Enterprise mobile apps provide businesses with a range of great opportunities. They offer new tools to enterprise employees so they can stay organized, share information, and manage essential tasks.
Even though a mobile app for an enterprise has a wide range of benefits, getting one designed can have many challenges. With a new trend like the inclusion of animations in an app can be a task for the developers. Actually, the larger the enterprise, difficult it is to create a mobile app that can offer all the relevant features to its audience.
Enterprise Mobile Application Development Challenges
Are you in the process of developing a mobile app for your enterprise business? Here are 10 common challenges that can befall you when you are getting an enterprise app solution for yourself.
1. Information Security
As a customer, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the term security breach? It can mean credit card fraud or a stolen identity. However, when you talk about a security breach in a corporate environment, it's not just a credit card fraud or an identity theft, it is much more.
On an enterprise level, when an app is designed it handles a lot of sensitive information. It can include client account details, their personal files, financial information, social security numbers and more.
In case, you are an enterprise dealing with a lot of financial statements, data loss can turn into a serious threat for your business. And that’s why every top-notch enterprise app needs high security.
2. Right Resource & Expertise
The first thing you need to consider when designing a mobile app for your enterprise business is to find the right resource with an adequate amount of expertise. Most enterprise apps greatly fail in the market just because their customers face difficulties in operating their way around the mobile app.
According to Gartner, mobile application development for enterprise businesses have now become a necessity. Mobile app developers with limited understanding of the basic application development lifecycle and quality assurance are the real challenge that enterprises are facing in modern times.
When hiring a resource, it is essential to make sure that your mobile app developer should understand quality assurance, UX design, security requirements and there way around back-end integration accurately.
3. Designing User-Interface
Good and bad experiences play a massive role in deciding whether your business is going to turn into a success story or will it spiral down the failure drain. When you are working in an enterprise, everything from your vision to mission to core pillars of your organization is all well planned.
When your app is operating on a massive scale, you need to make sure that your enterprise mobile app must also have a great user-interface as well! And for that, you need to keep a track of the latest UI design trends.
Imagine if your enterprise-level employees are asked to work with a badly designed UI. It can become very confusing for them to perform their activities or update their information.
A good UI is more about usability than it is about functionality.
4. Integrating Backend Resources
Apart from designing a great user interface, enterprise solutions nowadays also face difficulties in integrating backend resources with the organization’s mobile app solutions.
According to Arun Gupta, Java Champion and the former VP of Developer Relations at Couchbase,
"I would say with Android and iOS right now, there’s not a lot of innovation happening. The fun stuff is figuring out how to integrate your deployment variables, your edge devices, and actually derive meaningful information from it,"
When you are working in an enterprise, you use a variety of applications and systems to fulfill various tasks. Having an integrated system allows users to perform all necessary actions from a single app. It improves efficiency and reduces data redundancy. Also, your whole team stays on the same page.
Overcoming this challenge can really help enterprises keep their employees engaged with the mobile app.
5. Pushing App Updates
An app that can’t offer seamless communication to the employee circle of an organization devoid of its use permanently. Enterprise-level organizations mostly invest hundreds and thousands of dollars to create this mobility experience. If one thing’s for sure, they can’t afford to have that on their plate.
Hence, to ensure that the mobile app works seamlessly within the organization, they govern that the apps are in sync and always in use by the employees. However, when employees are running different versions of the same app, it can create hindrance in communication as well as operations.
On an enterprise level, not all employees will pay attention to updating the app on their own. And if your operations somewhat depend on your enterprise mobility solution, you should have a proper EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management) or MAM (Mobile Application Management) in place.
You can instantly push app updates to users’ devices without waiting on approvals for the update.
6. Superimposing API Strategies
When designing a mobile app solution on an enterprise-scale, it is important that you devise a solid API strategy. APIs allow certain functionalities to work on your app when they are integrated.
Where most organizations face difficulty is when they are applying a suggested API on an existing API strategy for the app. It is important that the developers should address that the current strategy coherently works with the existing strategy and both are fit to work together without any conflict.
This can pose a real challenge for app developers proposing a new design to an enterprise. It will require reverse engineering where developers have to study the previous implementations.
No wonder, enterprise mobile apps are a great solution as they can help manage information commendably within an organization. A well-designed enterprise app can fulfill many objectives by streamlining various operations.
However, if your organization is failing to follow proper protocols, or it is not considering consultancy from a third party experienced development solution, your app can create problems for your business. Create something that works, keep the challenges in mind.
The Closing Note
Much like any other app development, the designing and development process of an enterprise mobile app requires full focus and all the hard work of the development team. At various stages, there may be different concerns that may pop, which needs to be addressed accordingly. For example, taking care of the security aspects can be catered through BYOD and different modes of connectivity can be a task.
If you are looking to develop an enterprise mobile app in the future, do ping us, and we can genuinely help you with the development process and the possible challenges that you face.
Sr. Content Strategist
Meet Manish Chandra Srivastava, the Strategic Content Architect & Marketing Guru who turns brands into legends. Armed with a Masters in Mass Communication (2015-17), Manish has dazzled giants like Collegedunia, Embibe, and Archies. His work is spotlighted on Hackernoon, Gamasutra, and Elearning Industry.
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