While searching for a solution for making your next app, you may have stumbled on Rapid Mobile App Development solutions, also known as RMAD. These solutions position themselves as a code free solution to creating an original app, often using a drag and drop interface. The simplistic nature of RMAD means that creating an app with an RMAD solution is often fast, but it is hard to create something custom in design or in function. RMAD may look great on the surface: accessible, code-free programming you can use to quickly create a mobile app for your customers or your staff. Unfortunately, the easy way out is rarely the best way. While RMAD can work for a business under certain limited circumstances, it also presents a handful of key challenges. Below, we outline the limitations of RMAD so you can make a fully informed decision about whether it’s right for your business. Lack of Expert Opinion While RMAD allows you to do everything in-house, you must evaluate whether your in-house resources can deliver the expertise needed to plan and develop an app from start to finish. At a glance, it may seem more costly to hire a professional developer when you can utilize RMAD to put together the app interface on your own. But, remember that when you do it yourself, you’re also on your own when it comes to design and feature decisions for your interface. Do you have someone on your team with experience in UI and UX trends and best practices? The development of an app’s interface is just one of many reasons to hire a professional developer. A dedicated mobile app development team comes with a breadth of experience in the industry: Which user experience elements resonate best in your sector? What is the competition doing? What are the latest and greatest upgrades you should be integrating into your app? Where can you set yourself apart? These are questions developers can and will answer when you bring them onto your project. Opting for RMAD means losing the strategy collaboration and expert feedback that comes with hiring a development team. A Missed Branding Opportunity U.S. consumers now spend an average of five hours per day on their mobile devices, giving them ample opportunity to discover your mobile app. Consistent branding is important to make a positive first impression, capture new audiences, and build brand recognition across your consumer base. Unfortunately, RMAD makes it difficult to personalize your app to your exact branding standards. Companies that choose RMAD as a development tool do so at a trade-off: a faster process and lower cost, at the price of total control over functionality and brand design. You will be able to create a semi-customizable app through RMAD, but it likely won’t be consistent with the graphic standards of your other online assets, including your website. This can confuse loyal fans of your brand when launching your app, if it doesn’t appear clearly connected to your brand it may distract customers from the purpose of the app. Integrations Made More Difficult Something we often fail to appreciate about the best apps is the way they seamlessly integrate with other platforms used by the same business. We’re talking about how your mobile app talks to your online store; how the email address a customer inputs on your app registers properly in your user system; and how the purchases made on your website or in-store are automatically reflected in the app, as well. While you can produce an app quickly and by using RMAD, you likely won’t have access to the backend; i.e. the way your app interacts with any other systems of your business. Not all RMAD platforms are built equally, and some may not connect well with your existing online infrastructure. If your users encounter any errors when trying to connect between your app and your company’s website, for instance, you may not have full insight into the connectivity issue in order to resolve it. Additionally, while RMAD may offer a convenient way to develop one simple app, it’s not well-suited for a company that wants to produce multiple apps for different functions. It quickly becomes overwhelming to manage them all without proper resources in place. A Compromise in Privacy Your customer’s privacy is of the utmost importance. It’s hard to ensure security and trust if you store this valuable information in a platform where you don’t have complete control over privacy settings and upgrades. RMAD platforms can be intuitive and fast to use, but they can also compromise app security parameters. Even if you develop an app using a secure version of an RMAD platform, you won’t have control over bugs or updates that could create potential security breaches in the future. Working with a professional development team gives you better control over the security measures and the task of keeping them updated moving forward. Favoring a cloud-based (or other off-device) data holding center is another good way to avoid security risks. In the end, there are situations in which RMAD make sense, but they are few and far between. If you’re operating under a very tight budget or deadline and if the app functions you need are extremely simple, it may work for you. In the end, though, RMAD is best reserved for the prototyping stages of a project — brainstorming the product you eventually want your mobile developers to expertly build to your exact specifications. If your company has made the decision to create its own mobile app, it’s best to do it right the first time with an experienced development team.

