Create the best mobile apps

Mobile Application Architecture

Deploy best-of-breed mobile architectures from a single platform

“There is no single solution to choosing a mobile architecture when building apps in your organization. Application leaders will need to rotate between multiple architectures.1”

1 Gartner, “Key Considerations When Building Web, Native or Hybrid Mobile Apps”, Published: 14 February 2020, ID: G00465982

There are two types of mobile applications:

     1. App Store (native and hybrid)

     2. Mobile Browser (responsive web and PWAs)

Native is by far the best app-store-based experience and PWA is the best browser-based experience.

By supporting both Native and PWA, Mendix empowers organizations to deliver best-of-breed mobile solutions for every situation.

NATIVE

Native Mobile Done Right, Quickly

Building native mobile apps is just as easy as building web apps – with Mendix.

Leveraging the React Native framework, Mendix enables you to create both iOS and Android apps from a single code base. Equally important, you reuse the same model and application logic as your web apps.

Factor in Mendix’s quick time to value and best-of-breed architecture, and you’ve got a tool that gets native mobile apps into the hands of your customers and employees at speed and at scale.

A NATIVE DIVE

Why native really matters

Delivering native mobile solutions to your users means your company will supply them with the same mobile experiences they use in their everyday lives, which are smooth, intuitive and interactive apps that are effortless and efficient.

Optimized for both performance and device interaction, Mendix’s native mobile capabilities delivers features loved by both users and developers.

Features that users love:
Offline Functionality
Push Notifications
GPS and NFC
Gestures, Beacons, Fingerprint Scanning
Face ID
Barcode Scanning
Features that developers love:
One-click Publishing
Over-the-Air Updates
Instant Testing
Mobile Backend Services
Single codebase
Offline Sync

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive web apps (PWA) provide an upgraded mobile browser experience that delivers better performance, off-line capabilities and device integration.

Installed locally and launched from the device’s home screen, PWAs improve performance by reducing trips back to the server. You get a native-like experience, but without an App Store dependency.

As PWAs continue to push the browser’s off-line and device integration capabilities, hybrid containers will become a thing of the past.

PWAs are not just for mobile apps! You can utilized PWAs to improve the user experience and performance of desktop browser applications as well.

For use cases that require both PWAs and native apps, you can reuse the same models, back-end services and application logic for both – no need to reinvent the wheel.

Responsive Design

Delivering a great web experience is a crucial component to any digital initiative. But even expert JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS developers admit it’s time-consuming to create great, consistent experiences across form factors and mobile platforms. Mendix’s Atlas UI Framework addresses this challenge, while remaining standards-based, open, and extensible.

We put responsive UI design in the hands of rapid developers through a fully open source, responsive framework integrated into the Mendix visual development environment.

With Mendix, even non-designers can quickly create rich, great looking apps that automatically adapt to device form factors.

Full-Featured Responsive Apps
All features are available on every type of device — phone, tablet, or desktop. Powered by the Mendix UI Framework

  • Responsive Layouts

    Layouts control your app’s navigation and how content is rendered on the screen. Responsive layouts include options for all navigation styles — top-bar, side-bar, main, and sub menu and are available with every theme.

  • Page Templates

    Choose from a wide array of out-of-the-box templates for a vast range of page types, including overview, master-detail, dashboard, location and wizard. Our UI framework also comes with a fully responsive layout grid so you can define specific layout behavior for smartphone, tablet, and desktop.

  • Building Blocks

    Speed up development of custom pages using building blocks: assemblies of multiple, pre-configured widgets that you can drag and drop into pages to implement common UI patterns, such as headers, timelines, and wizards.

  • Widgets

    Further build out your pages by adding additional widgets from the rich set of user interface elements that come with the platform, as well as an ever-expanding set of widgets found in the Mendix Marketplace.

  • Design Properties

    Widgets are styled automatically according to the theme you select, but the styling and placement can be customized on a case-by-case basis using design properties.

Choosing the right mobile architecture

Gartner, “Key Considerations When Building Web, Native or Hybrid Mobile Apps,” Published: 14 February 2020, ID: G00465982

Should you build a mobile web, progressive web, or native mobile app?

In Gartner’s Key Considerations When Building Web, Native or Hybrid Mobile Apps, they asked this same question. They concluded that “Application leaders should expect to simultaneously use multiple architectures such as web, progressive web app (PWA), hybrid and native.”

At Mendix, we recommend a different approach: best-of-breed.

Analyzing Gartner’s Mobile Architectural Trade-Offs, when cost and code portability are eliminated from the equation, Native is BY FAR the best option for app-store-based experiences and PWA is the best browser-based option.

With Mendix, we eliminate the need to make sacrifices based on cost and code portability. Instead, choose between delivering the best app-store-based experiences (native) or browser-based experiences (PWA).

Where does Mendix stand apart? Native.

Most low-code vendors allow you to build PWAs for the best browser-based experiences, but they won’t support native for the best app-store-based experiences. They rely on hybrid.

And don’t be fooled by claims that hybrid is as good as native. They are not – check out the graphic above. There is an undeniable difference in performance, device integration and overall richness of the user experience. Native is better. And your users can tell the difference.

End users — regardless of whether they are coworkers or customers — expect superb, modern mobile apps. As expectations continue to rise, native mobile is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s become a must-have.

With Mendix, you can quickly deliver best-of-breed app-store-based and browser-based experiences – or a combination of both – from a single low-code platform. It’s what sets us apart from the rest.

BEST-OF-BREED BENEFITS FOR MOBILE APPS

Turbo-charge PWA mobile development

Utilize capabilities in the browser that used to require a hybrid container.

Under the hood, PWAs get the same building blocks as responsive web apps.

We handle of local installation, home-screen icon, and full-screen viewing.

Visual development means any developer can build leading-edge PWAs.

Turbo-charge native mobile development

Unlike hybrid, there’s no more cumbersome coding to mimic native features.

Under the hood, our apps utilized native iOS and Android controls – not HTML.

Leverage components us or the React Native community – or create your own!

Visual development means any developer can build iOS and Android apps.

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