Five Challenges of Building Mobile Apps for Smart IoT Devices
Nowadays, many development companies are investing money into mobile app development to take benefit from growing demand. Near about 47% of the global start-ups assembled mobile apps for their industry, within the first 2 years of their operation. As the IoT market develops, more and more businesses are started investing in this trend by developing smart devices controlled through mobile devices.
Yet, there are few challenges in designing mobile apps for smart devices. The development team and the clients must be on the same page from the initial development phase to make the application functional, safe and scalable. More research and attention is highly needed to overcome various challenges. Here we’ve enlisted a few major challenges that one has to overcome during the development process.
Development Approach towards UI and UX Design
With the development approach, you need to review the nature of your business as well as future plans. With this, you need to formulate UI & UX requirements. Before starting with the documentation and development process, it is necessary that the client and development team should be on the same page by considering what the app is supposed to do, what devices will be utilized and under what circumstances will be the devices used.
These three things are essential to earn right from the start as all of them affect UI and UX design. It is essential that companies and developers should pay enough attention to how accessible the UI is to users under various conditions. Sometimes you might require regulating the brightness settings, utilize voice recognition and so on. Besides these, few more aspects are there which require to be taken care of. A good start can get you in the right direction.
On another side, the app should have a built-in UX that guides users with the help of loading data or connecting to the network to end up with a specific process. That means, if the user requires waiting for the device to connect data with the mobile phone, that action should be illustrated with a relevant screen and message.
Confirming Compatibility between Several Sensors, Networks and Hardware
Device compatibility is an essential factor for a mobile app. You need to make sure that your app should give flawless service and compatible with various devices. It is a little bit challenging task to predict the system and performance requirements when the app is in the initial development stage. Many times, the development teams don’t get precise hardware data as they’re starting the analysis and development.
Sensors and networks via which they interact are a crucial part of IoT development. It is one of the challenging tasks for many IoT experts to search for the compatibility between several sensors and different network types.
These days, there are many sensor manufacturers, OEMs, vendors, which don’t always perform under the equivalent regulations and protocols. Organizations sometimes become aware of this concern later in the production process. Hence, it is necessary to double-check the concerns early on in the development process to stay away from high-cost maintenance later down the line.
Managing How Devices Connect to the Network
The challenge of connectivity and networking is still one of the serious concerns when we consider connecting various devices to operate within a single app. As the IoT ecosystem and its architecture develop day by day so does the demand for networks and the number of devices connected to it. Sometimes, the devices exceed the performance and coverage of specific networks, causing concerns with data processing and exchange.
If there’s a network concern with the device or within the app itself, the mobile app should have a way to describe to the user what is happening. There should be an explicit and visible notification that describes what’s causing the concern and provides suggestions on how to resolve it. It becomes a little bit easier when the developers have a thorough understanding of the devices’ features and functionalities that makes taking all the development decisions easy.
Security
One of the most serious challenges of the IoT application development process is how to transmit data using IoT by keeping complete security. The concerns are not related to only network security it is going beyond that –
- Physical Safety –IoT devices are usually placed in open spaces. So assuring they are free from damage is something that becomes a huge challenge.
- Data Exchange Security –Data protection is one of the most essential parts of the security purpose. The data must transfer first from the IoT devices and sensors to the gateway and finally to the Cloud, so security protocols are a must in this cycle.
- Cloud Storage Security –The information which is stored in the cloud is evenly delicate. Your application should come filled with the standards for protecting data (access control, encryption, etc) stored in the cloud.
In order to minimize the examples of attacks and prohibited access to data, there are few steps that developers can include in their IoT app development services:
- TLS/SSL encryption
- Detached corporate VPN
- Utilizing updated anti-virus
- End-user and machine to machine authentication
Managing Dataflow
It is necessary to consider that the network chosen should be secure enough to give a constant data outlook on all devices. It is also essential for the developers to assure that the data size has to be followed by the requirement of the platform. A secure and consistent database connection assures that new data is displayed across all devices.
Nowadays most of the data that smart devices perform with is disorganized, so it might be tough to reserve it in a suitable SQL format. In addition to that, the data is controlled based on its volume, variety, so you have to assure a fine data flow via various layers of the smart system’s architecture.
Keep in mind that when many devices work with huge data, it’s essential to minimize and remove redundancy and complexity of data to make it more comprehensible and secure for the end-user. Smart apps should be powerful, intuitive and secure enough to control human-driven errors. Additionally, if you are a start-up and strength is there in your priority list, you require that early acceleration to get started. We at hIOTron, provide you an IoT Service and Solutions that can change your dreams into reality.