Annakate Ross
Hi, everybody. Today we’re joined by Ashton Bailey, a member of our mobile development team. We’ll speak with Ashton about what it takes to build a mobile app. Everything from how to choose a framework and overall technical approach to what goes into creating the timeline and budget. We’ll also cover how software development, and mobile development in particular, are constantly changing and how developers can keep up. Ashton, welcome to the show. Thanks.
Ashton Bailey
I’m really excited to be back here.
Annakate Ross
Yes, we had Ashton on in season one for our women in tech episode, which since has become one of our most popular episodes. Thanks for coming back again. We didn’t scare you off?
Ashton Bailey
Not yet.
Joey Baggott
This might be the last time for though, but, well, yes.
Annakate Ross
Let’s see how it goes. Well, let’s just get right into it. I think all really excited about this topic. Today we’re really going to dig into. So you want to build a mobile app, and what all goes into that, because it seems mobile apps are, you can just download them right from an app store. They seem easy and straightforward, but we’ll find out that there is quite a bit that goes into them.
Let’s just hop right in. I’m a client and I come to Atiba and I want to build a mobile app. Where do I begin? And I think maybe a great place to start might be cross platform versus native. Can you kind of tell us what that means, Ashton, and maybe some pros and cons of each?
Ashton Bailey
Sure, with native development, you’re working with a language that is built to work on that specific platform. The two most common, as we know, are IOs or android. You’ll have to create a code base for each of those platforms. And then if you’re trying to do cross platform, that means you write one code base and it can be used on either one, or there are a few more out there that are a lot less used, but those are the two main ones. Some pros to native is that a lot of the UX is going to be more seamless and what users are used to for that particular platform and transitions and that sort of thing are going to be a lot smoother. You have access to more device features such as Bluetooth or cameras and imaging and that sort of thing.
As the platform code is updated, which pretty much happens yearly, especially with iOS. You have access to that as a developer immediately instead of waiting for the cross platform features to catch up. Some cons to that would be because you must develop two different code bases. It takes a lot more time, potentially twice the amount, especially if you’re using the same team for both. And so that’s just going to translate into a higher cost. Basically, for the cross-platform pros, kind of the opposite. It’s a lower cost faster to develop. You have reusable code there, so you don’t have to manage how something looks or works across both.
They’ll feel the exact same way for both kinds of users. And sometimes I’ve found some users will have two different devices that work on two different like an iPhone and an Android tablet, for example. So that’s kind of important to remember there. And then also it takes less maintenance. When you have to go back into your code or update your app for some reason, then you only have one place to do it. The cons there are going to be it’s a little bit more difficult to integrate with the higher functioning hardware capabilities. If you’re trying to manage gestures, if you’re trying to do complex gestures in your app, then it’s a lot more difficult no matter what cross platform framework you’re using. Location services is a common one that’s used as well.
I’ve worked with location-based notifications. That’s incredibly difficult to do in cross platform and do it well anyway. And I mentioned Bluetooth before. That’s one that I’ve run into.
Annakate Ross
If your app is planned to use Bluetooth, the camera function and mapping cross functional platform or across functional platform might not be. There may be some challenges with that that you’ll have to overcome.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, I want to put a little asterisk next to the camera. Taking photos is simple, but managing, or what am I trying to say? Like changing photo or manipulating photos, that’s way different. It depends on how complex those needs are.
Annakate Ross
Okay, got you. And you mentioned gestures before. What do you mean by gestures?
Ashton Bailey
Anything where the user is touching the screen, like swiping left or right, or scrolling up and down if they want to do like a pinch and zoom, or a pan if they put their finger on and hold it to the screen and move it around, those are all managed differently between different platforms. And sometimes you can’t do them at the same time. And sometimes our needs are that you want to be able to swipe a page and scroll a page. So that could become really complex.
Annakate Ross
Yes. And that’s a great segue into just if you think about what mobile development is. It’s a piece of software that has to exist on a mobile phone. And between the operating systems and all the different phone types, there are just so many variables to keep in mind. Am I thinking about that in the right way? Is that part of the reason why a cross functional platform would be much harder because it would have to deal with all these different software or these different variables?
Ashton Bailey
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the number of Android phones out there, it’s literally thousands of different kinds of Android phones. It gets really complicated.
Annakate Ross
The other topic we wanted to hit on in this part of the discussion is how much a company might already have in place. One of the questions I know we like to ask clients when they first come to us with a new mobile app idea is, how much of this do you already have in place? Is this like a greenfield business? You have the idea, but nothing is leveraged yet. Or is there an app in place or a website or some part of your business concept that already exists? Could you speak to that a little bit too?
