This was originally supposed to be a post on predictions. But as the founder of a mobile app development company myself, my focus is more on specific opportunities that exist for a boutique company such as ourselves in this space.

First let’s look at some facts:

Now take a look at some major trends:

• HTML5 Mobile: The browsers from every big player are getting more powerful. The open source tools are getting better and better. And with the Flash war finally having ended, Adobe is finally getting on board as well.

• Cross Platform Tools: These tools make it possible for the app developer to write-once-and-run-on-multiple-platforms. Or at least they try to make that possible. Multiple acquisitions and fairly large VC investments have happened in this space.

• Hyper-Local-Mobile: The early movers in this space are continuing to grow or have been acquired. But the new players are doing well as well.

• Cross Device Testing as a Service: With more than 300 Android handsets now available from various manufacturers, it is next to impossible to manually test an application across all these devices. There are now multiple services on the cloud that aim to solve this problem for you by automatically testing your Android applications across a wide array of devices.

Keeping the above in mind, here are a few opportunities for 2012:

• “Hybrid” Cross Platform Apps: The cross platform tools I’ve referred to above, allow for native platform API [Application Programming Interface] calls as well. These are useful when you have an application that has a combination of native components and other “content” components which most likely consume web services [and can be built with HTML5 and CSS3].

An example of such an application is the Onion iPad app. The application is written in HTML5 for the most part – but uses falls back on native API to play video. This is probably because of some of the issues related to HTML5 video tag support on iOS. The Onion plans to roll out the app quickly on the Android platform as well – and with mostly the same code [pdf].

Main Challenges:

• Cross Platform Tools are not mature yet: The API documentation is sparse, support is patchy and the community is still nascent. So which platform should you bet on? Unfortunately, the answer is, “it depends” – on multiple factors such as whether you need a native look and feel (which Appcelerator and Rhodes provide – but PhoneGap does not), the number of platforms you need to support, the technical skills of your dev team etc.
• The Mobile Web is Slow(er): Performance optimization is key if you want your site to look pretty and be snappy on mobile devices. There are many good resources available to get you started in the right direction.

• Low Cost Solutions for Mobile Optimization: While purely content based sites can choose to rely on the Mobile Optimization Services I’ve mentioned above, there are a lot of other verticals that don’t have such an option – yet. For example, there are a lot of E-Commerce sites out there that are not mobile optimized. Especially those being run by small business owners or startups.

Main Challenges:

• The data has to kept in sync with the original systems – in a seamless fashion
• Mobile payment gateways are still far from mature - especially in a country like India.
• Oh, and the Mobile Web is Slow – but I said that already.

Main Challenge:

So how do we tranform into an agile team and then continually propagate the core values of the process – so that it becomes the culture of the organization?

One method that we’ve found quite useful is the concept of études – as described in James Shore book. We’re now trying out the thinking études. Every evening at 6:30PM our team splits up into pairs. Testers pair as well – with programmers.

Each pair picks up a topic from the book that interests them, reads the chapter for about 7 min, discusses (for about 8 min) how different/similar our actual process is wrt to what’s in the chapter. Any 3 pairs then give 5min presentations on what they learnt and any action items they think need to be implemented to make our processes better.

This is Kaizen (a little improvement every day) applied to process.

How do you practice continuous improvement in your company? Any ideas on how we can do better? Don’t be shy – go ahead, comment below.

A list of things good software should achieve:

• Should solve a real problem
• Should be shipped and maintained within the budgeted cost and time
• Should be easy to use

Update: We’ve now migrated to James Shore’s definition:

“Success is usually defined as delivering on time, under budget, and as specified. That’s a flawed definition. Many late projects are huge successes for their organizations, and many on-time projects don’t deliver any value. Instead, think in terms of organizational, technical, and personal success.”

What it takes to build such software:

Our version of the software life-”cycle” :

Do you like this list? Or not? Have suggestions for more? Go ahead, talk to us in the comments below. We’d LOVE to hear from you.

We’ll be blogging about some of the above topics in more detail in the coming weeks. Do drop a line in the comments section below, if you’d like to learn more about anything specifically.