What does a mobile app developer do?

Now we order food, buy clothes and shoes, also medicines, and thousands of other products through mobile applications. Leaving home is no longer necessary since, with just a couple of clicks, you can do many of your daily activities from a mobile device.

“With 5G technology rolling out across the world and the COVID-19 pandemic reshaping the way we view mobile communication; Mobile Internet is in a state of maximum growth. Developers are responding to changing technology demands and the rate of mobile consumption has reached unprecedented levels. This, combined with the increasing portability of smart devices, has led to mobile connectivity becoming the new norm”, they comment on the subject in a Statista article.

According to reports from the same statistics firm, in 2021 there were 230 billion global downloads of mobile applications. And in the first quarter of 2022, users downloaded approximately 28.3 billion applications on Google Play, while in the Apple App Store they accounted for 8.5 million downloads, which serves to measure the impact of both the use of applications and the use of operating systems.

Responsibilities of a mobile app developer

In this context, mobile application developers are among the most sought-after professionals in the technology industry. For this reason, you have to be very attentive to the profile that you are going to hire so that you are sure that they have the necessary skills for the platform that you need to develop.

You must be clear that, always, the responsibilities of a mobile application developer will depend on the experience you have. The more experience, the more challenges.

“The primary duty of a mobile application developer is to create, maintain, and deploy source code to develop mobile applications and mobile platform programs that meet the needs and requirements of customers using computer programming languages,” they explained in an article published by the Value Colleges portal.

The work of mobile application developers is also aimed at designing application prototypes, giving structure to such an application and supporting development plans.

Basic Skills a Mobile App Developer Must Have

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or relevant courses and certifications in the area.
• Knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Also knowledge of Java web applications.
• Logical thinking, as “app developers often have to figure out how to make different features work across a variety of devices and operating systems. If you love to solve problems, you will excel in this career”, detailed in Thinkful.
• Design knowledge. Although UX designers take care of the graphical part of mobile applications, as a developer, it is a very valuable skill to handle the basic aspects of design.

A mobile app developer must also be a person who pays special attention to details, since the slightest mistake can cause an app catastrophe. Likewise, it must be someone who knows how to manage their time very well in order to meet project deadlines as much as possible.

What is the job of a mobile app developer?

As we have been commenting, a mobile application developer is a professional who designs, builds and implements mobile applications. This profile may have the following responsibilities:

• Turn customer needs into technical requirements, they explained in a Freelancer Map article.
• Develop APIs to make applications more functional.
• Work hand in hand with UX/UI designers.
• Ensure coherence between the functional and technical aspects.
• Make sure the frontend and backend are properly connected.
• Work on the functionality of the design of the applications.

A mobile app developer can focus on creating different types of apps:

• Android applications

“An Android developer develops apps for use on phones and tablets running the Android operating system, from interactive games to media players, e-book readers, and global navigation software. The code required for Android development is mostly open source and freely available to anyone interested in developing applications for use with the Android operating system", noted on the Career Explorer portal.

• Aplicaciones iOS

iOS app developers “have a good understanding of build views; can handle user interaction; can display data; show alerts; manage navigation; display images, labels, and text views; and integrate with REST API and parse JSON.”

As for the programming languages used by mobile application developers, they are varied and will depend on the operating system for which they are working. For example, if you are going to develop applications for Windows, you usually use C# or Visual Basic. 

If you are working on an application for Apple, the Swift programming language is being used more frequently, although many applications are also using Objective-C.

For Android app development, “a custom language similar to Java is used, although as with iOS (and even desktop operating systems), there are more than a few options for using web languages to create apps. Android Studio is development software provided by Google that greatly simplifies and speeds up Android development”, Career Explorer explained.

If you are thinking of developing a mobile application for your business, evaluate the basic aspects that we have just explained to you so that your experience is as successful as possible. And if you need a technological partner, contact us!

We recommended on video