If a couple of centuries ago in different parts of the world people were en masse of the Gold Rush, now it is safe to say that the modern world is completely absorbed by mobile fever. Will there be at least one person around you who doesn’t use a smartphone? And what is there. Sales of smartphones are growing at lightning speed, and manufacturers are investing huge sums in mobile technology, their development and promotion in the market. Mobile development is a very fast growing area of programming, as the number of mobile devices far exceeds the number of personal computers, and this trend will only grow.
As long as Elon Musk continues to work on colonizing Mars and chipping the human brain, we continue to use mobile phones everywhere – at work, at school, at home, on vacation… Demand for mobile app developers is growing at the same rate, but unlike frontend and backend developers , the market is not yet saturated with mobile developers, so now is the time to start mastering this promising area.
Let’s take a detailed look at what is meant by mobile application development and how relevant it is, who is a mobile application programmer, what skills he needs to learn, where to start learning, and what tools are used to develop mobile applications. We will also tell you what stages this process consists of, what is the cost of developing applications for smartphones and how much it pays off, we will understand what the salary of a mobile developer is, and how to earn money for a beginner.
Who is a mobile development vendor?
There is one common characteristic for good mobile development vendors. All of them consist of knowledge driven mobile engineers who breathe their life into soulless tech boxes, some shamans-casters who can easily speak a foreign or even a few foreign languages and can implement almost all creasy ideas related to mobile development. Also you, as a client, you should check the skill set of the people that you will be working with. Amont hard skills, there have to be the latest technologies in the list, courses taken and the projects done. Ampng soft skills, employees need to be at least responsive and responsible. Because a great programmer includes not only the knowledge of foreign and tech languages but a system thinking skill set. Because they will be involved in creating complex systems with lots of code units, integrations and user flows while working in a team of different people from different countries.
Mobile application engineers, also known as Mobile-programmer and Mobile-developer (or you might hear Android-developer / iOS-developer – is a software engineer who develops mobile-based applications for specific kinds of mobile devices (iPhone, Samsung smart phone, Pixel phone), and most often they are creating solutions for tablets and smartphones. Not that loong the Goolge first called the digital world the mobile-first world. That’s why not that long ago it became fancy among software engineers to switch from being Frontend or Backend-development to the Mobile-developer.
As was already mentioned, based on the software for which engineers are creating solutions, there are two different types of mobile engineers: Android developers and iOS developers. Engineers of the first category (Android) are using common technologies in their daily work: Java. So if you are planning to build an Android based product – you should consider companies that have such expertise.
Engineers from the second category are considered one of the most needed and profitable in the labor market. In addition,building mobile applications for Apple have become very convenient after the advent of Swift and Objective-C languages have been announced in the tech world.
What are the main tasks of a mobile application developer:
- creation of a technical specification (technical task) for the development of a mobile application;
- discussion with the customer of the stages and process of the project;
- building application architecture;
- direct programming;
- work with designers;
- support for mobile applications;
- work with testers on debugging and testing of applications;
- assistance in creating instructions for working with the finished application;
- registration of documentation;
- placement of applications in the AppStore and Google Play Market, Amazon Appstore, Opera Mobile Store and other mobile application stores.
