A hybrid mobile web app is an application written mostly in JavaScript/HTML5 and wrapped in a native shell using tools such as PhoneGap. A native app is written in a platform-specific programming language (Objective C for iOS, Java for Android, etc.) and is able to take full advantage of all device-specific features. There are also “pure” mobile web apps that run in a browser, but they are not really apps per se because they cannot be placed in platform stores such as Apple’s AppStore or Google’s Play.

There are many parameters to consider when deciding between hybrid and native app development. Many articles on the web provide “pros and cons” which aid analysis. But is there an easy way to understand the tradeoffs, as in the classic project management triangle? Here’s one: the choice is between a multiplatform solution, the beauty of an awesome user experience, and the beast: development cost.

Basically, when choosing how you will develop a mobile app, you have to settle for two out of three. Here’s how it works.

If you want a the most elegant and beautiful app that runs both on iOS and Android, be prepared to reach deep into your pocket. That’s because you’ll have to do native apps for each platform. You could probably design your app in a way that some code would be reusable, but the potential savings are quite limited. If you paid X dollars to design and develop your native app for one platform, be prepared to spend 70%-80% of X for each additional platform.

If you have a limited budget, and still want to reach the maximum possible group of users across multiple platforms, be prepared to sacrifice some of the slickness of the user experience. Why? With HTML5 and JavaScript, it only costs 15-30% extra to support each additional platform. You could even afford to include Windows Phone 8 which is gaining momentum, and not break the bank. But complex animations, scrollable lists of transparent images, certain background processes like always-on location tracking: some of that stuff is going to have stay home. Javascript doesn’t have what it takes to pull these off smoothly.

But if you are developing an enterprise mobile app, then you can usually do it in a cross-platform hybrid and do it cheaply. Your audience may not need a top-notch user experience. After years of working with your current enterprise application on Windows, designed in say the early 2000′s, will your users really be that demanding for UX? Even if you believe they will, do you have the budget to address this perceived need? If you do, we’d like to hear from you!

Don’t get us wrong – it’s certainly possible to develop slick, beautiful apps in HTML5/JavaScript as we know from experience. Been there, done that. But be careful – you need to know the pitfalls and limitations of the technology stack you are choosing. You need to know what can be done and what can’t be done. Or you need a developer that knows, and can bring that knowledge to your project. At Waverley, we love AngularJS because it allows us to build really slick JavaScript apps that function well on all major platforms. More on that in another post.

What is your experience with choosing an approach to mobile development? What route have you chosen, what were the tradeoffs you had to make? Did the approach you chose meet your expectations? Share your story!

Since I go through these personally, over time I’ve started to notice a trend: the country with the largest share of attempted hacks to Waverley’s server is China. This week, I decided to build a spreadsheet to take a closer look at the geographic distribution of hacking attempts. Since the first of the year, Waverley’s server has logged 307 failed logins. Of this total, 124 (40.4%) originated in China. The second biggest offender was the United States, with 40 attemps (13%). Rounding out the top five are Korea, Germany and Brazil .

Interestingly, it is reported that “President Obama will confront Chinese president Xi Jinping next week over a spate of cyber-attacks on the US, including the latest allegation that Chinese hackers gained access to more than two dozen of America’s most advanced weapons systems.” I have no idea if the hacking attempts on our servers originating from China are coordinated and run by the military or if the Chinese people just have a lot of time on their hands to break into computer systems.

China, the largest country has 19.1% of worlds by population, and India is at 17.1%. However comparing the two countries of similar size shows very different picture from the hacking perspective. As of May 30, 2013, China has 124 hacking attempts compared to India’s 7, almost 18 times the number as seen from China.

Sometime during the last few months, Waverley began limiting entire subnets from offending Chinese IP addresses, masking off the least significant byte of the IP address. It’s hard to say how much of a difference this has made, but we still get lots of failed logins from China. Interestingly, almost all the “Made in China” hacks are directed at the account “root”, whereas access attempts from other countries are slightly more likely to use people’s names.

At Waverley we believe that magic happens when buyers and sellers of a software development project integrate their knowledge to create combined know-how greater than the sum. Assuming the buyers, or clients, know their business well and that the sellers, or providers, know how to design, write and deliver great software, the magic happens when two parties figure out how to bring their experience and knowledge together to get the job done. They need to listen to one another and brainstorm to find the best possible approaches for solving problems, which technology to choose and what processes to employ in design and implementation. When a vendor has specific domain experience it can be reassuring for the client – but is domain experience really such a critical component of a successful project?

We feel there are several considerations that trump domain experience. Care, attention, intelligence and trust for starters. Granted, trust is something that results from successful outcomes so trust takes time. But the others are there from the very first phone call. Care and attention mean prompt and thoughtful responses: “digging down” to get to a deeper level of understanding. Intelligence means bringing smart thinking to a problem, sometimes by those who are looking at the problem in a new way, and are in a position to question assumptions, challenge supposed limitations and take a fresh look at how the problem is framed and then solved.

Naturally the process used to build the solution is important. Agile is great, we use it on every project, but Agile is only a process; it’s the people who implement the process that make it work. Creating an environment where the team works together and solves problems well is also crucial. Environment is perhaps an over-used term. At Waverley we believe it covers everything from the physical work environment to the tools used to communicate over distance and the quality and bandwidth of that communication, down to the accessibility and readability of documents used to share ideas.

So when shopping for a software developer, we suggest looking beyond domain experience. Otherwise you might miss the magic: a chance to build a great working relationship and the clean design, solid engineering and top results that come with it.

