App development processes driven by design demands; trends

The application development process is becoming more complicated as the mobile market continues to fragment, and there are more considerations to make than ever before. A variety of component suites are available for app builders, allowing them to experiment with different approaches to their software projects. However, it's likely that each programmer has a unique preference when it comes to coding languages and the procedure they follow to create a successful application. As the market evolves, it will be essential for developers to be flexible with their methods and use the approach that will best meet user needs.

App adoption relies on the design
It's not very often that users take to a piece of software simply by luck, especially within the workplace. Developers cannot just put an application in the app store and expect it to succeed; it takes a significant amount of effort to gain support. Entrepreneur contributor Rahul Varshneya noted that programmers should not just focus on creating an app, they should also be building the business. Applications are becoming integral to many organizational operations from financial management to inventory ordering and customer service. As this software becomes more of an asset to employees, it's important that developers deliver an app that will have the features to make daily tasks easier and help the user be more efficient. If the program is difficult to navigate or does not have the right tools, staff will likely seek out alternatives, wasting the investments put into the business app.

"The fundamentals of building an app or a business are the same. In fact, an app is a business - if you treat it like one, you will go far and wide and make money along the way," Varshneya wrote. "On the other hand, if you just treat it like a hobby, which in my estimates is about 90 percent of the apps out there, your app will be among one of those many that don't make any money or any difference to your customers' lives."

Adapting to new development trends
With the mobile market further splintering, developers have to be up to working with trends they may not be familiar with. For example, Apple is coming out with Swift, a new programming language that is likely to be a replacement for Objective-C, which the company had previously used, according to Ars Technica. Although Objective-C has served Apple faithfully for years, it's limitations were becoming more obvious in the fast-paced business environment, with some necessary features being difficult to incorporate during development. Swift is being adopted to meet the more modern user needs and provide programmers with new opportunities for coding impressive tools.

"Apple promised better performance with Swift, and you can see some places where it might extract a bit," Ars Technica stated. "Constants are a big part of Swift, which makes sense. If you make a stock-tracking app, the price may change every second, but the stock's name and symbol change so rarely that it's just as easy to make a whole new object when this happens. Declare the name and symbol constants, and you can skip all the code required to change them in a thread-safe manner."

Swift will have its own share of challenges to overcome including a lack of error catching, but the language also stands as an opportunity for developer growth and standardization. Ars Technica mentioned that Swift has taken a step toward formalizing patterns like code strings that have often only been adopted haphazardly. In addition, Swift builds off of features currently being used in other popular coding languages, allowing developers to adapt more easily than they would with an entirely new system.