Seven buying factors to compare mobile app dev platforms

Many vendors now offer mobile app development platforms to streamline app building and deployment across multiple device types. Since there are so many mobile app dev platforms, it's not always clear how products differ and which products might be the best fit for an organization.

This article explores seven important criteria to consider when reviewing MADPs and how these leading products compare against one another in each category.

#1: App types

One of the first steps buyers must take is to determine which device types each MADP supports. All seven vendors profiled here let users build native or hybrid apps (or both) that target Android and iOS devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Platforms start to diverge when it comes to the additional devices they can support. For example, the Kony platform also supports the Windows and BlackBerry OSes, as well as wearable device types. Plus, the platform lets users build native, hybrid and web apps. On the other hand, the Microsoft and Oracle platforms add only the Windows OS to the list and support only native and hybrid apps.

#2: Deployment options

Although vendors differ when it comes to app deployment options, they each provide a cloud infrastructure as the default approach. In some cases, such as Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce, the vendor's cloud service is the only deployment option.However, Ko

However, Kony, Mendix, OutSystems and Progress let users deploy to private clouds, with OutSystems also supporting public clouds, such as Azure, Rackspace and VMWare. Only Kony, Mendix and Progress offer MADP tools that enable on-premises deployments.

#3: Development environment

When evaluating mobile app dev platforms, buyers should look carefully at the development options available, bringing the development team into the discussion, while taking into account the types of apps they plan to build and the available development resources that are on hand. They should also try to estimate future app needs, if only to articulate that those needs are varied and likely to change.

Mobile app dev platforms differ significantly when it comes to the development features they offer. Some provide sophisticated integrated development environments (IDEs) that users can download to their desktops. Others offer plug-ins that users can install into third-party IDEs, as well as web-based tools for building mobile apps. Many offer a mix of options.

#4: Back-end services

All the MADP leaders offer scalable back-end services to support app development and management. Although these services differ in their implementations, they still have a number of features in common.

For example, most vendors decouple the front-end development environment from the back-end services in such a way that users can use one without the other. Some offer the back-end services as a separate product, such as Kony Fabric, Progress Kinvey and Salesforce Heroku. In addition, Oracle sometimes refers to its Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) as simply a mobile backend-as-a-service, and Microsoft appears to be moving in the same direction with Visual Studio Mobile Center.

#5: Integration

The ability to integrate with other systems and technologies is integral to an effective MAPD.

For example, Kony's Fabric uses open standards, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), extensible markup language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), to support connectivity with such systems as Active Directory (AD), Salesforce and SAP. On the other hand, the OutSystems platform includes prebuilt connectors to services such as Salesforce and SAP, as well as to database systems, such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and Db2.

Mendix takes a slightly different approach from other vendors by basing its platform on Cloud Foundry, an open source platform-as-a-service standard. The result is a fully open, pluggable platform architecture that supports broad interoperability and extensibility.

Vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle provide deep integration with their many other offerings. For example, Microsoft's Visual Studio Mobile Center provides tight integration with Azure services, such as Azure AD, and Oracle's MCS offers inherent integration with Oracle Applications.

#6: Security

When reviewing a MADP's security capabilities, buyers should take into account such factors as compliance with industry standards, data encryption techniques and system monitoring capabilities.

For example, Kony offers binary protection within its native framework library and adheres to standards set by the Payment Card Industry, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Federal Information Processing Standards. Kony also supports the keyed-hash message authentication code for cryptographic messaging, the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm for encrypting data and the Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 for protecting encrypted keys.

All the leading vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce, adhere to industry standards and provide multiple levels of security.

The OutSystems platform provides security within the application code and performs app security checks. In addition, the platform includes built-in identity management and authentication, role-based access control and single sign-on, data encryption mechanisms and auditing features for system and user access monitoring.

#7: Lifecycle management

All leading mobile app dev platforms promise some form of lifecycle management to unify the process of building, testing, deploying, managing and monitoring mobile apps. However, some customers might find it more difficult to negotiate a platform offered by a vendor that supports numerous other products and services, especially if the vendor is playing catch-up in the MADP area.

For example, Oracle and Microsoft were both slow to jump on the MADP train, and their MADP services are merely one piece of much bigger puzzles, with their focus in many different areas. At the same time, both vendors arrived in the MADP market with a significant cloud infrastructure in place and lots of resources to throw at their MADP tools.

Reference:
Robert Sheldon. “Seven Buying Factors to Compare Mobile App Dev Platforms.” SearchMobileComputing, searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com/feature/Seven-buying-factors-to-compare-mobile-app-dev-platforms.