Mobile front-end is the visual and interactive part of the application the user experiences. It usually resides on the device, or there is at least an icon representing the app that is visible on the home screen or is pinned in the application catalog of the device. The application can be downloaded from the platform app store, side-loaded directly onto the device, or can be reached through the device’s browser, as in the case for PWAs.
Regardless of what front-end platform or development methodology is being used, delivering high-quality mobile applications that delight and retain users requires reliable back-end services.
Given the critical importance of back-end services for the success of the mobile application, the developers have several important architectural decisions that they must consider. These decisions include which services should they build themselves and which third party services should they leverage, and then should they run and maintain their own services or should they take advantage of 3rd party services.
The answer is increasingly clear; to improve developer productivity and efficiency, mobile app programmers should only build their own services if they are highly specific to the domain of the application and embody unique intellectual property. Also, even for the services they build themselves, they should almost always leverage cloud-based services to build and maintain their backend infrastructure.
User Sign-up/Sign-in and Management
Social login (Facebook sign-in, Twitter sign-in, etc.)
Analytics and User Engagement
Push Notifications
Real Device Testing
Data Services
Real-time and Offline Data
Application Logic/Cloud Functions
Conversational Bots
Image and Video Recognition
Speech Recognition