What You Should Ask Yourself When You Create an App?

What is the purpose of creating an app? This is a question that must be asked by every business owner and app developer because it is at the heart of mobile app development. For an app that is of the promotional type, it might be wise to give the task to a seasoned mobile development company. But if your objective is to reach a particular monetary target with your app, then that calls for a more targeted approach. This cud mean creating your very own app and with a good app developer. Finding a competent and experienced app developer can be difficult, but once you identify the right man for the job, melting ideas and action can’t be difficult.

We jot down the questions you should ask when you start to build a mobile app.

Will the app be free? The app category can determine whether your app is free or paid. Entertainment and games are usually free on most platforms. You can however still find a balance by creating both paid and free versions of the app. Being in the market for some time can be of great help as it helps you make a decision on monetization options. Developers looking for more downloads will find free apps most suitable.

What kind will the app be? This is important because the market trends are ever changing. You therefore want to make sure that you create an app that is bound to be in demand. By looking at the top paid and free apps, you should be in a position to choose a category and app kind that will not disappoint. Possibilities are that the market might have an app similar to what you have in mind and your homework should be to find whether people are actually downloading the app. Create an app people will love to have.

Should I hire an app developer or create the app myself? Hiring an app developer may be an easy way out if you are just looking for a promotional tool for your business but it will definitely cost you more in the long run. If your aim is to start an app business, then you are better off building your app. A good app developer will give you the right combination of security and interactivity. You will however need to make the right choice with the mobile app builder and learn how it works to have a pleasant experience. There are some app builders too, that have been designed easy-to-use so you don't need any coding knowledge to successfully develop your app.

Simple Steps for Creating a Mobile App!

Every industry wants to be part of the mobile bandwagon. From small businesses that look to increase their profits to big business houses who want to increase their ROI (return on investment), people across industries are looking at mobile apps in order to enter newer markets. In this article, we look at conception and design of any mobile app and what you must do to ensure your app does not become just another one among the millions.

1. Start with a clear idea

This begins with research to understand your target market and your competition. Do you have a completely unique idea? If yes, go ahead to step 2. If no, ask yourself if your idea is better or cheaper than your competitor’s? If this too is a no, you need to go back to the drawing board.

2. Proposal

        I.            Statement of Purpose:

      II.            Identify need and solution

    III.            Define target market

    IV.            Define function, display, and promotion requirements

      V.            Determine revenue goals and methods

3. Concept drawings

Create Wireframe. Then, make your app beautiful. This is an important part of the function and design part of developing the app.

4. To the developer’s office

Bring your proposal, research, and concept drawings. This is where you need to talk development. This is the stage of app development where you learn that almost anything is possible, but not everything is feasible.

5. Revise

Take all your great ideas, compute the cost (time + money), weigh it against value and balance then both.

6. “Paper App” Testing

        I.            Select 3-5 testers that fit your target market.

      II.            Ask your testers to try out the “Paper App”

    III.            Present screen displays based on user actions

    IV.            Watch, listen, record

7. Revision

This needs to be done as mistakes that were not evident before seem to come to the surface when you run through them once more.

8. Submit final design to developer

This is critical as it is the developer who has to finally verify if the design is feasible or not.

Five iOS Features That Android Needs to Have

Even hardcore lovers of Android and its latest version lollipop, would tell you that Android isn’t perfect. There are areas where the iOS is frankly, better. This, despite Android’s smart sharing features and deep Google integration.

In this article, we look at some of the areas that Google should improve upon, taking a cue from Apple.

1. Top-of-the screen touch

One of the most irritating things when you browse WebPages has to endlessly swipe through to reach the top. Well, iOS users would never have had this problem, for you just have to touch the top of the screen and you’ll be right there. It’s indeed puzzling as to why Google hasn’t enabled this considering this is a facility fairly easy to implement.

2. Quick reply

Some third-party texting apps create a popup window for users to respond to a message without diving back into the app. Users would feel great if Android could have this type of quick reply natively. Especially since it makes two messaging apps:  Hangouts and Messenger.

On an iPhone it’s much faster to reply to someone this way. It helps users save some time when they’re interrupted with a text and want to respond quickly and get back to what they were doing.

3. Steal Airdrop

When iPhone users want to send/transfer files among Apple devices, they need look no beyond Airdrop. To be fair to Google, it already has this facility in Google drive. All it needs to do is to connect this to Drive given that there’s desktop software for both OS X and Windows.

