With the advent of technology, users started experiencing the functionality of desktop computers on their hand-held devices, giving rise to smartphone usage. The population of smartphone users have started growing rapidly, so much that mobile devices have started dominating over the traditional desktop computers. It is common to see mobile apps becoming ubiquitous in our life.

The Scope of Mobile Applications

The proliferation of apps can be seen in every domain of life- be it shopping or studying or anything one can possibly think of. It makes sense for businesses to go with the trend to achieve unprecedented growth, especially when the internet is required inevitable to perform even the smallest tasks, including serving customers.

The Rising Need of Mobile Apps in Business

If a business restrains itself from the web apps, then it is creating limitations for itself. For instance, the organizations, irrespective of their sector, send thousands of messages in a day to their customers and employees. A large portion of messages have attachments, files, important documents, etc. It becomes tedious to manage the growing amount of data. Along with this, other issues like restoration, security, and productivity, compliance arise frequently. So, demands for email archiving apps started to emerge because of their benefits and likewise with other functions.

Although email archiving solutions have been around for years, businesses providing these services did not realize the potential of email archiving mobile apps until recently. As a result, they faced a lot of difficulties and potential losses in business.

A Tale of Windows and iOS App Development

Overview:

One of the clients of Pratham faced a similar difficulty. The client enjoys the status of the world’s first compliance driven archiving solution provider. The app was a web-based app, which was a carrier-grade forensic archiving and emails compliance solution. It allowed organizations to collect, store and save every email and instant message securely in a tamper-evident repository. The users could avail functionalities like searching, retrieving, forwarding, and replying directly from the application.

However, the web solution allowed access to archived emails only on the desktop via the web browser. The organizations that require email archiving solutions started demanding for mobile-based apps because of the limitations posed by the web-based apps. Rising demands for faster, tamper-proof, and reliable solution forced the client to develop a mobile app that could be accessed on iPad or iPhone or Windows Mobile.

Challenges

The major challenge in the process of developing the mobile application was related to technology. It was required to analyse and display different formats of emails, load large size emails with embedded images on the mobile application.

Since the client wanted a mobile app for two distinct platforms, there were some platform-specific challenges. For instance, iPhone OS required decrypting emails/attachments on the fly, etc.

Approach Utilised

We decided to form a team of 5 to work on the project in two different duration gaps.

Windows:

The team decided to go step by step, addressing one challenge at a time. For windows, SDK 8.1 was used for development, and C# was used for programming. Other technologies comprised of Linux, Bugzilla, etc.

iOS:

iOS SDK 6 & 7, Objective C, SQLite, Photoshop, etc., were used to develop an app compatible with iOS.

Milestones

• The team added several vital features along with providing a seamless experience to the end users of both Windows and iOS apps.
• The swipe action feature (a newbie back then) along with some additional action features were also added in the app.

Functionality and Features

• The mobile application helped the clients to manage their operations more efficiently.
• It also provided a restoration facility to the end user along with enhancing the security of emails.
• It was a value addition for the customers which also provided them with the ease of managing compliance

The Bottom-Line

Today, the scenario is that the sale of smartphones has overtaken sales of PCs. There are many benefits of having an app for business purposes. If the business does not cater to this changing demand, it may lose its competitive advantage. Going mobile is essential for every business house.

However, a business must hire reliable and experienced developers who can provide solutions that match the expectation of customers. Pratham Software is dedicated to providing prime offshore product development services at an affordable cost. It houses the best developers who have years of experience in developing mobile apps and solutions that cater to diverse requirements of the clients.