Building mobile first applications

Building mobile-first applications have become an important part of web development in today's world. The requirement of all the companies has now inclined towards building mobile-first applications. Recently my company also started moving towards building mobile-first applications. We initially had an application that was only on the web. Now that the business demands applications that work both on mobile as well as desktop applications, it is mandatory thing to build applications that are mobile-first.

What is the mobile-first application?

Mobile-first applications are the applications that are fully compatible with mobile browsers. Basically, all the tasks that are capable of doing on a desktop browser should be available on the mobile browser as well. The main thing here is the flexibility to switch between the different sizes of the screen. For I would like to show some examples as to how the mobile-first applications are built. There are two images below where the first one is for the desktop and the second one is for the mobile device.

The first image is for the desktop application and the second image is for the mobile application. We will be able to see the transformation there. The social icons go down making it viewable or readable on the mobile device but on a desktop device it can be on a wide mode that looks good.

People are focusing on these types of aspects at the UX level when building a mobile-first applications. The demand for UX designers plays a vital role in these things. In modern designing people prefer mobile-first applications more than the legacy view of the application and that is the primary reason why people switch from older web pages to fresh and new web pages.

How easy is it to build mobile-first applications?

Building a mobile-first application from scratch is easier compared to transforming an existing web application into a mobile-first application. There are some frameworks and libraries out there that make the web development task easier. For example, Bootstrap is a framework that can be used effectively to build mobile-friendly applications. Based on the size of the window bootstrap is capable of adjusting the components inside the web page. It is also easy to use as the components come with inbuilt adjusting capabilities making the task easier for the developers.

By default, the modern design itself supports mobile-first applications. People choose libraries like bootstrap or tailwind that support mobile-first applications. Even if a developer is a vanilla CSS developer who uses no libraries it is still possible to build mobile-first applications but using such libraries gives us an advantage in such a way that website designing time is very minimal. Nearly a decade back building such applications was a bit challenging and there were also no devices apart from the desktop browsers where the application would be used. But with the modern technology and the tools we have, it becomes easier to build applications that are mobile-friendly first before even entering the desktop browser.

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Posted with STEMGeeks