Ashton Bailey
Sure. Yeah, that’s going to affect how much you have available to bring to us initially, is going to affect how long and how much it cost. If you have an existing website, for example, then you have a little bit less design time just in the background, and then you don’t have to build the backend side of it either. If you’re going into the design phase of building your mobile app, then we have something to base on. You would want your products to kind of look and feel similar. So that’ll cut down a lot on design. And then, yeah, backend work is a whole other section. Depending on your needs, it could be half of the work and cost and time that you need. Or the same amount of work, I should say, as the front end.
Annakate Ross
Yes, for those who might not be familiar, front end would be the mobile app that you’re actually interacting with on your phone. But then the back end is the API components and whatever. The brain is working behind the scenes to process and do whatever the app needs to, right?
Ashton Bailey
Yes.
Annakate Ross
Yeah. Joey, do you want to get us into timeline and cost a little bit? I know your role on our sales team. You have a very interesting perspective on all this.
Joey Baggott
Yes. So, a little bit of background on this topic is, in general, just like, what in the world does a mobile app cost? I think that a lot of people see mobile apps they download on their phone. They’re like, okay, this seems really simple. It’s got some basic functionality. And so, I don’t know, maybe people have a misconception that you can develop a mobile app for $1,000 or something like that. And granted, they’re coming to Atiba, and I’ve dealt with people who have come to us from maybe, let’s say they’ve hired some offshore developers and they’ve kind of gotten stuck, whether it’s timelines or language barriers. They come to us in what I call rescue the project. We try to just not weed people out of the mobile app development world, but we do want to set expectations.
So how much does a mobile app cost? I mean, Ashton, you have talked about the timing, and I know there’s a lot of variables with native versus cross platform that you’ve already discussed. But let’s say someone like Anna Kate comes to me with an idea of like, find my midwife or find my doula, a mobile application or something like that. How much is that going to cost? If someone comes to you to estimate a project and they give you some functionality, do you have some ranges? I want to talk about specifically money right now, and then we’ll talk timeline. But what about the money side? Like, what is a typical estimate? Maybe an average estimate that you see for a mobile app?
Ashton Bailey
I hate to say this, but I’m never on that side of these discussions. I can give you more time, but the dollar signs are definitely not part of.
Joey Baggott
Pretty much what I hear from most estimators is, think, six figures. And I know that it may scare some people, but I think once we continue this conversation and talk more about everything that goes into a mobile app, you understand. And when you see the numbers broken down, you understand. So then let’s talk about timelines, because I think a lot of people also, they have this vision that they could get something built, whether it’s a website or a mobile app or a web application, built in like a month’s time. So again, thinking to some of the applications you’ve built, what are some of the timelines that you’ve dealt with?
Ashton Bailey
If you have absolutely nothing coming to us, it’s going to be at least a year to get a back end together and a front end that works along with it. I have spent as little as two months on a brand-new mobile project, but that had no back end, and that included all the discovery and design time as well. And it basically had four pages that you could walk through. If you want, like, a tiny little app that only does three things and they’re not complex, then, yeah, two months is the base, and you won’t have a whole lot.
Annakate Ross
Right. A lot of times when things seem simple and four pages, the next time folks are like using an app, think about what four pages means. Log in. If page is one page, the second page is dashboard, third page is. I don’t know what it is, but four pages is tiny. But also, when apps work simply, there’s usually so much that went into the building of that to make it seem simple. So simple doesn’t always mean short or inexpensive. One thing I was going to say, too, is the way that from my project management perspective, a lot of times with an initial build, there’s different ways to think about executing a project.
You could do it in a waterfall manner where you have all of your requirements designed at the top and you just kind of trickle down, knock them off one by one. You finish it. That’s the end of it. But what almost always happens, or what is the different? I guess the inverse of that approach is an agile approach where we’re developing little bits at a time, we’re testing it, we’re getting feedback, and then we’re going on from there. And a lot of times, a hybrid form of those two is what ends up taking place in the end. But especially if it’s a brand-new business, thinking about what this app needs to do and how it comes together, it’s really hard to do that completely on the front end. Our UIUX designers are great at helping think through what some of those processes and workflows are, but things inevitably come up, so you must plan for that. Having a set budget right from the start, there’s always going to be new considerations that we’ll have to address as we get there. And I know that can add to the timeline some as.
