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With increasing speed, digital transformation is including more and more sectors and industries whose core business is not information technology. Mobile applications are helping companies to raise the efficiency of their processes to a new level. The challenge involves the quick provision of corresponding solutions and the required compatibility with countless mobile end devices. In view of the complexity of mobile business applications, which is continuing to grow with the increasing integration of various systems, there is a demand for solutions that can drastically reduce the need for resources, time, and costs and that are characterised by an outstanding user experience. In developing such solutions, Cluster Reply relies on the use of Xamarin.
Mobile applications in the area of Industry 4.0, such as for documenting work on production facilities, are still often confronted with insufficient Internet connections. Accordingly, mobile applications must be deployable autonomously, without access to the central infrastructure. Business logics that are intended to be depicted by mobile apps are becoming increasingly more complex. New paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Industry 4.0, with the digitalisation of all logistics processes, require ever more extensive integration of systems that formerly operated separately. On the user side, the large number of various end devices and operating systems constitute a further challenge for apps. The trend toward BYOD (bring your own device) has made this challenge even greater. Accordingly, applications today must often be developed separately for iOS, Android, and Windows. This creates substantial expenditure of resources, which can exponentially increase in the event of regular updates to the app. These factors constitute a serious threat to the digital transformation process.
In developing mobile business applications, Cluster Reply relies on Xamarin technology in combination with the platform-independent data base SQLite. Using Xamarin in development makes it possible to write more than 90% of an application’s source code in a platform-independent manner, eliminating the need to port application logic, data management, and user interfaces to other operating systems. For Cluster Reply, the following approach has proved to be a reliable procedure:
The main benefits of using Xamarin are substantially shortened app development times and thus faster go-to-market. Moreover, comprehensive compatibility creates broad acceptance on the user side. Modifications, updates, and function enhancements following the initial roll-out can be accomplished in a simpler, faster, and more cost-effective manner, which lowers the total costs for operating the solutions. Since there is no added effort for porting to different operating systems, more resources can be mobilised for key tasks: the development of value-adding business logic, i.e. the core aim of the application itself. In the end, the use of Xamarin boosts the agility of the development process and shortens development cycles. This boosts the company’s competitiveness and customer satisfaction increases. Cluster Reply specialises in the Microsoft ecosystem, and has many years of experience in developing business solutions on Xamarin.