by: Robert Wang Better thank your lucky stars. On October 5th, Adobe announced a workaround to the iPhone's complete incompatibility to Flash. The company showcased a handful of apps, developed in Flash and directly converted to a fully functional iPhone compatible form, in front of a live audience at the annual Adobe Max event in San Francisco. In enabling the channels of conversion, Adobe has opened the floodgates for ever greater volumes of 3rd party applications. Now it’s anyone’s game—provided you can make it past Apple’s heavy-handed censors. By using Flash Pro CS5 (slated for public beta later this year), aspiring developers might finally get their very own piece of the much-sought-after Apple pie. The iPhone/Flash incompatibility has long served as a source of annoyance for many a user: causing anything from minor style disruption to the total catastrophic failure of entire websites. Over the past decade, Flash has grown from amusing novelty to one of the primary mediums of content delivery on the internet. Flash is used to power everything from animated ads, to video players (the likes of which have granted YouTube and Hulu their runaway success), to full on media platforms from which complex applications can be run—all on a lightweight, easy-to-install standalone program. So why hasn’t Apple included Flash functionality on the iPhone? Due to the nature of the Flash player, it would, to be blunt, cut into Apple’s profits. Apple is currently maintaining something of a totalitarian regime over the software and hardware rights to its creations. Users can only gain additional content by purchasing it through the Apple regulated iTunes store…and Apple aims to keep it that way. So will you ever be able to stream that new trailer off MovieFone? Don’t bank on it. The Flash player actually violates the Apple Terms of Service, in fact any sort of plug-in to the Safari Browser would represent a breech in contract. But it’s a start, and with greater pressure to ease up on content restrictions arising from competition like the Google Android, it’s only a matter of time before Apple is forced to reconsider its policies. However, with html 5 in full swing, the need for dynamic content plug-ins like Flash and SilverLight is significantly reduced—potentially to the point of obsolescence. Html 5’s design means that the potential and power behind web apps freshly created on its platform will be unparalleled: faster, more immersive, and ever closer to being indistinguishable from their offline brethren. To date, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and even Microsoft are doing their best to promote it. With the lines already drawn, it’s going to be a tough, uphill battle for Adobe. Is it time to ditch your Flash books in the closest dumpster and move on? Has Flash become so prevalent that it’s now an irreplaceable Internet staple? Look for Barefoot Solutions to weigh in on the debate soon. In the meantime, let the games begin.

Lots of apps suck. Just plain, bad products that should fall into the undesirable pits of failure and leave us alone. Don’t let that happen to your idea or your app. There are plenty of ways to ensure your app is used, loved, and could even be the next big thing. Here are some tricks we’ve learned along the way from clients whose ideas went from concept to Steve-Jobs-like success story. 1) Make it stupidly simple. No no, don’t make your app stupid, make it stupidly simple to use. There is nothing more frustrating than taking the time to download an app, only to struggle with understanding how to use it. Provide a simple walk-through guide for first-time users so they understand what they are supposed to be doing with your awesome app. From there, remove complexity in every way possible. Your app should be a tool to make their lives easier or a game to bring joy. Therefore make sure yours is an asset to their app collection, not the complicated monstrosity they will be complaining to their friends about. 2) Avoid a bunch of advertisements. How many times have you downloaded a free or freemium app, and to use it you’re barraged with an unending amount of advertisement pop-ups? Or worse, ads over your listening experience. Take Spotify’s advertising model for example - while we appreciate the freemium version they put out there, users are pretty much bullied into subscribing monthly for the app due to the constant stream of music montage ruining commercials that keep screwing up your workout, especially that one time you were about to PR (personal record). Yes advertising can help fund your app, but remember there are lots of ways to monetize your app. If you choose to go the ad route, try not to overwhelm your user - because that sucks. 3) Keep your target audience in mind - and make them happy. As much as you’d like it to be, your app can’t be everyone’s best friend. Understand the person you are targeting and build your app with them in mind. If you try too hard to imagine every person who could ever possibly use your app, you’re just going to piss off everyone. Focus on the ideal user and make them giddy with your app experience. 4) Make it inexpensive or free. Everyone likes free stuff. That goes for your potential users too. Lower the barriers to entry and if you can, make your app free to download. If you do want to put a price on it, at least keep the cost down to maximize the people who will be willing to pay a buck or two for your app. 5) Learn from your audience. The Internet is filled with people with opinions. If they don’t like something you can be damned sure they are going to tell you about it. Listen to those who complain and yes, sometimes it stings a little. Just don’t forget the haters are always louder than the lovers. It’s therefore helpful to request feedback from your users to get the opinions of those who like your app and can tell you what cool things you’re doing right. You’ll probably need some positive feedback anyway as listening to the complainers and trolls can get downright taxing. 6) Study your competition. It’s helpful to understand your competition because you don’t want to reinvent an already working wheel by making a lamer version of something users know and love. Check out their model to verify that you have something unique that users can gravitate to. Sure, it can be a solution to the same problem the competition is looking to solve, but what’s going to make you successful is having taken a different angle and mastering your own competitive advantage. 7) Do one thing and do it better than anyone else. Sometimes people think their mobile app should be a mobile version of their web app, with all the functionality of the web app on the mobile app. This is typically the wrong approach - your app can’t be everything to everyone. Facebook recently realized this and is actually removing functionality and spinning them out (e.g. Messenger) into separate apps. Do yourself a favor and realize this early and focus on being an expert at that one thing. The point is, your app idea could be great in your head but flop on execution. The last thing we want for you is for that to happen. So don’t be a stranger, let us know how we can steer you in the right direction, whether it’s with us or another team who will help make sure your app isn’t awful.