Joey Baggott
And speaking of things like that, I think, too, it’s important to note, and Ashton, I would love to hear your take on this. On the backside of the build. Like once you get the app developed, deployed, it’s on the app stores, which that’s a topic we’ll discuss here in a second. It’s not mean, I think, that we’ve all seen that every time you open an app, there’s an update for it or something like that. There is that ongoing maintenance that people maybe don’t factor into their budgets. If you’re looking at it from a business perspective, you’ve got to have someone that’s going to own that application on your end of the business, like a CTO, a CIO, somebody. But then also you got to think about this. 20% of the build is a good estimate to consider for ongoing maintenance, and this maintenance is consistent.
You’ve got to continue to keep the app to where the app stores can approve it and to where it can be used on new mobile devices. Ashton, do you want to talk a little bit about the maintenance side after you’ve deployed the.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, that’s, that’s a huge part of, I mean, your mobile apps will update for any little thing. They could be fixing bugs that the app is originally pushed with to the stores. They could be updating because IOS decided to push their update. There could be security updates, which happens on a yearly basis nowadays, and there could be faults in the framework itself if you went with that. With a cross platform framework, they’re always multiple times a year updating their frameworks, and you have to keep up with that on the code side as well. So it’s not like a set it and forget it. You have to at least look at it twice a year. Honestly, that’s like the bare minimum that I would say.
Joey Baggott
Would you say that going back to our first topic about native versus cross platform, do you think that while you have a shorter build timeline for a cross platform, but do you think you have to spend more time on the opposite side for maintenance? And tell me if I’m wrong there, but it seems to me that there’s a lot more potential maintenance issues.
Ashton Bailey
The road for cross platform. Yes. The short answer is yes, because if you are developing for native things, then you get those changes to the underlying operating system immediately. Whereas if you’re working with a framework that handles both, and you have to wait for the developers who created the framework to update their code to handle the OS changes at the device level. There’s multiple steps that kind of happen in between you as a developer get to change things.
Annakate Ross
And yes, this is a great discussion to have. And on these cross platforms, what are we talking about here? What are some examples of the big ones if people have maybe heard of some of these?
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, the top three are flutter, which is a Google product, React native, which is from Meta, and Maui is the latest. But you might have heard of Xamarin as well. Those are both from Microsoft. Maui is kind of the newer version of that.
Annakate Ross
Yes. Okay, cool.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, I’d say for the top one it’s between Flutter and React native. As far as number of users?
Joey Baggott
Well, because we’ve touched on a little bit, the last thing on this topic of basically how much the considering costs. Talk to us about the app stores and how that process works, because I’ve heard in my time that the Android Google Play Store is a little bit easier to get published on. You have to go through a lot more requirements than you do. Could you just touch a little bit on what that whole process looks like?
Ashton Bailey
Sure. For both cases, the steps are the same. You hand the stores your app. If there’s a login or membership process, you have to give them kind of the test user to walk through the app themselves. And that’s what they do. They’ll literally walk through your app in the review process and make sure that everything works. If you have any sort of obvious bugs or crashes or anything like that, you fail with IOS, they’re a lot more stringent about your security. Sure, we all are aware of that even as users, and there’s a reason for that.
They have many security rules. If you have any sort of data that can be used to recognize your user base at all, then you have to put in plans in your statements, in your privacy policy, or in your app itself, that the user has to know that they’re consenting to all of these issues. And then again, if anything breaks at all, it’s a lot harder to get that past a IOS review board rather than Google. So, they’ll either reject your app and they’ll let you know what the problem is and you have to go back and fix it in the code and resubmit and go through the review process again, or they’ll submit it and pass it and it’ll be live.
Joey Baggott
How long does that process typically take?
Ashton Bailey
It’s changed over the years. Google’s a lot faster. I sometimes get a turnaround if the app is not brand new. Updates can take less than a day. Sometimes that’ll happen. With IOS it will, depending on how small your updates are. But if it’s a brand-new app, you can expect a week to two weeks sometimes for your app to go live.
Annakate Ross
We’re going through this with one of my clients right now, and the first go with our submission to the App Store was a couple of weeks ago probably, and we heard back in like three or four days. There were some questions and some things we needed to work through with them, and we’re still going back and forth with them. I would plan for at least a month or so before a go live. So you’ve got plenty of time to anticipate any changes or those kinds of things because it’s largely out of the developer’s hands at that point. You’re at the mercy of the app stores and what they’ll accommodate, right?
Ashton Bailey
Yes.
