Web Development for mobile devices.

The web development has been experimenting dramatic changes with the evolution of mobile devices and the increasing network speed connections.  With all the constant improvements in device capacity and connectivity, web developments have started to use more resources making them larger, and this works really good and improves the user experience in regular home wireless or wired connections, on the contrary, cellular networks, which haven’t reached yet the speed of wired networks, experiment slower connections making those larger web developments, in some cases, an annoying experience for the mobile users.

The problems in the mobile device using cellular networks are:

Latency represents the delay between the request and the response. And there is a big difference between the latency in wired and wireless networks, usually wired connections travel more directly and the latency depends on fewer factors than wireless networks.

Web performance, there are techniques that can be used to improve the performance of the website, like reducing the amount of http requests, eliminating images and avoiding redirects.

Mobile device limitations, there is a very wide range of mobile devices in the market with different characteristics, screen sizes, etc. but most of them have lower capabilities than desktops or laptops, therefore it is important to recognize those differences to provide a better user experience. First, the processor capabilities, mobile devices are very powerful in these days, but still not enough, the use of JavaScript is expensive in terms of CPU processing and can make the application slower and drain the battery more quickly. Therefore, the suggestion is to try to avoid its usage if it is possible, in web mobile developments specifically in cases like animations where CSS is much more efficient.

Next limitation is memory capacity. Mobile devices have considerably less memory than desktops and laptops. Web applications that consume too much memory in mobile devices can make the browser slower, unresponsive or crash.  Normally the biggest problem are the images, in a desktop application, usually the images are loaded in the DOM (document object model), even if they are not visible on the screen, but with the memory capabilities of the desktop this is not a problem and the web application can run smoothly. But in the case of a mobile device, it can crash the application, then it is necessary to remove the images from the DOM that are not longer needed in order to avoid the unnecessary consumption of memory.

In my opinion, for web development there is no way to create one hundred percent universal applications that are able to provide good user experience among different types of devices. In the design of each application it is important to identify the target devices audience, and make the design based on the characteristics of each device target, if it is a desktop, probably the web mobile application can contain richer elements than a phone version. It is even necessary to differentiate the phone and the tablet web developments.

Reference:

Zakas, N (2013). The Evolution of Web Development for Mobile Devices. Queue 11, 2, pages 30 (February 2013), 10 pages. DOI=10.1145/2436696.2441756