When you’re thinking about using your internet marketing experience towards developing an app for the mobile market, you might be drawn into the question of whether or not this is similar to developing an app for a personal computer or a console? I’m here to answer that question in this blog post. Mobile apps do have to be quite different from PC apps and PC software. Most of that is because you’re working for people using a different type of device, whether it’s a mobile phone, a tablet computer or some other type of device.
The key thing you should be thinking about is the size of the screen. There is much more screen real estate available on a personal computer than there is on a mobile device. Even if you have a high resolution screen on a mobile device, this still won’t be this obvious to a user purely based on the size of the screen not just the resolutions. Make sure to develop something which will work in the smallest screen and it doesn’t require the high resolution available on a standard PC.
You need to be aware of the power of a mobile device compared to a PC. A mobile device is run by a battery for a large amount of time. That means that if you develop an app, which requires huge amount of power, the battery will run down very quickly. This will not just be acceptable for most of the users. If it’s a cell phone, they want it to run all day without having to run to a charger every few minutes. You need to make sure that the app is not overpowered. Even within this level of processing power below them for PC and need to develop with this in mind.
You also need to think about the time input mechanism available on mobile device, such as, how is data entered into the device. This may be a keyboard but most generally, there will be some form of touch screen. What you will notice with a touch screen when compared to using a mouse is that the touch screen is much less accurate. A size of a finger or a stylus is less able to select a very small area of the screen on a mobile device. Then you will be able to select an equivalent area on a PC. So, design your interface with that in mind. Make sure that the touch area is relatively large especially when you use your fingertips or a stylus.
You need to know when you’re developing a mobile app, this is going to be a very different process to developing for a PC app and you need to take the device being developed for into account. Make sure you understand that the smallest screen with much less accuracy is going to influence how input unto the screen is done. Also, consider the general power of the device and whether it will run your proposed mobile app. If you can do this, and your app still sounds like a winner then you should go ahead and develop it and quickly enter into the mobile market.