Building an Enterprise Android Tablet App - Lessons Learned

Bespoke Software

Could you use a bespoke tablet app instead of paper forms to collect data? The latest mobile app development platforms and the availability of low price tablets make it easier to build, deploy and support bespoke enterprise mobile solutions. A bespoke tablet app that syncs data back to a central web based application can be a cost effective solution for any organisation looking for faster data entry, improved data accuracy and better management information reporting.

We recently developed an android app that’s being used to collect audit data in factories. Some of the decisions we made about the approach and the lessons we learned on the way are worth sharing:

  1. Native app development for iOS and Android is expensive and slow. Instead build an HTML based app with Apache Cordova. It won’t be quite as slick as a native app but it’ll be more than good enough for fast and accurate data entry.

  2. Cordova also lets you build once but deploy to more than one platform (iOS, Android & Windows). The alternative - building and then supporting multiple native apps (one for each platform) - would become seriously expensive. It’s hard to see a business case for building multiple bespoke native apps in an enterprise context.

  3. Go a bit further and ask yourself if you really need to support more than one platform, particularly iOS. The Apple App Store takes longer to approve new apps than the Google Play store (Android). Updates also need approval and again Apple takes longer. This has big implications for how you support your users. Your testing has to be super rigorous because even critical show-stopper bugs can take hours or even days to deploy to end users.

  4. Patchy wifi coverage will create issues. Fortunately Cordova makes it relatively easy to build in offline/online data storage - so you store the data on the tablet when the wifi signal drops out and then you automatically sync with your web application when the signal reappears.

  5. Android might be your default choice. Android tablets are cheap and you can get ruggedised versions that make more sense in a factory setting. An app built with Cordova should in theory work across a wide range of different tablets. Our experience has been that it does - more or less - but there’s a strong argument that says that targeting a small and very well tested set of devices will make your support life easier.

  6. What about Microsoft? There are more and more low cost Windows tablets on the market and Microsoft are making it even easier to develop Windows apps - with tools and technologies that are very familiar to any Microsoft.NET developer. Think seriously about leveraging Microsoft’s great development tools to build a Windows app that can be run on a low cost Windows tablet if you want to integrate with applications built on the Microsoft technology stack.

  7. As already mentioned, testing during tablet app development is even more critical because deploying updates takes longer. Updates to a cloud based web application are quick - critical updates can be rolled out almost as soon as the software is fixed - but getting updates out to tablet users is slower. Testing adds to the development cost in the short term but you can’t avoid it - update a web application and hardly anyone notices; repeated requests to end users to update their tablet app because testing is always squeezed will slowly nibble away at confidence in the system.

Developing a bespoke tablet app isn’t really any harder than building a bespoke web application. The challenges are around deployment and support but these can be mitigated with a careful planning, sensible platform choices and plenty of testing.


With bespoke software, SkillsLogic can help you streamline processes, improve collaboration and analyse your data.

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SkillsLogic Ltd,
Cooper Buildings,
Sheffield Technology Park,
Arundel Street,
Sheffield,
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+44 (0)114 383 0093
info@skillslogic.com


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