The convergence of path breaking developments in three areas- broadband connectivity over mobile networks, cloud computing, and hand held devices; is creating a powerful new paradigm for our interactions in this world, which is soon transforming into a global village with people being virtually together for 24x7 hours at will. The heady mix of 3G network, mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle) and cloud applications (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) has the entire next generation excited and full of ideas about how they wish to connect, interact, learn, work and entertain.

The above convergence of mobile networks, hand held devices and cloud computing is being loosely referred to as mobility or mobile computing. This has generated a whole new genre or ecosystem of mobile applications that are not only accessible to you anytime and anywhere you go, but has also opened up the opportunities to develop applications that are sensitive to your current location.

Forrester Research predicts the mobile applications industry to be worth $38 Billion by 2015. Leading mobile apps stores such as Apple App Store and Android Market have shattered sales records one after the other, thereby offering significant revenues to app developers and a wider choice of applications for end-users. Enterprises are investing heavily in extending their applications to fully leverage the power of mobility.

Mobile Web versus Native Apps

It's an interesting debate to choose between making web applications mobile compliant versus developing dedicated native apps on each mobile platform (e.g. Android, iOS, Blackberry OS).

Theoretically, mobile web offers the advantage of code reusability and seems to be an active proponent of the write once, run everywhere philosophy. However, with a large number of smartphones and tablets sporting varying screen sizes, lack of common standards and inconsistent support for frameworks such as Adobe Flash, making web applications mobile compliant is much harder than it seems. Though HTML5 is touted as the next big thing for mobility, there's a lot of work to be done by the standards body before that fascinating proposition becomes a ground reality.

In contrast, native applications offer an ideal platform to fully leverage a mobile operating system's capabilities. The obvious downside is that it takes a significant amount of time to build an application on each mobile platform and there's no quick way to port apps across platforms.

Our Mobility Experience and Skill Set

We at Metacube have been keen observers of technology changes in the mobility domain. Having engaged ourselves in native app development as well as mobile web, Metacube has seen the best of both worlds.

We have an expert app development team catering to iOS, Android and Symbian platforms. We've also worked extensively on HTML5-enabled mobile frameworks such as Sencha Touch and Appcelerator Titanium for various client projects. Apart from development, we've also undertaken a number of testing and QA projects focusing on usability and performance testing of smartphone and tablet applications.

Our mobility skill set in brief is as follows:

  • Platforms - iOS, Android, Symbian, J2ME
  • Languages - Objective-C, Java, HTML5
  • Tools - iOS SDK, Android SDK, Symbian Carbide, Sencha Touch, Appcelerator Titanium

Sample Mobility Projects

We've engaged in several short/ long-term mobility projects over the years. These include

  • J2ME Client Development for a popular Voice SMS solution
  • Feature-rich OEM grade Call Manager for Symbian platform
  • Geolocation-based Salesforce application
  • iPhone app to launch deals, discounts and promotional offers
  • iPad sync app for cloud-based file server