Taxonomy of mobile applications
Depending on need, mobile apps can be structured quite differently
- Untethered App
- Example: Angry Birds game
- Server: never or rarely requires one
- UI paradigm: must be a Local App
- Difficulty: Can be the easiest, although there are super complex and rich games
- Mobile Only App
- Example: Instagram
- Server: requires your own server, with intermittent or constant connection
- UI paradigm: local App by definition. There is no user interface for the ‘server’ or ‘service’
- Difficulty: Significant challenge to provide all the functionality over limited device.
- Pure web-ui
- Example: GMail application on iPhone
- Server: requires your own server, and connected all the time
- UI paradigm: web based UI, by definition
- Difficulty: You save a lot of trouble by not having to develop local app. Much less mobile platform dependence
- Mobile front end to rich web app
- Example: Facebook app on iPhone and Android
- Server: your own server, providing it’s own user experience, plus a connection to the mobile app
- UI paradigm: Looks like a native app, often is a hybrid
- Difficulty: One of the most difficult. You need to design two separate and complete user experiences
n.b. there other permutations but this scheme catches most of the major cases.
n.b 2. the acceptable and popular approaches are constantly evolving based on user expectation and available tools and platforms