Article: How to Develop a Mobile Application, Jan 04, 2010
http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/money/article/how-to-develop-a-mobile-application-shira-levine

One of the big shifts at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas over the last couple years is the surge in mobile devices and software. As the world’s technology improves exponentially every year, technology is quickly becoming much smaller in size as well as more efficient in power consumption and processing power. As AT&T and Verizon are pushing their US based 3G data networks farther, other companies like Sprint are hinting at the development of even larger bandwidth such as 4G. One can only guess where it goes from there.

With wireless bandwidth being ever so available, power and processing improving every day, and size constraints being over come, this all adds up to one thing: our devices are becoming increasingly mobile by the day. The upside is that we’re all in constant communication on the web from anywhere now. The downside is that all of our old ideologies on the standards for website development are becoming quickly outdated. A new set of standards are popping now, standards that are not necessarily a replacement of the old 800 x 600 development procedures, but more secondary to those procedures.

Recently, a Spokane based advertising agency, BHW1, undertook a new project for River Park Square, an Inland Northwest shopping, dining and entertainment destination in Spokane, Washington. The problem at hand was that the current website for the shopping center is built entirely in Flash and therefore not available via mobile devices. In order to fully optimize the website for mobile use, it would need to be completely rebuilt and Flash would not be advisable due to the mobile limitations. In looking at the issue at hand, what made the most sense was to build a separate, smaller application for the shopping center and house it as a stand alone mobile version of the website. A quick and cost effective solution came to light just this past December when RiverParkSquare.mobi went live. Now, a visit to RiverParkSquare.com from a computer looks just as it has, but the same visit via mobile device redirects the visitor to the mobile version for optimal viewing.

Mobile web isn’t the stopping point either. With devices like the iPhone and Android quickly gaining leverage in the mobile race, devices like Windows Mobile and Blackberry have nowhere to go but the same direction when it comes to mobile applications. The difference? Mobile websites are actual website code based and require an Internet connection to run. With mobile applications, however, this isn’t necessarily the case. Many mobile applications run locally, as they are just a simple program loaded on the actual device. In some cases, these applications may pull data from the web to be displayed within the application, but many do not.

So where do you go from here? As River Park Square has proven, you don’t have to change what you already have. You just need to build upon it. There are many companies out there that can build both mobile websites as well as mobile applications. Mobile website development is going to be much less expensive than mobile application development – anywhere from a fourth to a tenth of the cost, depending on the mobile application requirements. Testing is imperative with application development and updating of mobile applications has proven to be problematic at times, so if you are interested in developing an application for the iPhone or Android, make sure the company you choose to develop it fully understands this hurdle. As marketing vehicles are changing, this is forcing your traditional advertising agencies to change as well. Many businesses aren’t aware that their talented advertising agency that produces their TV, newspaper and direct mailing materials are also producing websites as well as mobile versions, much like BHW1.

A few years ago, for most companies, a website was a luxury. Now, it’s a requirement for doing business – not just in the global and domestic markets, but now in the local marketplace as well. With the growth of the mobile marketplace, it won’t be long before having a mobile optimized website as well as applications that run on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile are regarded in the same nature.