Just like a drunk boyfriend, the web is unreliable and not always available to apps. That means that mobile app developers need to think differently about building for the mobile experience as compared to the desktop experience. And figuring out how to do that is hard for all the people out there who may want to build a mobile app without knowing how to set up Facebook authentication or manage a collection of virtual machines on Amazon Web Services.
“There’s no reason developing an app has to be something esoteric that requires a lot of knowledge,” said Kevin Lacker, the CEO of Parse, speaking at GigaOM Mobilize in San Francisco. “Someone else should be doing that boring work for you.”
Parse is that someone, and because he sees a lot of applications, Lacker also offered up a few tips for aspiring programmers to use in their apps to help with getting them picked up and keeping users involved. First, to help drive adoption of your app, or at least distribution, he recommended integrating with Facebook. He also said that to keep users coming back, implementing some sort of push notification could make sense.
If Parse or other platform plays like it are a success, then mobile development and supporting those apps could be as easy as setting up a Tumblr. Imagine what kind of world that would be.
Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.
