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If you are looking for a business application to serve a specific purpose like managing customers, leads, contracts, vendors, and orders, you need to invest in software that suits your specific requirements. Before investing in a software application package, however, consider the viability of a platform that enables professionals to develop their own apps with minimum coding. Application building is highly accessible to business professionals with the advent of pioneering technological developments. These high-productivity platforms hardly require hand-coding. As an app developer, you will be able to build, deploy, and upgrade apps of different levels of complexities with minimal coding. High productivity Rapid Application Development Platforms like HokuApps enable IT and business executives to act as co-developers in the app development process. Plenty of businesses have leveraged our platform to increase their revenue by creating business-specific apps within days or weeks, and not months.
To help you through the decision process of partnering with a RAD Platform like HokuApps, we present a buyer’s guide. We have outlined in this article three decision points in order to help you assess your app development needs.
• The decision of whether to buy apps vs. creating apps should be informed by what is required for the app in specificity. If the need is a generic one and/or a static app is what you need, you could avail of a packaged cloud-based app to serve the purpose. This is what you need when your requirement is a set of pre-built features to deal with a particular kind of challenge. These solutions are straight out-of-the-box and offer little customization.
• On the other hand, your business might require high customization options to suit your business’s exact requirements. Customization capabilities are highly restricted in packaged application software. If you build your own app, you will be able to customize and update your application as and when required, in a short span of time.
• Additionally, if your data and process needs are unique or frequently changing to keep up with consumer demands, or if one of your processes, in particular, gives you an edge over the competition, then building your own customized app is going to be far more productive than purchasing an off-the-shelf package.
• In case your organization needs to create a series of apps at rapid speed, developing and maintaining multiple apps is convenient for a rapid app development platform. The process also proves to be cost-efficient in comparison to having to buy one packaged application software at a time for each app development project. Also, RAD platforms like HokuApps provide a high level of modules customization with more than 500 API tools.
Once you have decided to build your own solution rather than buy one off-the-shelf, the next decision point is how you will go about creating the app/apps. There are two approaches to developing customized apps:
Every function requires hand-coding in this approach to developing apps. Also, this approach would follow linear developmental stages which are quite rigid and do not allow scope for iterations and enhanced collaboration between business and IT.
This approach uses automated application codes and requires minimal hand-coding (less than 10%). This approach is facilitated by high-productivity low-code custom mobile app development platforms. It uses flexible methods and allows for iteration at any stage of app creation and encourages enhanced collaboration among business processes.
Centralized and decentralized technology budgets are a factor in the decision-making process. As the business owns a large part of the technology budget, they often prefer to invest in cost-effective solutions like the HokuApps RAD platform which offer complete adaptivity, flexibility, and durability.
If you want to develop an app in a matter of days or weeks and be able to implement updates to the applications over-the-air, you should opt for the HokuApps RAD platform. This is especially true since coding and technical expertise are scarce, and speed plus efficiency are of utmost importance. Developers of various skill levels can use these high-productivity platforms as it is streamlined and employs visual development tools to create apps with a drag-and-drop method.
While the inclusion of business professionals in the process of creating apps is an idea that still evokes much apprehension, getting builders on the development team is a trend that is growing and looks set to catch on further. An organization is driven by the motive to increase profitability at some level. This makes business-productivity-driven app development increasingly relevant in our age of digital disruptions. Growing consumer expectations and digital transformation have necessitated the adoption of this approach. In fact, Gartner predicts that 60% of RAD Platforms are going to exclude formal IT resources by 2020.
The demand for customization is growing in the market, both for customer-facing apps as well as enterprise apps, and this is best facilitated by low-code RAD software. Even if you have strong IT capabilities in your organizational repository, these will soon be redundant, as studies predict.
The market for apps is evolving rapidly, and those businesses that adapt and stay flexible are the ones that remain ahead of their contemporaries. Besides, IT-intensive and traditional app development methods are usually not as efficient as they take a longer time to deliver and deploy apps. They do not have much scope for collaboration and have more chances of failing to meet customers’ expectations. Additionally, Rapid Web Application Development is also slow to develop and make iterations based on feedback.
Having weighed the pros and cons, therefore, it is critical to go about the decision-making process per the requirements of the organization. Besides, an emerging best practice is to combine the positive aspects of the native approach with cutting-edge cross-platform rapid application development approach. This bimodal enterprise capability would give you both high control over the developmental process as well as high productivity simultaneously. This would entail leveraging the two (native and cross-platform) RAD platform approaches to complement each other and reap its two-fold benefits – stability and innovation.
Once you have decided to select the HokuApps Rapid Application Development platform, the next logical step is to make contact to allow experienced personnel to provide the best of a fast-evolving platform solution.
