Speaking at one of their conferences, Gartner principal research analyst Adrian Leow said last week that enterprises are increasingly finding it difficult to build all the mobile apps they need. The demand for mobile apps is increasing far faster than the supply of mobile developers can create them and it’s only going to get worse. This is clearly a problem.
There are three possible solutions to this problem:
- Find a way to decrease the demand of mobile apps. (Good luck with that one.)
- Increase the number of mobile developers.
- Decrease the time it takes to build mobile apps.
Solutions 2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive. You could potentially do both. Adrian Leow even points to the solution when he suggests that developers use rapid mobile app development tools. These tools can provide solution 3, but they don’t create necessarily create more developers.
At Xojo, we have been building rapid application development tools for more than a decade so we know how to do it. Plus, we know how to make it easy enough that citizen developers (those that build apps but don’t have “developer” in their job title) can build the apps they need themselves. Xojo supports the ability to build native iPhone and iPad apps along with the ability to build web and desktop apps from a single IDE and language. Xojo is ideal for citizen developers as they often need desktop or web counterparts to their mobile apps. Anyone with experience in Visual Basic will find it quite easy to adapt to Xojo.
Xojo provides the combined solution that creates more developers by enabling citizen developers taking some of the burden off of IT and dramatically decreasing the development time of mobile applications.
