I read with great interest the recent article, Salesforce aims to bypass expensive mobile app dev, covering Salesforce’s Lighting Platform Mobile written by Martin Banks. Quoting Leyla Seka, EVP and Head of Salesforce Mobile, the article points out the fundamental challenge mobile developers face on a regular basis:
Why aren’t more companies delivering engaging experiences on mobile? The answer is simple — it’s hard. Building user experiences for iOS and Android and enhancing them with backend services requires heavy development work and can become costly and time-consuming……. And whether it’s fair or not, consumers today expect every mobile experience to be just as immersive, intuitive and easy-to-use as the likes of Spotify, Google Waze, or Instagram. That’s a high bar.
The article goes on to explain Salesforce’s commitment to low code development tools and the 180+ pre-built JavaScript components it provides to help developers build great apps.
Salesforce is one of the leaders in mobile development and application development. Today, there are dozens of low code mobile development platforms. Plenty of mobile developers code mobile apps natively. The reality is, it’s a hotly contested market. We would never think to compare one development platform to another. Within Appdome ourselves, our development platform preferences vary and the religious battles between iOS and Android app development environments remain very, “ehem,” healthy. Developers like all creators value choice. In this way, we’re like the rest of our users – constantly in search for the most efficient, repeatable means to deliver great apps to our users.
As you’ve seen, our technology accelerates mobile app release cycles. We use Artificial Intelligence and a unique architectural approach to empower developers and non-developers alike to customize and enhance apps. Our users use Appdome to add features, mobile app standards and external services like SDKs, APIs and more to mobile apps in seconds. Users select from literally thousands of features and services on Appdome, combining them into Android and iOS in the click a button.
Introducing Build My App
Up until today, the button our users clicked to manifest their creations carried the proud title – “Fuse My App”. Fuse or Fusion refers to the brand name of the modular, technological method we use to add services to apps. Today, we post this blog to let our users know that the button has changed. As of today, we no longer say “Fuse” or “Fuse My App”. On the platform, you’ll now see “Build” and “Build My App,” as these words most closely describe what we’ve become – a place where people come to build new services into apps in seconds.
Build Mobile Apps with AI on Appdome
It took us a while to get here. As everyone knows, we started by merely adding 1 or 2 discrete SDKs to apps. We’ve grown to embody hundreds of SDKs, APIs, vendor services, mobile standards, our own feature sets and more. The feature richness and vendor implementations available on Appdome continue to evolve very quickly. To grow, we train our AI coding engine with new code sets that take on an ever increasing part of the manual work needed to add services and features into apps. Users are often surprised that there are no dependencies on using Appdome, nothing to code or change in the app to make apps compatible with our service. After the Appdome system completes a user’s requested implementation, users are delighted that the resulting package is an .ipa or .apk. All that remains is signing the app and deploying to an app store. Our recent foray into CI/CD integrations only serve to complete the story – Appdome is a place where anyone can come to build new services into apps in seconds. A place where you can build mobile apps with AI.
Customizing apps to suit enterprise use cases is a large part of what we do. Larger still is our use inside mobile development groups and app makers themselves. Quite honestly, it was this group – the app developer – that most often suggested we simply say “Build My App”. “Build My App”, they argue was more natural. “You save us from building it,” was a common refrain. They’re right. That’s exactly what we do. We save mobile developers from having to build what one major app vendor said very bluntly: “that other stuff”. The fact that Appdome can now go further, adding full workflows, UI and combine one-of-a-kind coding solutions out of a box is, as one SDK vendor put it, “magical.”
As 2019 evolves, expect us to do more to support building great apps on Appdome. While we do not plan to enter into the same market as Salesforce and other mobile development platforms. We do plan to do our part to help developers and non-developers alike customize, enhance and improve already great apps with the services, features, SDKs and APIs needed in their apps. It’s a big bright day in the mobile app universe. We’re happy to be a part of it.
