1.1 INTRODUCTION
When the idea of reaching people first struck home in the dark ages, we wanted to find ways for people to use and pay for our services. We had to find a way to let people know these services existed. In early days there were town criers, then during the industrial revolution when we could reproduce and distribute text to a largely literate audience, we had broadsheets. Then came the catalogue where mercantile companies would list their wares for sale. Once we heard the first radio waves, one of the first things they did was to sell advertising on the radio. This graduated to television advertising. Then along came the Internet. Everyone had to get themselves a website and would put their website address in their print, radio, and TV ads. Along came Facebook and everyone created a Facebook page for their companies.
Now, everyone wants to have an app for their customers to download. These apps go with customers wherever they are and provide instant interaction between consumer and supplier. We can push advertising into them, take orders through them, keep in touch with friends and relatives, and of course play games, listen to music and watch videos all in the palms of our hands. These experiences require devices, operating systems, and apps, all of which require software companies, architects, and developers to produce them. Unfortunately, these devices and operating systems often change.
In today's computing world, there is one thing you can be sure of; the leading operating system (OS) platform will change. As recently as 7 years ago, Microsoft Windows Mobile was the leading smartphone platform and tablet computers, while mobile, were large and clunky and ran full versions of the Windows XP and Windows 7 OS. Then came Blackberry which took a lot of market share from Windows Mobile. But that only lasted until the iPhone came along in 2007 and we went from a feature phone dominated world to a smartphone dominated one. This set a new benchmark and became the leading mobile computing platform. In the same year, the Open Handset Alliance re-released Linux-based Android-powered smartphones. Then in 2010, Google launched its Android-based Nexus series of devices. By 2011, Android-powered smartphones made up the majority of mobile OS-powered smartphones shooting past the iPhone.
While phones were taking off, in 2010 Apple released the iPad. Tablet computing was not new and in fact Microsoft and its Original Equipment Manufacturers OEM partners had been trying to sell tablet computers since 2003. However, the iPad's sleek design brought tablet computing to the masses despite the clumsy and restrictive iOS operating system. This opened up the tablet computing market which Android was well suited for. After the iPad's initial success, by 2013 Google's Android-powered tablets had overtaken iPads as the tablet of choice. Additionally, although lagging considerably behind, Microsoft has re-created itself to make a run in the mobile and tablet computer markets as well. With Microsoft's massive install base, and very large developer ecosystem, they are likely to challenge Apple and Google in the mobile and tablet space eventually. With Windows 10 released as a free upgrade for over 1.5 billion eligible devices [1], it is likely to be the most common cross platform OS. That is, over half of Gartner's predicted 2,419,864,000 devices shipped into the market in 2014 [2]. Overnight the app ecosystem market leader could change again.
What this means for software developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), hobbyist app developers, and online service providers is that every few years they will have to retarget their efforts for a new platform, new development languages, new development tools, new skills, and new ways of thinking. This is not an attractive proposition for anyone. However, due to the success of the iPhone and iPad, software developers were willing to re-skill and even purchase proprietary hardware just to be able to develop applications for the new platforms. Then when Android devices surpassed the Apple devices, these same developers painfully went through the whole process again. Developers were forced to maintain three or more separate and complete codebases. This is the problem that Platform-Independent Delivery of Mobile Apps and Services solves.
If you are not planning a platform-independent strategy, you will likely be an ex-company in 3–5 years. Due to the rapid change of the consumer and enterprise mobile computing landscape, software developers must be able to adapt to new platforms, devices, and services before their competition. While cross-platform goes a long way toward this goal, it is still cumbersome and tends to lag behind a more platform-independent strategy. While it is not practical to get completely away from device-specific app code, the more you can move off of the device and put into a reusable back-end service, the less code you have to write and maintain when a new OS version or a new platform comes along. In this book we will examine strategies to do this, and provide future proof foundations to support changes in the computing landscape down the road.
Disclaimer: This book was written in late 2014. Everything in it was accurate at that time. If you are reading this in 2025, expect that a few things have changed. Just keep this in mind as we go through this so I don't have to keep writing “At the time of this writing….”