The leaders among business services organizations are embracing a new global delivery concept, which KPMG calls “Extended Global Enterprise” or “EGE”. EGE includes end-to-end processes, with internal resources and outsourced service providers working together towards the goal of delivering high-value services.

As a result of this paradigm shift, client expectations are changing. Service providers need to adjust or become irrelevant. Forget about transactional long-term mega-deals with the emphasis on back office and TCO metrics. Labor arbitrage is more and more out of the equation. Some argue that even location matters less. All of which begs the question of whether outsourcing is dead or is instead evolving into something broader and wider than the traditional ìmodel? I think that the latter is true.

According to the survey the support for Agile with outsourced projects has fallen significantly from last year. Only 49% of respondents said they use, or plan to use, Agile methods – down from 77%!  Given our success with Agile methods this trend surprises me. Unfortunately the results report doesn’t go into any detail about why people are struggling in this area, I would have loved to get into the details of this one.

We have found that Agile actually aids us in our success and could not imagine a better way to coordinate with our clients and make sure we are addressing their highest priority features and issues during development. Agile promotes close communication which is so vital in outsourced projects.  I can confirm that we are not part of that drop in outsourced Agile support!

Erik’s point is that many entrepreneurs, clients, product managers, etc don’t often stop to consider all that needs to happen for good UI design to happen, and that good UI design is not the goal but a kind of natural follow-on to effective thinking about a problem: thinking that is informed by considering how work actually gets done, thinking that considers the views of multiple stakeholders, most of whom are not concerned with design at all, thinking that leads to solutions that are relevant, parsimonious, elegant, adaptable, and robust.

In Erik’s words, “UX is the intangible design of a strategy that brings us to a solution.” Put another way, UX is all about how to approach a problem, whereas UI expresses, in limited terms, a part of the solution that good multi-stakeholder problem-solving generates. UI is about layout and flow and widgets and content and transitions and giving the user the tools he needs as the need arises. UX is about how to get there, how to know what parts of the original problem can’t be addressed by the UI alone, and how to keep asking the right questions so the UI evolves with the way real people actually end up using the product.

Symbian, Android and iOS, Europe

ComScore also analyzed the European market for smartphones over the last couple of years (data reported below through July 2011). Between 2010 and 2011 Google Android gained 16.2 percentage points, almost exactly matching the market share lost by Nokia’s Symbian. Apple iOS and RIM both grew by about 1.3%. Current trends indicate that Symbian will continue to lose market share and disappear entirely by 2015. Also worth noting is the far greater growth of Android’s market share compared with Apple’s iOS.

Android and iOS, USA

ComScore’s analysis of the US market runs through February 2012. As of that date, Google’s Android has just passed the 50% market share mark (50.1%), a 3.2% gain relative to November 2011. Apple’s iOS market share grew only 1,5% in the same quarter, and now stands at 30,2% overall. iOS and Android together occupy an 80.3% share of the US smartphone market. Of the competition only RIM is managing to hang on with 13.4% of the market, down 3.2% from November 2011 to February 2012. Windows Phone market share stands at 3.9% and Nokia’s Symbian at 1.5%.

Things begin to get interesting in what Tuckman called the Storming stage, when team members open up and start confronting each other’s ideas, discuss the degree of autonomy each will have, and settle on what leadership model will operate. In contrast to Forming, the Storming stage is almost always uncomfortable, but it’s just as necessary to the growth and eventual productivity of the team. One might say it’s the process by which a collection of individuals becomes a team, so it’s important to go through it and not get stuck there. In the next two stages, Norming and Performing, some ideas and personal agendas within the group are given up, a mutually agreed-upon plan and shared set of priorities emerge, and things start to hum along.

At Waverley we’re familiar with this cycle. We’ve seen it within our own organization (changing circumstances and new hires can partially reset the cycle) and in most new client relationships. A a new project kicks off and bright, talented people who have never worked together form a new far-located team. When the stakes are high (and in software design and engineering they almost always are), there’s always a moment when the new team is finding its legs, the clock is ticking, and the temperature rises. We’ve learned to harness this heat to improve outcomes, to cook tastier applications. While the team Storms and Norms synergies are created, and these synergies are a big part of what brings us to work in the morning.

On a recent project, the first in which Waverley’s new in-house UX/UI team was asked to produce a complete cross-platform mobile app design for a visionary entrepreneur, Tuckman’s phases were right there, textbook-style. The concept was so exciting that our lead designer started envisioning features and opportunities well beyond what was initially presented. And although the enthusiasm was welcome, it wasn’t long before we were busier sketching version 3 than writing a spec for version 1. The client, who was on a very tight budget for the UX design phase of the project, started to push back while our designer maintained that the only way to stress-test the flow and interrelation of certain features was to project them out into future versions. All good, but the clock was ticking and before too long the design of actual screens had to take priority.

This was classic Storming. In those early conversations, framing and reframing functionality, we weren’t just debating abstractions, we were getting to know the app, and each other: observing how we each responded to challenges while stress-testing assumptions about everything from on-screen help to the potential for social networking. Our designer was getting his head around the app’s proposed features, something the client had long-since done, but fundamental to what happened next: an elegant set of screens started to emerge, informed by the concerns of all stakeholders: market knowledge, cost constraints, user needs, and aesthetics, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Respect doesn’t come easy, and politely pretending to agree doesn’t cut it when people are demanding the best of themselves and each other. Storms have a way of focusing our minds and sharpening our senses. Faced together, they bring out the best in a group.