Enormous growth is forecast in the use of Smartphones worldwide and with them the consumption of mobile apps. Mobile app developers are in increasingly high demand as companies scramble to keep up with their users who are rapidly moving beyond the desktop paradigm.
And developers are scrambling to increase the efficiency of their practices to keep up with the demand. As the success of Instagram and other highly engineered mobile apps has shown, there's a lot to get right. It's not just design and interaction that make a great mobile app, but also speed, security and a host of other factors that do no meet the eye (or touch the finger).
Building out all of these features in a bespoke manner has been a huge pain point for mobile developers until the advent of rentable backend platforms, or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I will be writing about the pros and cons of these solutions and describing some of the leading providers in an upcoming post, but the bottom line is that, when appropriate, PaaS saves developers and their clients tons of time and money.
The "black-boxing" of the mobile backend limits flexibility, but also radically lowers the barrier of entry for mobile apps. As Scott Jenson has said from the users point of view, lowering the pain level for use also lowers the benefit necessary to justify an app. The same can be said from the business point of view on the backend. Lowering the cost and time of deployment makes experimentation easier to justify—and with experimentation comes the chance of doing something genuinely new and innovative.
John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard, a cloud-based platform as a service company that provided the infographic below, wrote about this topic recently on Forbes.com. "One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is also one of the most overlooked: the ability to accelerate innovation. By moving to the cloud model, you can scale back investment in non-differentiating IT infrastructure and instead focus on exploring big, new ideas that lead to better products, services and business results."
For app designers and developers, PaaS means that you have an integrated development and deployment environment at your fingertips, often including sophisticated software frameworks that also speed your work. For the not-enough-to-go-around developers with not-enough-hours-in-the-day, this is all very good news.
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