Computerworld -
Johnson & Johnson, the consumer packaged-goods giant, recently hired Jeff Mathers as director of mobility. He's charged with accelerating the development and deployment of mobile apps for all lines of business at the company.
With a job like that, it's clear he's not going to be building just one or two apps. Instead, he'll be jumping into a new trend among leading-edge companies: Building scores of mobile apps, many designed to be used for short periods -- days or months -- rather than indefinitely.
When mobile app development often takes a minimum of six months, how can companies afford to build apps that are to be used for so little time? Some, like Johnson & Johnson (J&J), are experimenting with offerings known as back-end as a service (BaaS), designed to take care of the humdrum capabilities required for most apps so that internal developers can focus instead on the user interface and experience.
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Computerworld - Johnson & Johnson, the consumer packaged-goods giant, recently hired Jeff Mathers as director of mobility. He's charged with accelerating the development and deployment of mobile apps for all lines of business at the company.
With a job like that, it's clear he's not going to be building just one or two apps. Instead, he'll be jumping into a new trend among leading-edge companies: Building scores of mobile apps, many designed to be used for short periods -- days or months -- rather than indefinitely.
When mobile app development often takes a minimum of six months, how can companies afford to build apps that are to be used for so little time? Some, like Johnson & Johnson (J&J), are experimenting with offerings known as back-end as a service (BaaS), designed to take care of the humdrum capabilities required for most apps so that internal developers can focus instead on the user interface and experience.
"For a consumer-facing app, typically what you want to build in is messaging, social integration, payment, advertising and other features," says Lars Kamp, a consultant at Accenture Mobility, which offers mobile consulting and software services.
App developers thus need to build those same capabilities -- and a similar set for internal apps -- repeatedly, for the first app they build as well as for the five-hundredth. "Those are undifferentiating features. So why not industrialize that?" Kamp asks.
[See related story, "BaaS: It's a crowded (and young) market."]
BaaS vendors including Parse, Stackmob, Kinvey and Cloudmine have responded to that question by launching services aimed at making it quick, easy and inexpensive for developers to add those undifferentiated functions so in-house developers can work on more strategic app pieces. The service providers package functions including log-in systems and push notifications into APIs compatible with most mobile platforms so developers can simply drop the code into their apps.
Testing BaaS
To test the BaaS waters, some businesses are building short-lived, non-mission-critical apps.
At J&J, Jeff Mathers is starting out by using Kinvey in an app that employees will use for a few days while attending an internal conference. "We're in exploratory mode," he says.
Employees will be able to download the app to their iPads or interact with the app at a dozen iPads stationed at a booth. The app will allow them to provide feedback on the conference and will track messages they post on Twitter. The comments, paired with photos of the employees, will be displayed on the main screen at the conference.
Kinvey is providing the Twitter integration and log-in process. Without Kinvey, Mathers would have had to spin up Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances, create a database, and then set up a Twitter developer account and learn how to integrate it. It might take days to even start developing the app, while with Kinvey he says he was developing within 10 minutes.
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