Liferay Accelerates Mobile Application Development
Today, Liferay Inc., a leading open source portal software company announced the release of a Mobile SDK that will ship with Liferay Enterprise Edition 6.2. You can read about all the technical benefits here, but, so what does this mean from a business standpoint? Mobile application development isn’t a new concept and for the most part, major industries, like financial services, have figured out a way to get to market with mobile apps either through the use of partners or through their internal capabilities. So, the process of creating mobile apps already exists. How does this move by Liferay change your world and is this relevant?
It’s quite obvious that investments in mobile technologies are increasing year over year and month over month due to the ubiquity of smartphone and tablet usage. In short, user experience and adoption are driving investments in mobile application development. In fact, mobile internet usage is expected to exceed desktop usage in 2014. With this in mind, overtime, your user base will increasingly expect more than just default mobile views of your application, they’ll start to expect mobile application functionality and much like how you’ll lose business with a terrible looking website, you’ll start losing your users with poor mobile user experiences.
So, what happens now? What happens now with no mobile SDK? In short, redundancy. Building a rich internet application, followed by the implementation of a mobile application across multiple devices can only be streamlined to a point, for example, at the database layer. This redundancy results in higher exponential costs for design, development and testing and much longer development cycles. Not a good combination if you’re striving to create amazing user experiences.
With the mobile SDK and beyond, Liferay will continue to create and add to the plethora of services that can be consumed in a mobile application context. And the more shared services, content & collaboration features available to you when you build your applications, the less redundancy you’ll encounter and the quicker you’ll be able to get to market with a mobile version of your applications.
This is an extremely positive announcement from Liferay and aligns very closely to our lean development principles. For us and our customers, it means we can extend the benefits of our development practices to mobile and accelerate the release of those applications even faster and most cost effectively by using Liferay as a central application hub.
