Build Faster Apps with AWS Mobile Services

The mobile app development space is highly competitive. AWS Mobile Services offer a wide range of tools and services to build new-age apps to cater to the needs of mobile users. Know the best practices that can drive the success of your app.

The world is increasingly becoming digitalized. Digital transformation has impacted the way businesses connect and engage with their customers. This has made mobile apps an essential part of our lives and the business landscape. Consider these numbers:

1. There will be around 7 billion mobile users globally by 2021.
2. Mobile app downloads are expected to reach 258 billion by 2022.
3. On average, a mobile user in the US has more than 100 apps installed on their phones.
4. A mobile user checks their smartphone 63 times in a day.

While mobile apps offer plenty of opportunities to businesses, the competition is intense. A survey by Amazon Web Services (AWS) highlights that 67% of businesses building apps believe they must speed up development to remain competitive and 56% say improvements in the app lead to increased profits.

Many companies are changing the way they build and manage mobile applications and are using modern application development platforms and methods to build awesome, stable and secure apps. One such platform that is gaining popularity among mobile app developers is Amazon Web Services (AWS) mobile services.

AWS Mobile Services acts as a one-stop hub to help businesses build mobile apps. Some of the key tools and services available at AWS include:

• AWS Amplify: Manages the back-end of your mobile app and provides a framework to integrate the backend with the frontend. You can also automate the release process of both the front-end and back-end of your app using this tool. This, in turn, speeds up the app release.
• Amazon Cognito: Helps mobile app developers in adding user sign-up, sign-in, and access controls quickly and easily. It also enables user authentication through Facebook, Twitter login ids. Cognito also allows you to save data locally on a user’s device, which allows apps to work offline.
• Amazon Pinpoint: Facilitates sending targeted messages like promotional alerts, transactional and engagement messages to app users through multiple channels.
• AWS Device Farm: It is a mobile app testing service that accelerates the development process. Your development team can use this service to test both Android and iOS mobile apps and web apps on many devices at once. It helps your team to identify and fix issues quickly by providing videos, screenshots, logs, and app performance data to identify and fix issues quickly.
• AWS AppSync: Helps in building data-driven mobile and web apps by securely handling all the data management tasks like data access, synchronization and manipulation across multiple data sources.

AWS Mobile Services not only provides you with tools to build apps faster but also adds new features, tests and releases.

You can build apps faster, manage them better, upgrade them quickly and drive user engagement using AWS. At Gemini Consulting & Services, our mobile app development team has considerable experience in building apps on AWS Cloud. Click here to know how we can accentuate your digital transformation journey with user-friendly mobile apps.

If you are building a mobile app or planning to build apps on AWS mobile services, then this best-practice driven approach will help you. Here are a few tips to follow in app development using AWS cloud.

1. Build Microservices Architecture: Companies often find it tough to manage a monolithic app once it grows in size and functionality. Microservices allow you to divide an app into components that are easy to manage, support faster adoption, allow you to quickly integrate new features and save time and costs.
2. Leverage AWS Lambda: This allows you to build and run apps without the need for provisioning and managing servers. It also provides flexible scaling.
3. Automate Security: App security is a top concern among users as well as enterprises that develop apps for internal use. Build security into the app development workflow during the pre-deployment phase. This helps you capture automated events/notifications of any changes to your infrastructure and take action.
4. Use Amplify Libraries: The AWS Amplify service functions as a cloud-based back-end and has three main components: Amplify Libraries, Amplify CLI and Amplify Console. You can leverage the Amplify Libraries with back-ends created using the CLI or with existing AWS back-ends.
5. Use Data Lakes: If your mobile app is collecting and analyzing a lot of data, then Amazon will provide data lakes to manage it. The data lakes can help you ingest and store data from multiple sources into a centralized platform, build data catalogs to search and use data stored in the data lake, turn raw data assets into optimized usable formats etc.