In recent years, the number of developers in the mobile development outsourcing industry has considerably increased. First, as mobile devices became more affordable, many enthusiasts have learned mobile applications development on their spare time. Then, these engineers have become professional mobile developers. Also, many companies have trained engineers on mobile development skills. Nowadays, two breeds of mobile developers are available in the mobile development outsourcing market.
Mobile Development Outsourcing
Develop mobile applications seamlessly.
Platform Developers usually know popular mobile platforms in depth. For instance, today, these platforms are iOS from Apple and Android from Google. Platform developers usually master the native platform features well and build deeply integrated applications for a given platform. In its early stages, the mobile development outsourcing market used to have mostly platform developers.
Cross Platform Developers tend to have a more shallow platform knowledge and leverage cross-platform frameworks to write mobile applications. For instance, today, popular cross-platform frameworks include ReactNative, Xamarin and Flutter, among others. As a result, these frameworks, popular in the mobile development outsourcing industry, enable quick developments. However, they tend to not always utilise all capabilities of a given mobile platform.
Deciding whether to use a cross-platform framework or rely on a platform specific native knowledge is a key decision to be taken fairly early in a project.
Typically, a good mobile developer has a few core skills:
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- Deep understanding of the mobile development lifecycle
- Ability to optimize mobile code and make it efficient
- Mastering in-memory DB or device local storage
- Good knowledge of REST APIs and JSON
- Knowledge of notification / push framework of the platform.
- Bonus : Ability to write unit tests to auto-test the code
Usually, good mobile engineers, particularly for Android, have previously been good Java engineers. Although younger developers have become mobile engineers directly at the start of their career, the majority of developers in the mobile development outsourcing market have evolved into this role over time. In the earlier earlier stages of their career, they typically focused on web development or desktop application.
