Mobile Applications

Mobile devices are the fastest-growing enterprise platforms in IT, with custom software development companies like Blueberry designing every possible mobile application to run on tablets and smartphones.

The fundamental consideration with delivering bespoke business applications over mobile devices is the wide variety of smartphone and tablet computers, and the ever-increasing number of features each device offers. This is important since mobile apps can be designed in one of two ways – using a web browser as its destination, or a dedicated app for each mobile device.

The advantage of using the web browser approach is that you don’t have to develop a separate application for each platform. Of course, it’s never as simple as that, but we can still write versions of an application for many different platforms using a single language and many pieces of reusable code.

With a dedicated app for a particular mobile device, there are cost implications associated with development. At the same time, a dedicated app will almost certainly perform better than an app that has to run through a browser.

In many cases, modern Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) blur this distinction by offering offline support, push notifications and home‑screen installation while still being built with web technologies.

Depending on what the customer wants, successful mobile app development often involves a combination of technologies and techniques. This is where a diverse skill set, together with an understanding of the mobile landscape, is essential to provide businesses not only with high-quality and relevant development services but also effective and ongoing guidance in this time of accelerating change.

The challenges at this stage in mobile technology are mirrored by an ever-increasing range of opportunities for businesses to implement new and improved processes. In general, there are two main approaches to delivering business solutions over mobiles:

1. Web

The mobile web has undergone enormous advances over the past few years. Network performance continues to improve with widespread 5G and emerging 5G‑Advanced rollouts.

Smartphone and tablet usage is now effectively universal in most demographics, and high‑speed 4G/5G connectivity makes mobile web access a standard part of daily life.

2. Mobile Apps

Mobile applications are software solutions deployed directly onto devices such as tablets and phones – many of these tie into internet services in order to provide extended functionality of a website, although in some cases the mobile application is the priority and the website acts as an extension.

Mobile app development is split between native and cross-platform (previously called “hybrid”).

• Native development involves writing code targeting the platform’s compiler, giving developers full access to device features such as GPS, sensors, and native graphics rendering. On iOS, Swift is now the preferred language (replacing Objective-C for most new projects), while on Android, Kotlin has largely taken over from Java, though Java is still used in legacy systems. Native apps usually offer the best performance and integration.
• Cross-platform development has matured significantly. Today, Flutter (Dart) and React Native (JavaScript/TypeScript) are the leading frameworks, surpassing older solutions like Xamarin (C#). These frameworks allow developers to maintain a single codebase while publishing to both iOS and Android with near-native performance. In addition, Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) is gaining momentum for sharing business logic across platforms, even when UI layers are still written natively.

While cross-platform solutions make it easier to target multiple platforms and reduce costs, native apps still provide the deepest access to hardware features and the highest possible performance. In practice, many projects blend approaches, using cross-platform frameworks for most functionality but falling back to native code where necessary.

In terms of technologies, the ecosystem has shifted from older mobile programming staples such as C++ and Objective-C to newer, platform-optimized choices like Swift, Kotlin, and modern cross-platform frameworks. Each major platform still provides its own Software Development Kit (SDK) with tools to support design, testing, debugging, and deployment.

The complexity of mobile application development means that even targeting a single platform involves extensive testing. Many businesses maximise resources by balancing native user interaction with cross-platform resources at the back-end, so that a mobile app effectively functions as the interface for a web-based system.

Google’s Android operating system has been going from strength to strength over the past few years. Having initially been seen as a platform of interest mainly to geeks, Android is now the #1 smartphone operating system in terms of market share in the UK. Moreover, with the platform’s adoption by electronics giants such as Samsung, Android has firmly established itself as the primary operating system of the mobile computing sector – for now at least.

Globally, Android and iOS together account for the vast majority of smartphones, with Android leading on volume and iOS dominant in certain premium and enterprise segments.

Android’s growth is partly down to the openness of the platform, which is available on phones from across the market and from various hardware manufacturers, making it accessible to a more diverse range of users than iPhone, which runs the closed, proprietary iOS system developed by Apple.

Mobile apps available on the Android platform are also subject to very little control, which produces a great deal of variety and flexibility but naturally results in a higher proportion of poor quality applications in circulation.

Google’s approach is the opposite of Apple – which retains total control over its mobile phone operating system. Google’s initial idea was to make a new phone operating system which would be open and free. Their hope was that this would encourage innovative development of both phones and applications. Google has invested in Android because it expected that Web searches would increasingly happen on mobiles, and it wanted to be able to advertise to mobile users.

Although Google’s position within the mobile world seems very strong right now, it is still difficult to say how things are going to progress.

The Android system is offering a good level of integration with business services such as Microsoft Exchange, and the open nature of the platform makes integrating with existing enterprise applications relatively straightforward for developers.

The iPhone was of course in a dominant position as the advance of the smartphone took shape, and the platform is still in a very powerful place. Although business users tended toward BlackBerry in the past, both iPhone and Android have continued to make considerable headway in enterprise as well as consumer markets.

The iPhone offers support for external business utilities such as Microsoft Exchange and, unlike Android, iPhone apps are subject to serious vetting by Apple themselves before users can deploy them – and even then, they can only buy the app through Apple’s App Store. The natural downside to this heightened level of control over the platform as a whole is a lack of flexibility. But for business applications the plus side is a virtual guarantee of quality and reliability for the end user – and ultimately for any business processes being implemented through the technology.

With the hugely popular visual designs and interaction models Apple is famous for, the iPhone is certainly an attractive platform for commercial applications. Apple has been responsible for developing innovative features whose success has prompted other platforms to emulate them, such as multi-touch interaction and Apple Pay.

Blueberry has strong Swift and cross‑platform development skills for iOS, and we also maintain Objective‑C expertise for legacy applications where needed.

Although iPhone has lost considerable smartphone ground to Android and other competitors, it is generally still seen as the platform to beat, and continues to be a market leader in many ways.

BlackBerry was once the leading business smartphone platform, but BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 have now reached end‑of‑life. Modern BlackBerry‑branded devices run Android, and the company is now better known for enterprise security software than phones. We still support legacy BlackBerry projects where required, but new development is focused on Android and iOS.

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