The Need
Today, as consumers, we are all getting used to an almost omnipresent network connectivity, from Wi-Fi in Starbucks and restaurants to airplanes and 4G connectivity in our mobile devices. We incorrectly assume the same environment for enterprises while it could be quite the opposite for a business. We typically lose signal under a bridge, in a train, inside the airport or at a conference center and tons of other places.On a personal side, it’s perfectly ok to lose connectivity for a few minutes or seconds or have a low signal reception however, if a business was to run on such an infrastructure, losing connectivity for a few seconds could mean losing a customer.
For example, if a salesperson is capturing an order in his/her iPad at a conference and lost connectivity for a few seconds, the potential customer is not going to wait to repeat the order and would simply walk away. There are quite a few business scenarios in sales, logistics, field services, etc., where a few seconds of lost connectivity could have a direct impact on customer experience and business.
Then there are mission critical business situations where mobile devices are needed but network connectivity is simply not an option. For example, when service engineers from a utility company need to assist with post-storm recovery, maintenance and repair operations in manufacturing, Oil-&-Gas, chemical and other heavy duty industries where network connectivity may not even be an option for a mobile app.
Some of the primary reasons why enterprises prefer offline apps are:
- Seamless app performance to the end users and remove any dependency on network carriers or 3rd parties
- Ensure that the field operations are not compromised or slowed down for the lack of network connectivity
- Guarantee that no data lost even while the app is not communicating
What was stopping enterprises
However building an offline capable mobile app has always been a complex, time-consuming and expensive affair, because good offline apps needs to have few fundamental architectural components in place to provide a seamless experience. For example, a high quality offline app will have the following features:
- Offline authentication
- Encrypt and store all required business data, securely on the device
- Execute and apply the right business rules locally on the device
- Have data synchronization and data orchestration capabilities
- Provide a queue to sequence and playback transactions
- Data comparison engine to identify conflicts and
- A conflict resolution engine to manage all conflicts among offline users
- Robust MDM (Mobile Device Management) and MAM (Mobile Application Management)
As you can see, keeping the app requirements and logic aside, building an offline capable app takes knowledge, skills, time and money just to get the infrastructure right. On top it, imagine replicating this for all available mobile OS (operating system). No wonder enterprises are finding it difficult to build and deploy offline capable apps, as it takes a lengthy deployment and a large budget to rollout.
The Game-changer
That is – until now. Enter the appsFreedom Platform. The appsFreedom platform provides all these and more offline capabilities out-of-the-box, and the best part is, it can all be achieved with little to no programming. Enterprises can build and deploy offline capable apps, very rapidly, typically in less than 1/4th of the time with far fewer resources as compared to any traditional approach of building offline mobile apps.
The appsFreedom Platform is the first Platform to give Rapid Offline Apps capability, out of the box. It is a game changer for your enterprise that will let you deploy mission critical offline apps, in no time without investing a lot on developer workforce to build, deploy and maintain offline apps.