Getting mobile phone apps iPhone support and Play Store broadcast
Almost every customer has a smartphone, and mobile phone applications are a proven way to empower reach customers. Making that happen depends on making sure the mobile phone applications are functionally useful, stable and easy to use, and available where their users expect to find them. To get your own mobile phone applications out in stores where they need to be, build and maintain an inventory of store requirements for your target mobile devices, pick a development strategy that lets you link development for each platform to each of the stores you’ve selected, and make an App ALM model that validates mobile phone applications against both functional and store requirements.
- Mobile phone applications publishing
Whether your company depends on mobile applications for worker productivity or customer sales and support, you probably need to publish your mobile phone applications somewhere to get them into the hands of the target users. The worst possible approach to this is to write an application and then go out and try to get it placed in a store—even your own. Mobile application development has to include certification and publication requirements as co-equal to the business requirements that are driving development. Publishing happens in two steps—submission of the application, and certification of application behavior.
The most basic requirements for application submission relate to the credentialing or signing of the mobile phone applications, which will normally involve getting a digital fingerprint from the application store with which you can sign your submissions. Be especially careful to note the way that application updates are handled, and if you are updating an application follow the store’s update process rules stringently. If you don’t, you may end up posting a new application rather than a new version, and your users won’t get an automatic update.
Most mobile application developers and iPhone Developers know that submission and credentialing should be managed by a single team or person. Having divided responsibility here not only risks not submitting the application with the proper credentials, it risks submitting an application before it’s been internally validated against certification requirements.
The most basic requirements for application submission relate to the credentialing or signing of the mobile phone applications, which will normally involve getting a digital fingerprint from the application store with which you can sign your submissions. Be especially careful to note the way that application updates are handled, and if you are updating an application follow the store’s update process rules stringently. If you don’t, you may end up posting a new application rather than a new version, and your users won’t get an automatic update.
Most mobile application developers and iPhone Developers know that submission and credentialing should be managed by a single team or person. Having divided responsibility here not only risks not submitting the application with the proper credentials, it risks submitting an application before it’s been internally validated against certification requirements.
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| iPhone Application Development |
- Testing, signing and certifying mobile applications
Most stores will require that mobile phone applications be tested and certified before being posted, to weed out mobile phone applications that are poorly written, pose a risk to the user, or include material or information that store policies won’t allow. Certification of apps tends to fall into four areas. First is security; does the application present any risks of personal data or other confidential data, have serious security holes or expose the user’s network or system to hacking? Second is technical compliance; does the application use the resources of the target platform properly, in accordance with vendor recommendations, to insure stable operation? Third is functional compliance; does the application do what it’s stated to do, so users will get what they expect, and finally there is content compliance; is any media included with or distributed through the application appropriate and free of copyright risks?
Every application store has its own specific testing and requirements in each of these broad areas. You’ll need to meet these for each place you want to publish your application, and if you’re establishing an app store of your own you should use the requirements of other stores as a resource in framing your own. That means starting your app design process by collecting the repository requirements for all the sites on which you intend to make your application available. Your goal will then be to frame applications designed to insure all the broad requirement areas are considered.
Experience shows that the need to support multi-platform development for your mobile phone applications will create significant complications in certification, unless you use multi-platform development tools to minimize or eliminate platform-specific development practices. If you plan on multi-platform development, then your development tools and mobile-back-end-as-a-service (MBaaS) platforms should enforce the certification and publication requirements you’ve identified.
Every application store has its own specific testing and requirements in each of these broad areas. You’ll need to meet these for each place you want to publish your application, and if you’re establishing an app store of your own you should use the requirements of other stores as a resource in framing your own. That means starting your app design process by collecting the repository requirements for all the sites on which you intend to make your application available. Your goal will then be to frame applications designed to insure all the broad requirement areas are considered.
Experience shows that the need to support multi-platform development for your mobile phone applications will create significant complications in certification, unless you use multi-platform development tools to minimize or eliminate platform-specific development practices. If you plan on multi-platform development, then your development tools and mobile-back-end-as-a-service (MBaaS) platforms should enforce the certification and publication requirements you’ve identified.
- Validating application store requirements
To validate certification requirements for your first, and also subsequent mobile phone applications and application releases, set up an application lifecycle management process that includes testing and validation of all four areas of certification, and run all your development and releases through this process before you submit anything for certification review. You’ll need to update your lifecycle management and testing method regularly to reflect changes in certification policies or your own failures in certification. Every problem you have is an opportunity to refine both your development processes and your applications lifecycle management and testing, to be sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Pre-testing for the four certification requirements can preserve your reputation with your target application stores, and that can be critical. While experience here varies with the application store involved, application authors report that those who have recurring issues with one or more of the four main areas of certification are likely to be reviewed more carefully than those who have never had a certification problem.
Pre-testing for the four certification requirements can preserve your reputation with your target application stores, and that can be critical. While experience here varies with the application store involved, application authors report that those who have recurring issues with one or more of the four main areas of certification are likely to be reviewed more carefully than those who have never had a certification problem.
- Technical compliance is key
Security and technical compliance is normally the most rigorously tested and difficult to certify. Best practices can change over time for each platform you expect to run your mobile phone applications on, and unless your organization has professional mobile developers you can expect to fall behind on changes. This is where having a multi-platform application development tool and MBaaS element in your application will pay off. The developers of these tools have too much to lose if they build problems with certification for their users, and so they’ll work hard to stay on top.
Some cross-platform mobile development tools and MBaaS middleware products will offer template applications that have been pre-certified on each of the platforms they support. This can save you many trouble if the templates are kept up to date. To find out if your merchants are keeping up with certification changes, see how long it takes for them to support a new version of a mobile operating system or a new device.
App stores are powerful differentiators and revenue generators for mobile merchants, and they can be expected to take even more care to protect their application reputations in the future. Only by making certification a requirement from the very first, and extending certification qualification goals all the way through the application ALM process, can you make sure your own place in a store is secure.
Some cross-platform mobile development tools and MBaaS middleware products will offer template applications that have been pre-certified on each of the platforms they support. This can save you many trouble if the templates are kept up to date. To find out if your merchants are keeping up with certification changes, see how long it takes for them to support a new version of a mobile operating system or a new device.
App stores are powerful differentiators and revenue generators for mobile merchants, and they can be expected to take even more care to protect their application reputations in the future. Only by making certification a requirement from the very first, and extending certification qualification goals all the way through the application ALM process, can you make sure your own place in a store is secure.
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