Max Katz

Do you need to be a developer to build a mobile app today? The answer is no.

The app market is booming. It doesn’t matter if you have Apple’s iPhone or iPad or an Android device. Hundreds of thousands of apps are out there for your favorite mobile gadget, with more being added each day. But if you don’t have any developer skills, do you have any hope of joining the feeding frenzy? Sure, if the evolution of the Web is any indication.

In the mid-1990s, when the Web was still in it infancy, building a Web site for your school, small business, or just for fun wasn’t simple. It required strong IT skills. You first had to know HTML, the language with which you build the pages. You also needed to know how to upload the pages to the server (or first find the server). Connecting to the server and uploading the files was usually done via FTP, which wasn’t very simple either.

You needed to know a lot of other things too, such as where to upload images, where to upload other pages, and how to make the pages public—and we aren’t even talking about adding basic dynamic or dynamic features to the site. Anyone who wanted to get a basic Web site up and running but didn’t have a strong IT background was out of luck unless they paid someone to do it.

Build-Your-Own Web Sites

Things started to get simpler in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Build-your-own Web site services such as GeoCities (acquired by Yahoo in 1999, discontinued in 2007, only available in Japan today) made it much simpler to build and publish basic Web sites.

These services provided browser-based tools for building simple Web sites. Students, teachers, small business owners, and just about anyone else could create a Web site without needing to know much about Web development. GeoCities wasn’t the only service either. Homestead, Tripod, and FortuneCity were available at the time too.

Blogs And Social Media

With every year, it has become simpler and simpler to create Web pages or a Web presence for those without traditional IT or Web development experience. In 2003, the WordPress blogging platform was released. It enabled anyone with just a few clicks to create a blog or a Web site, no IT skills required.

Publishing content was made super easy. Today, the WordPress blog can be extended, customized, and made very dynamic with thousands of free available plug-ins. Look-and-feel can easily be changed with thousands of available free themes.

Next, we saw the rise of the MySpace social network. MySpace made it very simple to create your own space on the Web by easily adding blogs, pictures, and videos to the site. Today, Facebook dominates the social Web as anyone can create a page and enhance it with thousands of available apps.

Can The Same Happen With Mobile Apps?

The mobile ecosystem is huge, and it’s only going to get bigger. Many insiders believe that in only one or two years, more people will access the Internet from their mobile devices like phones and tablets than from desktop computers. Most observers will also agree that what’s happening with mobile is very similar to what happened with the Web.

The one big difference is the speed with which it is happening. The mobile ecosystem is growing at a much faster rate. One reason is that people always carry their mobile devices with them. Let’s assume that the mobile apps era started in 2007, with the first iPhone release. It took only four years to get where we are today with mobile. That’s incredibly fast.

Everyone wanted to have a Web site 10 years ago. Today, everyone wants to have a mobile app. It’s no wonder they say history repeats itself. So, we’re facing similar challenges to what we faced in the early Web days.

How can someone without mobile development skills build and publish a mobile app? You can always hire someone to build the app for you. However, people with mobile development skills are difficult to find and very expensive.

As cloud services such as WordPress made it very easy to publish on the Web, a new cloud service exists that makes it very easy for “citizen developers” to build mobile apps. Tiggr Mobile Apps Buider (http://gotiggr.com) makes it very easy for anyone to build mobile Web and native apps, entirely in the cloud.

You needed a Web developer guru to create any Web presence 15 years ago. Today, it’s possible to create a Web presence with advanced features in just a few clicks and under five minutes.

Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder

Tiggr is a super easy cloud service for building mobile apps. The key is making the process very easy and very fast. Anyone can use Tiggr to build a mobile app (see the figure). No mobile development or programming skills are required. It takes just five easy steps to build a mobile app with Tiggr:

1. Build the mobile user interface (UI): To build the mobile UI, you simply drag and drop components into the phone screen.

2. Add Internet content: Adding data and content to your app is very simple. You can get data from popular representational state transfer (REST) services such as Twitter, Facebook, or anything else available on the Internet.

3. Make the app interactive: Need something to happen when a button is clicked or to navigate to a different page? Easily define “triggers” and then select the action to be performed, such as going to another screen or opening a popup.

4. Try the app, share the app: At any point during the app design, try the app on the actual mobile device. Want to get feedback? Share the app so other people can try it.

5. Get the finished app: You’re done. Get the app to publish on the (mobile) Web or publish to an app market (native)

App Wrapup

Everyone wanted to build a Web site 10 or 15 years ago. In the beginning, you had no choice but to hire an IT professional to build it. Later on, easy-to-use tools started to appear and made it possible for people without a professional background to build a rich Web site.

Today, we’re witnessing a similar shift for mobile apps. Building mobile apps is challenging. Just as tools like WordPress made it very simple to build Web sites, cloud-based Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder now makes it very easy to build mobile apps. People without traditional IT experience now can build mobile apps—fast and easy.

The article was originally posted on http://mobiledevdesign.com/tutorials/you-build-mobile-app-today-tiggr-1011/