4. ‘Control Center’

Though some of the features of Android’s original notification shade such as toggle Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are already available in Apple, it would do Android no harm if it were to take a cue from Control center.

5. Please display the Battery percentage

This is something even those who swear by Android won’t pardon it for. That Google still hasn’t chosen to do anything about it seem quite inexplicable considering Android Lollipop had everything from lock screen to eliminating widgets implemented meticulously.

How You Can Debug Mobile Websites with Firefox?

Mobile design could be easy for a few. But ask even expert developers, and they would tell you that while designing for mobile can be easy, mobile debugging is not. But with lots of tools available today to help you debug even hard to notice errors, mobile debugging is getting easier too. This article looks at what Firefox has to offer here in comparison to its competitors.

Testing with Firefox

When you test with Firefox, It is good to start with the responsive mode as it allows you to adapt the layout to your mobile screen size. But the question arises, how do you test your responsive design? The usual response has been, ‘Let’s try resizing the browser window’. But experience proves that it is neither practical nor precise.

Here is where the Responsive mode of Firefox comes to the rescue. It is called the responsive design view in Firefox 15, and has been built to specifically test the mobile version of your website. Trying to find out where it is located?

You can find it in the web developer submenu in Firefox’s main menu. There, go to the responsive design view entry. You can alternatively use the keyboard shortcuts to reach there.

Resizing the view

When you activate the responsive design view, Firefox resizes the view. But the window remains unchanged. For that, you will have to use mouse controls on your right and bottom corner of your window. Alternatively, you can use preset list at the top that has under it many classic resolutions and if you can find what you are looking for among them, you are also free to define your own resolution by editing the current selected size.

Debug with remote debugging

Though the responsive design view allows you to take screenshots of what you’re viewing, it cannot replace a real Smartphone. This is where remote debugging is of great help as it allows you to access the developer’s toolbox for mobile websites.

All you need to do is just open the toolbox and go to the ‘settings’ panel where you will find the ‘enable remote debugging’ option.

What You Need To Know About Custom Mobile Development?

Mobile phones have become one of the fastest avenues for growth for all businesses. With the evolution of 4G phones, almost all sectors are looking at mobile development to promote their businesses. This has also pushed the demand for good mobile developers to newer heights. Be it iPhone application or other Smartphone apps, businesses are leaving no stone unturned to promote their businesses. The quality that has made this form of development such an attractive proposition is the fact that mobiles are no longer restricted as communication devices alone, but have become a complete multimedia device.

From online banking to e-commerce, mobile phones are one of the most important gadgets in our lives. With the number of users accessing the Internet through their mobile phones, the needs for such custom applications has increased considerably. It is no surprise that trade and commerce giants such as eBay, Amazon etc. launched their own mobile applications many years ago. Most small and medium businesses are following suit and targeting this market as aggressively.

Custom development projects are handled by developers who have years of experience in designing and developing mobile applications to meet the minute needs of a business. Developers bring in all their expertise to provide you end-to-end solutions to meet extensive business needs and give you a competitive edge over your rivals. You can bring down the development cost substantially once you outsource your development projects to these offshore development centres.

Vital Tips for Custom Mobile Development

·         Conceptualize the application in your mind before approaching the developers. This is important as you know your business better than anyone else, and know your expectations from the app.

·         Avoid overdesign, as this is one of the major mistakes businesses commit when it comes to custom development of their applications for various handheld devices. Your application needs to be user-friendly and there is no harm in drawing inspiration from successful applications.

·         Ensure that your application is lightweight as this is easier for users to download and use. Ask your developers not to use unnecessary tools and elements in your app. Handheld device users like simple apps, which can be operated using a few buttons.

·         To have an effective marketing campaign, opt for multi-platform mobile development, which will ensure that you target users using major operating systems.

·         Release regular patches and updates and be in sync with the latest hardware development in the industry. This will not only increase your user base but also your credibility in the market.

What You Need To know about iCloud Drive?

There has rarely been so much buzz about one feature of an iOS release as has been for the iCloud drive. So, what exactly is the iCloud Drive? It is nothing but a simple extension of Apple's iCloud service. Now users will recall that the iCloud has primarily been used to store backups and sync data between devices.

