Mobile Application Development—An Interesting Career Path for Students

“British teen sells iPhone app for $30 million.”

“Adam Hildreth creates social networking app Dubblt, and rakes in $3.7 million.”

These stories in newspapers, websites, and various other discussions inspire and make us eager to read about how these teenagers or young adults made it big at such a young age.

It’s the age of mobile devices, and they are here to stay. Today, the average city resident is most likely to have access to the Internet and therefore, new applications and websites. People want to try new mobile applications and they are often topics of discussion in most social gatherings. With the rise in the number of mobile phones and tablets, the demand for mobile applications will increase. For aspiring app developers, this is good news.

A mobile app is a computer application intended to run on mobile devices. Two of the popular platforms that host apps are Apple store and Google Play store.

Whether it is big money that attracts you or an attractive pay, there are a lot of both established and upcoming companies that constantly look to hire people equipped with development skills for application development on mobile devices.

Scope of Mobile App Development

The possibilities that stem from learning application development for mobile devices are endless. Some of the roles that are hot in the market are:

• UX/UI designer: Responsible for developing the look and experience of the application
• Mobile marketing: This role requires marketing your application to get more users and promoting the service.
• App developer: A crucial role in the world of mobile apps that generally requires coding and developing the mobile app.
• Growth hacker: A unique and new role. This person experiments with different strategies and hacks to improve the mobile app’s prospects in the market.

Skill Set

The skill sets required are technical. It is good to start with good programmeming skills. If you have not had sufficient exposure, then going for a course in computer applications is a good investment. Languages that are good to master are C, C++, Objective C, Java, and Go. This can be supported by good understanding of deployment and hosting of these apps on iOS and Android.

Also, building a skillset around user experience, marketing, and algorithm development equips you to do a plethora of tasks by yourself.

Future Scope

As per Gartner reports, it is projected that the number of mobile connections in India will cross 900 million. The average Indian user spends close to 52 minutes per day online. India is one of the booming economies and the global tech world has its eyes set on how it progresses.

If we look at the global arena, then the app market is projected to be a $77 billion industry by 2017 according to Entrepreneur.com.

Learn—Anywhere, Anytime

The Internet is a goldmine of resources. Without further delay, you can start learning how to make and deploy mobile apps as you finish studying online tutorials. Websites like code.org, developer.android.com, freevideolectures.com, and youtube.com are some wonderful places to start learning.

Make notes as you read, try coding and checking the progress. Learning which is driven by a target to achieve something is effective.

A Day in the Life of an App Developer

The life and times of a mobile app developer are different. It involves a lot of hard work, coding, and some more coding. While building the application, as a mobile app developer, you will face a lot of challenges, but they will help you become better at your skills.

Remember though that it can be a tough walk as well. There are changes that you have to make based on feedback you get from users. Feedback is not always kind as sometimes the audience using the app might like a particular feature more and something you build very dearly might not click with them.

But, in the end, it is a good journey. You are building a mobile game or application that could tomorrow become a big success. It is definitely worth diving into the world of app development.