Rapid Mobile Development: What You Need to Know

In terms of custom application development, simply getting your product into the hands of end users often isn’t enough to remain competitive – you have to do so faster and more efficiently than anyone else. As a result, companies are always looking for ways to decrease the time to market as much as possible, often with varying results in terms of the quality of the finished product. Rapid mobile app development, also commonly referred to as RMAD, is one such technique that companies are using that you’ll certainly want to be aware of moving forward.

What is Rapid Mobile App Development?

At its most basic level, rapid mobile development involves the use of a series of code-free program tools that are designed to make it faster and easier to create applications that are specifically intended to be used on mobile platforms. It’s a trend that has grown in popularity significantly over the last few years in the business world in particular, as users can build and manage internal applications that are designed to address certain unique business challenges they may face.

RMAD software is almost always Web-based, meaning that instead of the app being housed on a user’s mobile device like a smartphone it is instead housed on the Internet and accessed on that device via a Web browser. Most RMAD apps also include a basic, drag-and-drop GUI interface.

The end goal of RMAD is not to create the most finely polished, flashy app ever created – it is literally to create an app that does one thing as well as it needs to in order to help a business accomplish a particular challenge.

RMAD Considerations

In terms of the types of apps that are actually created using rapid mobile app development, there are a number of misconceptions that people have that need to be cleared up if you’re planning on going this route. For starters, you still have to pay careful attention to all of the core tenants of app development, including the user experience. Developers who value speed above all other factors often release inferior products through this avenue, which has caused some to refer to rapid mobile app development as “good enough” app development.

One of the major benefits (aside from speed) to RMAD is the fact that it also takes a significantly smaller investment up front to get an app off the ground, as all of the tools used to design the software don’t require any extensive knowledge of coding. This does not mean that the end result will be permanently inexpensive, however – an app will still require ongoing support to add new features, address bugs, improve UX and UI and more. One of the biggest mistakes that developers make is assuming that faster and easier development leads to less management from a long-term perspective, which is absolutely not the case.

Another important thing to understand is that rapid mobile app development was never intended to replace the traditional model of custom application development. Customers still value feature rich, native and extensive mobile apps that are designed to not only help them address their goals, but also provide a solid experience that they wouldn’t have through other means. By its very nature, RMAD cannot provide this for them beyond the basic goal of addressing a particular challenge. As a result, RMAD is something of a “stop gap” solution in terms of custom development – it lets you solve a problem as fast as possible so that you can spend more time solving in a much better, more efficient way down the road.

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