in Personal, Programming

Mobile App Engineer Trend

Web vs. Mobile web

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that many tech companies are investing more resources (engineering, marketing, and budget) into mobile strategy. The example? Apple.

It’s still that web pages are more dominant than mobile web pages, but more and more companies are providing alternative web pages just for mobile devices (mobile webkit).


Also mobile browsers added mobile specific JavaScript APIs and opened opportunities for better mobile web browsing experience.

Web engineers(FE/BE)

No matter what, backend engineers and frontend engineers are crucial to mobile software products (in web application form and native application form). However, Backend engineers are winner over the frontend engineers because they write data access layer to provide data to whichever client is and do not have to learn completely new programming language or new process.

On the other hands, frontend (client UI) engineers need to learn client programming language to build client applications for apple iPhone os (objective c), google android os(java), adobe flash lite(actionscript), and webkit/web browser(HTML,JavaScript, and CSS).

Transition to mobile UI engineer
I’ve personally seen so many people who were a web UI engineer mainly using flash transformed to objective-c programmer for iPhone app. The main reason that I think made it possible was the similarity of how programmer approaches application development in both platform although IDE and APIs are quite different. It’s like when there is a good programmer who has very strong fundamental of programming languages, that programmer has a very high chance of getting to pick up another programming language in no time. So transition from ActionScript to objective-c should be fairly easy if you are already familiar with actionscript 3 well.