Joey Baggott
Are there any workarounds, and this question for either of you, are there any workarounds to putting your app out there without having to go through the App Store approvals? Like, can you host it somewhere that can be downloaded to your phone that doesn’t have to go through that? Just curious.
Ashton Bailey
There are major security risks to doing that.
Joey Baggott
Don’t do that.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, definitely don’t. Yeah.
Annakate Ross
I’ve seen or heard of people trying to do it that way so they don’t have to pay the 30% or whatever it is that the app stores take. If it’s an app that’s going to be charged for in the app stores, offering it around the app stores is a way to protect some of that revenue. But, yeah, the security risks and also just from like, a consumer trust factor, it seems different. It could be seen as odd, but I could see from a business perspective, not wanting to give that piece away, but you are paying for something. There’s the security component that comes out of it.
Joey Baggott
You can, but you shouldn’t.
Ashton Bailey
Exactly. It is possible. We will tell you not to, though.
Annakate Ross
Let’s talk about bugs a little bit. Let’s just say this is a brand-new app. We’ve written out all the discovery phase, we talk about timelines, there is the building component. But before you get to that, you need to really define all the requirements.
What does this app need to do? We often talk about user stories. Right? Where, you know, there’s a period where you’re going through with the product owner or the client contact on the client side. As a user, I can log in. As a user, I can reset my password. As a user, I can view the dashboard. And then you go through all the various things the user needs to do you plan for that?
Then you walk through UI/UX of that, design it all out, make sure it’s working the way you thought, maybe re quote it. If you’ve uncovered some things that you weren’t anticipating on the front end, go all the way through it. Let’s talk about bugs for a second. I have some perspectives on this, too, but bugs are bugs normal?
Ashton Bailey
Absolutely.
Annakate Ross
Have you ever designed or built anything without any bugs?
Ashton Bailey
Oh, my gosh, no.
Annakate Ross
Never do you know, anyone, any software developer who’s ever built put any code out there without any bugs.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, bugs are inevitable. There is not a single product out there that is not shipped with bugs. The worst thing that could happen is that your app crashes and your user gets mad for a minute and the app is rendered unusable. But honestly, I have never seen that happen. And if you’re putting your app through the app Store, it won’t be out there with a crash like that. So, yeah, little bugs are common and they’re part of maintenance, basically.
Annakate Ross
I guess I bring that up and position it in that way because even after build, There is a QA period where the product owner or the client needs to go through with the developers and the project manager, test this thing end to end, see where the hiccups are. And there needs to be a chunk of hours allocated to that period where you’re uncovering some of these things and resolving some of these things. And it’s not anything to be afraid of. It’s just kind of a natural part of the process that needs to be planned for.
Ashton Bailey
Yes. I’m glad you brought up testing because that’s another part that’s completely separate from maintenance as well, and should happen before you even release your app to the stores. There are many options out there for what that looks like for each app. The app I’m working on now, we have a set number of testers that work for the company, but also use the app as well, so they kind of have an understanding of what to expect from the requirements of the app, which is helpful. Or we can find people to hire to test, or if you want to test it yourself, that’s probably going to be the least effective because you can easily overlook things as a developer and as a project manager, but it should happen before you send out the app anyway.
Annakate Ross
Yeah. And it can be exciting to be so close and want to get it in the hands of your users, but doing, I think, the most common kind of testing that the client ends up doing. And as the project manager, me too. You test the happy path you walk through. What’s this thing supposed to do? Let me log in. Let me do the things that it’s supposed to do in the app. I’ll log out.
Ashton Bailey
It works.
Annakate Ross
Everything’s great. But there’s all kinds of automated testing that could be done where different paths could be tried so that maybe not a typical user would cross that bridge or would go that way, but could kind of uncover an issue that way or oftentimes I’ve seen with QA Resources, there’s negative testing you can do too, where you try to break it, you try to do the weirdest thing you could imagine on here, or just really unusual workflows to see what would happen. And that’s a way to really kind of shore up your app too. But what have you found in your testing? Aside from just the happy path? What’s a good way to approach testing?
Ashton Bailey
Well, there are some options where you can actually write tests in the code as well, just to make sure that things don’t break in the way that you’re writing your code. But I often don’t have time for that myself. Sometimes I’ll just tap around. I say click, because I’m using my mouse when I test, but tap around or slide or try, like you said, just a crazy way to use the app and try to pull myself out of the user story because that’s part of the problem of doing it yourself, is you understand how it’s supposed to work. So that’s what you’re going to go through and do. So you have to kind of pull yourself out of that and get weird with it.
