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Engineering practice

Mobile application development

What is mobile application development?

Direct answer

Mobile application development is the design, build and release of software that runs on phones and tablets, either native to iOS and Android or cross-platform from a shared codebase. CodeDTX builds both, including applications that connect to enterprise systems already running in production.

Definition

Mobile application development

Building software for iOS and Android, either natively in Swift and Kotlin or cross-platform in a framework such as React Native or Flutter. The choice is a trade between platform fidelity and the cost of maintaining one codebase instead of two.

Scope

How the platform choice is made

The decision is not a preference. These are the questions that settle it on a given product.

  • Native iOS and Android

    Chosen where the product depends on platform capabilities, hardware access, or interface behaviour that a shared layer approximates rather than reproduces.

  • Cross-platform

    Chosen where the product is largely the same on both platforms and maintaining two codebases would cost more than it returns.

  • Backend and integration

    APIs, authentication, offline behaviour, and synchronisation with the systems the app has to talk to.

  • Release and store compliance

    Signing, staged rollout, store review requirements, and the update path for versions already installed.

Scope

Mobile applications with agents in them

When an application does something on a user's behalf, the interesting engineering is not the model call. It is what the app is allowed to do without asking, what it must confirm first, and how a person sees afterwards what was done. That work is covered under enterprise agentic AI.

Questions

Frequently asked

This is the practice the AI work is built on

We still take this work on. If the system you are describing should also be making decisions on its own, start with the AI side.