An Introduction to Mobile Applications
2014
The design of mobile applications has a significant impact on the amount of mobile data they use. This chapter provides a high-level overview of mobile applications. Mobile applications typically have a component on the handheld device and another component running on a server in the Internet. The communication protocol used between the two components defines the nature of the application. Web-based mobile applications rely exclusively on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol for such communication, while native protocols use their own private protocol written over the mobile operating systems. A hybrid mobile application uses a mix of these two approaches. Developers of mobile applications have to deal with the issues related to standard software engineering practices. Some of the challenges of normal software development are exacerbated in case of mobile applications because of a large number of devices that exist and the rapidity with which the underlying operating systems change.