with our popular Kendo UI library nearly two years ago, and we continue to see high demand for Angular from our community," says Todd Anglin, chief evangelist and VP technology at Progress. "For the more than one million developers using the Angular framework to write interactive web applications, the NativeScript 2.0 framework represents a giant leap forward -- they can finally create zero-compromise mobile apps with Angular featuring truly native UI and performance".

DHS releases government guide for mobile app development

The Department of Homeland Security released its Mobile Applications Playbook Monday, giving federal agencies a roadmap for creating, testing and deploying apps that will be shared across the government.

The 39-page guide can be used anywhere along an application’s development lifecycle, giving development teams a path forward when they are stuck on an issue related to an application’s progress.

The playbook leans on the agency’s “car wash” process, a continuous cycle that allows teams to build, manage and test source code that has caught on across the government.

Development teams can weigh whether their application would be better on mobile web versus a native app, the difference in user experience between a smartphone and a laptop, what programming language to use, what security and compliance metrics need to be accounted for, and how to test for software bugs.

DHS sets privacy rules for mobile apps

The Department of Homeland Security has issued privacy guidelines for mobile applications developed by or for the department. The new guidelines require DHS mobile apps to have an easily accessible privacy policy both before and after installation of the app.

The policy, which is dated March 30 and signed by DHS Chief Privacy Officer Karen Neuman, also requires program managers to notify a privacy official and the Office of the CIO before developing a mobile app, whether for internal use or for the public. For example, DHS is working on an Apple iOS app that would allow mobile access by employers to the E-Verify system.

Specifically, developers must run their apps through the DHS "Carwash," an OCIO service that scans and tests source code and offers lifecycle management for apps. Before the app can be deployed, results of the source-code scans should be reviewed by Neuman to see if appropriate privacy protections are in place.

Apple’s Safari Technology Preview is a stable test platform for users and devs

Over the last two or three years, Apple has put an increasingly large amount of its software development out in the open. Early betas of OS X and iOS updates, once locked behind a developer paywall and a bunch of nondisclosure agreements, are now released for the public to download and try out. Swift, Apple's new programming language, is now open source. And today, the company is releasing the first of many Safari Technology Preview builds, a new development snapshot of the browser designed to show off more features while offering more reliability and stability than the nightly WebKit browser builds.