Mobile Application (Apps) Development

Mobile Application Development courses that help students learn how to develop applications for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

Fancy making your own mobile apps? Its not that difficult as it may seem like, even if you don’t have any coding skills or programming background.

There are several mobile apps software and courses that teach how to creating Mobile Apps for Android / iPhone, that can help you get right into the game.

It doesn’t matter much if you’re not a Mac user, or don’t know programming; what matters more is that you need to think like an entrepreneur — make money by giving the market what it wants.

In these courses, the students are introduced to the current mobile operating systems and mobile application development environments. Students design mobile applications with more than one user interface and more than one system component. Students learn to develop applications for several popular mobile devices. Students create mobile applications that uses multi-threading to access online servers. Students design and build a variety of apps throughout the course to reinforce the concepts being taught and to help students practice what they are learning.

What students learn?

• Recognize the capabilities and limitations of mobile devices
• Design mobile applications with more than one user interface and more than one system component.
• Develop mobile applications on a popular mobile development platform.
• Evaluate the performance of mobile applications based on pre-set criteria

Topics covered in these courses

• Introduction to Android App Development
• Android Fundamentals: Building Your First App
• Activities, Intents, and Fragments
• Building a Simple App/Game: Design Challenges
• Services, Broadcast Receivers, and Data Persistence
• Processes, Threads, and Internet Access
• App Publishing and Business Models

Recommended Reading Resources (Materials, Books)

Helpful resources to complement your learning:

• Android Developer website at https://developer.android.com
• Apple Developer website at https://developer.apple.com/

Deitel, P., & Deitel, H. (2017). Android how to program (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. (Textbook)

How to Make Money with Mobile Apps

Mobile apps is not just about games. From weather to entertainment, apps are being used by millions of users around the world.

And there are thousands of apps available on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, for you to choose from.

It means, there’s also lots of opportunities waiting to be tapped, for both developers as well as publishers.

So how do you make money with apps?

There are various options available for iOS and Android app developers to make money with apps, the three main ones are:

• Ad Supported:
  • Banner Advertising
  • Interstitial Advertising (Displayed before or after an expected content page)
• Freemium (App is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged to access advanced features)
• Premium (these are NOT free)

 

Pros / Cons of Ads

The problem with the traditional mobile ads is that they annoy users and lead to low click through rates.

Using Ads reduces the space available on screen affecting the user experience, and of course the users don’t like them.

An alternative form of mobile monetization is native advertising where the brand message is mixed with the app content, graphics and user flow, leading to higher click-through rates.

In such cases, the natural pauses in the apps are exploited to show the ads (e.g. completing a level, finishing a workout etc.) without disrupting the user experience.

Every app developer hopes to build the next big hit but, as is the case for any hit-driven market, a large group will be left behind with little to show for their efforts. As in the past, larger amounts of revenue will go to those who enable development than to those who are doing the development. Adobe, Amazon, and Google made theirs enabling web developers; and as the mobile revolution takes hold, some new players will emerge providing tools to create apps and those may be the biggest winners.