In the iOS 8 update, iCloud Drive will allow users to store documents on iCloud and share them between all of their devices, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Windows-based PCs. Similar to Airdrop Handoff, iCloud Drive is part of Apple's mission to create a seamless transition when going from one device to another.

iCloud Drive will not only allow you to work with the same document across multiple devices, but also across multiple apps. One key feature missing from the iPad is the ability to have a centralized location for storing documents. While it is possible to share a document with another app using the "Open In..." feature, each app has to support this feature and new versions of the document get created each time you use it, which makes working across multiple apps a bit disorganized.

iCloud Drive changes this, by creating an integrated place for storing documents and making it a lot more easier for you to open a document in multiple apps.

iCloud Photo Library:

iCloud Photo Library is an extension of iCloud Drive that can store every photo and every video you take from all of your iOS devices. This improves on Photo Stream by keeping the photos in the cloud, so you don't have to use up storage on your iPad or iPhone to have access to photos across all devices. It also removes Photo Stream's limitation of only keeping recent photos.

iCloud Photo Library will store all of your photos, whether they were taking last week or last year.


Once turned on, iCloud Photo Library is automatic, so you no longer need to hassle with transferring your photos to another device to free up space on your iPad or iPhone. The photos are stored in collections based on the date and location they were taken. You can also mark favorite and create custom albums. On the whole, sumptuous!

5 Top Mobile App Frameworks!

Mobile app development has never been so exciting. Few sectors have seen as much growth in as little time as the field of mobile development. The interesting thing here is that you don't need to even have any prior knowledge of mobile coding to build a successful app here. You can get started right away with JS, HTML and CSS as there are hundreds of blogs and videos to guide you at every step.

This article looks at the many tools and framework available, that help you create mobile apps and lists the best 5 of the lot.

1. iONIC

Easily the top HTML 5 mobile framework, its USP is its UI components. iONIC has been built with SASS and uses Angular JS to help you build rich and interactive apps. Seasoned developers would know the advantages that accrue with Angular Javascript like data binding (two way) and APIs with backend services.

2. Mobile angular UI

As the name suggests, Mobile angular UI uses bootstrap and Angular JS to create mobile apps. It includes mobile component features in Bootstrap3 such as overlays, switches, and sidebars and also Angular JS modules like route, touch and animate. You don't need to include everything here as responsive media queries have been taken off bootstrap.

3. Appcelerator Titanium

An Open Source framework to help you create native apps, Appcelerator Titanium is a complete solution for hybrid mobile apps. Armed with Cloud service and a number of mobile platform APIs, it also uses an MVC framework Alloy, to help you create mobile apps quickly and easily.

4. Intel SDK

A cross platform application tool, all you need to do to use this download the application as it is completely free and can be downloaded on Windows, Linux and Mac. It also supports Twitter bootstrap, Topcoat and jQuery mobile. A large number of developers opine that it is the easiest to use among the current crop of mobile development tools.

5. Kendo UI

Another HTML 5 framework built on jQuery that allows you to create cross platform applications, Jendo UI is Open Source and easy to learn and use. The presence of a large number of videos that help you build apps with Kendo is also driving people towards it.

The Chase for Mobile Payments!

Mobile payments have made a strong case for themselves in the past few years what with the stunning growth of mobile phone users around the world particular in developing countries. So, the lure has been alluring for the customer who can now buy products and services from any location.

Mobile as a POS

Mobile devices have long begun to be used as POS (point of sale) tools. This has reached the next stage with NFC payment of which we’ll look at later. Mobile devices have become the go to option for consumers, as an instrument that supplements cash, cheque, and credit and debit cards.

Now, today many new devices have been rolled out that have wireless POS capabilities and they in turn, are competing with the mobile phone. Wireless POST terminals send instructions to the merchant payment server using the wireless network of mobile operators.

Mobile Payments as an Extension of Traditional Payments

Wireless and mobile POST can be said to be an extension of traditional mobile payment services as they use the wireless network of mobile payment operators. It is not difficult for merchant locations to offer POST terminals as payment as they do envisage them to take up a large pie of the payment market.

The Necessity of Interoperability

Mobile payment service provider’s role here is to make these wireless payments available to a majority of users. Well, that needs interoperability. You need to coordinate with banks, merchants and credit card providers to build a system that is secure, easy to use and foolproof. And of course, you need to convince the end user that your system can be trusted.


As of now, payment instruments are being stored in mWallets on the mobile device where the customer enters his or her financial details. It is in how these mWallets evolve into the next generation that holds the key to the adoption of mobile payments.