Joey Baggott
I like that. Let’s get weird with these apps for a second. And you can assume if you want to, that I am a child who doesn’t understand anything about how apps work. So where do the apps live and how does that play into the development of a mobile app? Because they’re not just there, they’re not just in the App Store, they’ve got to live somewhere. Correct?
Annakate Ross
Like the back-end component of it?
Joey Baggott
The back-end components of it.
Ashton Bailey
All of the back-end stuff, the data that you have to store, the logic it takes to manage that data and send it out to the app has to be hosted somewhere. One option is the cloud. Everybody has heard of that term, but doesn’t really understand it, but that just means that some other major company is physically hosting it for could. I think Atiba still does hosting ourselves. We could host it for you, or you could pay for an account somewhere to host it.
It basically means your data is stored just somewhere in a box. And when the app does things like, tries to log in or needs to see data or something like that, that isn’t just like text inside your app, then it’s going to go to that box and say, give me this and it’ll give it back to you. So, yeah, that’s the other side of the mobile development as well. You must have on the phone and then somewhere in a black box.
Annakate Ross
Yeah. And AWS is a popular place for storing some of this code, right? It’s like a solution kind of like that.
Joey Baggott
But yes, you’re right. Ashton Atiba does do that. So there’s a shameless plug for us, too. But I bring that up, too, because there is an ongoing cost to essentially store that data somewhere. So that’s something you’ve got to factor into it as well. When we talk about those maintenance costs, that’s part of those maintenance costs, too. It’s got to live somewhere. You’ve got to have that data.
And so, Annakate, are you cool if I move forward to just like, developers staying relevant, or do you have anything.
Annakate Ross
Else you want on the maintenance thing? The other thing I was going to say, we touched on this briefly at the start, but the maintenance is a combination of, and Ashton, tell me if this is right, but it’s a combo of bug fixes or any resolutions you need to have completed. I know there’s also app stores make changes also, so you must adjust your application to meet new and changing demands in app stores. There’s the cross-platform component. If you’re using a tool like a Xamarin or react native or something like that, and they make a change that requires a future change, it could be features that you’re adding to your app. I mean, there’s many different ways your app could need maintenance. Are we thinking about it in the right way?
Ashton Bailey
Absolutely, yes.
Annakate Ross
Okay. That’s just in these ongoing costs, it sometimes seems confusing about what those might be, but there’s just kind of a never-ending list of the needs your app may have in the future. You must plan for that as well. Okay, Joey.
Joey Baggott
No, you’re good. One thing too, on that, on bug fixes, I think if you look after you update an app, the developers always have the dev notes in the update somewhere in that text in the App Store. Most people probably ignore it. But if you do, if you scroll down and look at it, pretty much the first line on every single one of those updates is minor bug fixes. And so it’s like to your point earlier, Ashton, there’s always going to be a bug. You cannot get rid of them. No app is perfect. So just something to pay attention to as well as part of that ongoing maintenance.
So on to you. We talked about kind of your experience with apps, but you as a developer, and you may have touched on this a little bit on the women in tech episode, which really was awesome. If you’ve not listened to it. You need to, mostly because I wasn’t hosting that one and it makes it much better. But the broad question is how do developers stay relevant? And one thing I’d like for you to touch is like the changing of ways you can build with Swift, with Flutter, react native, all the different types of ways you can build a mobile app. So how does someone like you stay relevant with all this changing technology?
Ashton Bailey
Well, I kind of haven’t had a choice. I’ve been on the same project for a couple of years now at least, and I’ve been making maybe two or three releases to the App Store every year, and we recently switched it from Xamarin to Maui. That’s the new Microsoft framework, and Xamarin is the old one, just to keep up with the times, because Microsoft is going to end support for Xamarin. A lot of times you don’t have a choice but to learn the new thing because that’s all that you’re going to be able to do to work with other things. Pretty much all the frameworks let you know if there’s going to be changes there. The platform code, the Android code or the IOS code is changing yearly as well. So as a mobile developer, you don’t really have a choice but to keep up with what the changes are, or your apps will break, or your code won’t work. It’s just a matter of keeping up with the, I don’t know, new releases, I guess.
Annakate Ross
And how do you like, you know, we were saying at the start, Flutter has become popular. It almost seems trendy when things like that happen. How do you learn a new code base? Or how do you learn a new framework? I’m sure there’s some documentation to start with, but where does one even begin?
