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Vendor Landscape: Mobile Development Platforms
Ride the mobile wave while reducing fragmentation with an all-in-one MDP.
Last Revised: June 26, 2012
More Details
Your Challenge
- Mobile proliferation has created costly fragmentation. iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone are all popular with consumers.
- This poses a challenge for developers: they’re forced to choose between selecting one platform for development or investing in costly parallel development efforts.
Our Advice
Critical Insight- Mobile Development Platform (MDP) vendors help solve the conundrum of fragmentation by providing solutions that allow developers to "code once, deploy many" to multiple mobile platforms.
- Organizations that are heavily involved in mobile app development should adopt an MDP to allow them to reach the largest possible app market at the lowest possible cost.
- MDP feature sets are highly commoditized, with pricing and vendor attributes forming more relevant selection criteria.
- Understand the features and business benefits of using an MDP to support mobile development efforts.
- Determine functional requirements based on organizational needs to focus product evaluation on the right criteria.
- Understand the current state of the MDP market to evaluate and select a vendor that best meets the organization’s requirements.
Get to Action
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Evaluate MDP vendors and available solutions
Understand the MDP market, the players, and their products.
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Compare leading vendors and develop a shortlist
Narrow down the leading vendors to the most appropriate few.
Related Solution Sets
Vendor Landscape: Application Development Tools
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Vendor Landscape: Mobile Development PlatformsRide the mobile wave while reducing fragmentation with an all-in-one MDP.
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2 Comments
would like to see an evaluation of Sencha and appMobi.
Thank you for your comment on this Vendor Landscape. In both cases, Sencha and appMobi have solid products but are designed around the creation of mobile web applications. While the web-focused technologies are improving and the gap between what can be done natively vs. over the web is getting smaller, our focus in this vendor landscape was specifically on vendors that offered native compile capabilities. If a business’s intent is strictly to provide a mobile web interface or application, there are a number of vendors that specialize in that development arena. Sencha would likely be very much at the top of that list.