Mobile Application Development

Apps

We build apps in two different ways: native and cross-platform.

Both approaches have positives and negatives so it's important to work through those before making a decision.

Native gives the best possible performance and "feel".  This involves using Apple or Google's APIs and languages directly to give you the smoothest highest quality feel.  Unfortunately in this approach few things can be common and most need to be written twice (hence it costs more in development, design and testing).

Cross-platform used to mean clunky horrible apps but these days they are fast and very usable.  They also allow a high degree of reusability so at least 40% of the code is written once and re-used; that leads to a cheaper and faster build.  

Talk to us if you want to know more.

Web Optimised for Mobile

For a lot of cases having a mobile optimised web site is required (even if you have an app you can't guarantee all your customers will use it).

At Code Wizards we don't always advocate "mobile first" and we don't always do responsive design.

Why?  Well every client is different and their requirements are different.  There's still a lot of industries / sectors where mobile is last - for example esports and gaming clients - so desktop / full-size screen first is a better model.  Also responsive design is awesome for allowing re-use of content and reducing costs but sometimes the mobile approach needs to be different.  

When we use our mobiles we use them in different ways to our other devices and we need to reflect that.

In our view mobile should

• optimise for the biggest uses so you don't need to clamber through a million menus to find what you need - if most people want to check their balance then make that front and central
• make the flow through the site really slick for users - if a payment page is a single massive page on desktop then breaking that into sections on mobile can make it massively easier for users
• use the view to the maximum - use carousels to optimise the space used by images
• move the navigation so it's nearer a user's thumb (so none of those awkward moments where you try and find the menu with a finger while balancing the device in your hand!)