Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/72524
Tech Talk Creating an E&S App By Brad Pierce, President of Restaurant Equipment Wor ld brad@rewonline.com app for that!" With more than 500,000 apps in the Apple App Store alone, it seems that there truly is an app for everything imagina- ble.Well,almost everything. There was no app available in any of the app stores for browsing or buying restau- rant equipment, so I decid- ed to embrace the challenge of becoming the first to cre- ate one. I was armed with little more than a laptop computer and the naïve belief that I was smarter than a fifth grader, so I thought I could pull it off with ease. Of course, there were a fewbumps along theway but the process is manageable as long as you're willing to put in the time. The first dilemma with any app devel- W opment is deciding which devices your app should support. As an avid iPhone and iPad user, the iOS operating system was a natural.With a 32.2 percent mar- ket share and more than 172 million devices sold last year alone, I was confi- dent plenty of my customers would be carrying these devices. The Android operating system also caught my atten- tion.With a 58.8 percent market share, it was simply too big to ignore. Other mobile operating systems such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile made up only a paltry 9 percent of themarket, so the decision was made to skip devel- opment for these devices for our initial app launch. The next step in the development process was determining the infrastruc- 26 FEDA News & Views e've all heard the famous advertising slogan, "There's an ture for our app, since it would affect the tools I used for its creation.There are three primary types of apps. The first type is a native app; this means all the coding and functionality is written for a specific device in that device's operat- ing system language. Many of the apps commonly downloaded are of this type. The advantage is that it's always avail- able and fully functional, even without Wi-Fi or cellular service. The disadvan- tage is that every time a new version is downloaded from the app store, the user must make updates. The second type of app infrastructure is aweb-based app.Web-based apps use coding called HTML5 and JavaScript to performfunctionswhere theweb page you're visiting has a similar feel to a native app, yet nothing is actually installed on the user's device.The pri- mary advantage of web-based apps is that they are cross-platform friendly, meaning that they can be used on vir- tually any mobile device with a web browser. Another advantage with this type of app is that it can be changed and updated quickly and easily and those changes are displayed in real- time.The downside, however, is that it lacks a true app experience and many would argue it's not a "real" app at all, just a glorified web page designed to display well on a mobile device. The third type of app is called a hybrid app and is what I chose to embrace. It's a native app that's able to take advantage of all the benefits of being installed on a user's device, yet also incorporates content it pulls froma back-end web server so content and menus can be updated on the fly with- out any downloading or approval process.This felt like the perfect balance and nearly six months after the launch continued on page 29