Ashton Bailey
Well, I think a lot of them, since I had started learning code in general, a lot of them have really taken the same kind of approach to teaching developers how to use their product because they want to make it easy for you to use it so that you do. And I learned react several years ago and they have thorough documentation and they put on tiny little tutorials on those documentation websites. So yeah, you start with the documentation itself and make just like a tiny little app where you create lists or something like that, and that’ll teach you the very basics of it. You kind of just pick a framework and go from there and once you really get comfortable with one, then move on to another one. And that’s how you broaden your skills.
Annakate Ross
Yeah. Are there any podcasts you ever listen to or like Reddit threads I’ve heard developers talk about that have been helpful to them when they’re troubleshooting or any other resources you go to if you have a problem with something.
Ashton Bailey
Well, because I’ve been working with Maui, the most I go to Microsoft’s documentation, it’s honestly one of the better. It’s easier for me to read anyway. People feel differently about other frameworks, but the bigger companies put a lot of effort into their documentation, so that’s honestly the best place to start. And then Stack Overflow is a website that pretty much everybody uses. And I also will say that chat GBT can help you a lot too. If you have a broad question to ask them. To ask it, is it an it or them? I don’t know.
Annakate Ross
I don’t know. Sometimes I say he which it feels weird. I don’t know where that came from. But not to write your code, but just to orient yourself.
Ashton Bailey
A very broad thing, like how do I figure out how to get the one number from three different arrays that are the same or something like that. You can ask it a really and it’ll lay it out and it’ll give you examples. If you really need help, like understanding a concept, that’s a pretty cool tool to use.
Joey Baggott
There’s no shame in that. I use it for Excel formulas all the time. Like how in the world do I do this?
Ashton Bailey
I don’t know about the old school guys, but you could ask. Many developers will say that a lot of their job is Googling, and stack of workflow comes up a lot. So yeah, there’s just so much to know and understand that learning on the job all the time is a huge part of it.
Annakate Ross
Do you think working at a consulting agency like ours helps with that?
Ashton Bailey
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, I sought out a consulting agency when I got out of school. This is the way that I wanted to do it. I wanted to be learning and changing and developing pun not attended throughout my career. So yeah, this is definitely helpful.
Annakate Ross
Yeah. And you mentioned this at the start that to stay up to speed you kind of are forced to. I think that could be in a good way. When you’re thrown a new project or a new client or a new problem to solve, you’ve got to figure it out.
Ashton Bailey
Yes. I mean, especially with mobile. Mobile changes so quickly, constantly. So yeah, you really are forced to.
Annakate Ross
When you got out of school, did you know you wanted to be a mobile developer or did that just kind of happen organically?
Ashton Bailey
No, that kind of just happened. I actually thought that I didn’t because I tried react native after learning react, I was so inexperienced anyway, but I just couldn’t get it to click. But I came here and the first job that I was put on was a mobile app. But I quickly learned. Yeah.
Annakate Ross
And here we are.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, I’ve done some web-based products, but I found that it’s a lot more fun to me anyway. And I really think that mobile apps are going to stick around. I mean, people don’t need laptops anymore because a tablet can do a lot of what people need it to do these days. So, I don’t think mobile apps are going anywhere.
Annakate Ross
Yeah, that’s a good point. I have several friends in the music industry or who have non office jobs where they’re in front of a computer all day and they don’t even have computers, they just use their phones for everything. It’s wild.
Joey Baggott
I think we’re getting close on time here, but I think maybe a good last question topic would be where to get started. Where would you recommend starting it? To someone who is interested in getting into mobile app development.
Ashton Bailey
I kind of mentioned just picking a framework and starting there. I highly recommend that. I mean, the thing with Maui and any Microsoft product, it’s going to be based in any Microsoft Mobile product it’s going to be based in C Sharp, which is a complex language. And I mean, anything really is based on a different language that you’re going to get to in the big three too. They’re all different languages. I would say start with the framework and figure out how to do basic stuff there and then kind of dig deeper into the language it’s based on after that. React Native is the framework that meta built and it’s based on the JavaScript language, which can be kind of tricky for people to learn just as a language itself. So yeah, start with React Native and then dig deeper after that.
Annakate Ross
Awesome.
Joey Baggott
Love that.
Annakate Ross
Well, Ashton, thank you for joining us for the second time today and taking some time out of your afternoon to dig into all that goes into a mobile up. We really appreciate it.
Ashton Bailey
Yeah, it was fun. Thanks.