Overcoming the Mobile App Development Challenge

It’s been an action-packed start to the summer. We’ve been out and about talking with thousands of startups at our San Francisco Pop-up Loft in June and at our Activate booth at the New York AWS Summit in July. We have heard many intriguing business ideas as well as thoughtful input on what AWS tools, features, and services startups need. A popular theme that came up over and over in our conversations was the need for better developer resources to support the development of fast, secure, multiplatform mobile apps.

We couldn’t agree more, and AWS has been hard at work on this. Users continue to demand a higher level of quality in their mobile apps, and businesses need the right tools to overcome the challenges that rear their ugly heads, including how to authenticate users, analyze user behavior, and provide a seamless user experience across multiple platforms and devices.

Whether you’re putting the finishing touches on a new application or just beginning to brainstorm the next one, you need to check out these three new AWS resources that can help you build a killer app:

The Latest AWS Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK)

The new AWS Mobile SDK includes libraries, code samples, and documentation that make it easy for you to build applications for devices running iOS, Android, or Fire OS operating systems. It provides access to mobile-optimized connectors to popular AWS data streaming, storage and database services, and a full array of other AWS services. If you’re familiar with the last SDK, check out the following updates: Android and Fire OS enhancements include support of the Amazon Kinesis Recorder for reliable recording of data streams on mobile devices along with support for the most recent SQS, SNS, and DynamoDB features. For iOS / Objective-C development the SDK supports ARC and BFTask and conforms to the best practices for the use of Objective-C. It also supports Cocoapods and can be accessed from Apple’s new Swift language.

Amazon Mobile Analytics

Collect, visualize, and understand app usage, engagement, and revenue at scale with Amazon Mobile Analytics. You can access usage reports within 60 minutes of receiving data from an app, so you can quickly act on the data, spending more time optimizing for revenue and less time setting up and managing an analytics system. To get started just add the AWS Mobile SDK to your app and publish the app using your existing distribution mechanism. Amazon Mobile Analytics automatically starts to collect metrics on active users, sessions, and retention. You can add reporting on in-app revenue or any custom event you choose. You can start accessing reports through a series of tabs in the AWS Management Console. Amazon Mobile Analytics is free for up to 100 million events per month. (An event corresponds to activity in your app such as the start of a session or an in-app purchase.)

Amazon Cognito

Tablets. Laptops. Cell phones. Nowadays your customers almost certainly have multiple devices. These users demand a great experience regardless of the device they’re using. Amazon Cognito simplifies the task of authenticating users and storing, managing, and syncing their data across multiple devices, platforms, and applications. Through public login providers (Amazon, Facebook, and Google) you can create unique identities for your users. Cognito also supports unauthenticated guest users. It works online or offline and can securely save user-specific data such as application preferences and game state. With Amazon Cognito, you can deliver a great user experience across devices and platforms without writing any back-end code or managing any infrastructure.

These services will help you to build, deploy and optimize your next mobile app for use on iOS, Android, and Fire OS devices. Check out this post if you’re interested in learning all the details about these new mobile services. Or if you’re ready to hit the ground running, download the new Amazon Mobile SDK and get started building your app!