Chapter 4. What device is the app running on?
This chapter covers
- Understanding how devices influence app functionality
- Balancing development for multiple platform support
- Considering OS differences
- Handling variations in device capabilities
The final aspect of context is the device the app runs on. While often a final thought in the development process, the device can be crucial to the person who owns or uses it. Other than specialist medical devices, mobile phones are the most personal piece of technology in use. People are rarely more than a few meters away from their phones, even when sleeping, proving the relationship between owner and phone can be deep. For your app to integrate well into this relationship, you need to understand the device.
App developers often want to create apps that run on all devices that use a specific operating system. This can be thousands of different models, and there can be many differences between these devices that you can’t always ignore. But, increasingly, people want to build apps for more than a single OS.