A Look Inside the Department of Homeland Security’s Mobile App Development Playbook

In April of 2016, the Department of Homeland Security released a new “Mobile Application Playbook,” outlining the process of mobile app development for federal agencies. It was designed to give anyone creating mobile apps for the government a bit of a road map to work from, outlining best practices and procedures in terms of creating, testing and deploying the types of apps that will be used across the country on a daily basis.

Though most mobile app development is not performed at the federal level, this guide is still hugely valuable and can shed an important light on just how serious (and how powerful) app development is in the 21st century. 

The “Car Wash” Approach

The “Mobile Application Playbook” outlines what is referred to as a “car wash” approach to building custom mobile apps. Using this idea as a foundation, development is never truly “finished” in the strictest sense of the term. Development teams participate in a continuous cycle that allows them to build, manage and test source code – all while continuing to strengthen the finished product by starting back at the beginning again.

Under this model, development teams are essentially given the breathing room necessary to really test different versions of an app to see if it would be better as a mobile app or native app, for example. They’re also allowed to continually make improvements regarding the smartphone experience versus the laptop experience, programming language choices and more.

Outlining Positional Challenges

The “Mobile Applications Playbook” is also a helpful tool for outlining some of the challenges faced by the different members of an app development team throughout a product’s lifecycle. The CIO, for example, is tasked with mission delivery, security and privacy, standardization and cost concerns and more. The benefits of emphasizing these key issues is a mitigation of risk to the enterprise, a reduction of time to market, an increased project success rate and more.

From the perspective of a developer, however, mobility challenges include all of the standard deployment roadblocks one might expect, software updates, platform variability and more. The benefits to the mobile application process include a product that is built and deployed to the correct environment, an avoidance of many common mistakes, a general understanding of all platforms and more.

Hybrid Apps vs. Native Apps

The playbook also provides valuable insight on how the United States government values native platform apps over hybrid platform apps. While the user experience on a hybrid platform app is high, the experience generated by a native platform app will always be higher. The playbook also gives the edge to native platform apps in terms of performance and IT resource support.

Situations where the government favors hybrid platform apps over native platform apps, however, come down to code portability. The code portability of a hybrid app is between 85 and 90%, while the portability of a native app is effectively zero. This also leads to another advantage of hybrid apps, one of cost. It is almost twice as expensive in the long run to develop a native app than it is to develop a hybrid app.

Despite this, the government is NOT saying “always make a native app whenever possible.” The guide reiterates again and again that these types of decisions need to be made only after carefully considering the unique situation and goals the app in question is designed to meet. There is no blanket “right or wrong” answer, but there IS a right or wrong answer given the challenges and the tasks at hand.

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