The History of Enterprise Mobile App Development Platforms

In 2008, mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) hit the market. These solutions were described as a “multichannel” suite of products and services designed to enable the development of mobile applications that have three or more operating systems or back-end systems. MEAP executives presented their solutions as integrated platforms that address app design to deployment. However, these one-size-fits-all solutions were high on promise and short on delivery, with significant limitations and inherent “vendor lock-in,” precluding the ability to move to other platforms.

By 2012, mobile application development platforms (MADPs) found their space in the marketplace, largely with the ambition to overcome the problems associated with MEAPs. The market quickly became fragmented in the form of native toolkits, web toolkits and cross-platform suites that offered a single code base. Since MADPs generally served professional developers, rather than democratizing app creation for “app developers,” they have often been considered slow, complex and expensive.

Around the same time, mobile back-end as a service (MBaaS) solutions emerged as back-end integration tools that could generate services that were consumed by front-end mobile apps. Providers strived to give developers the ability to focus on delivering rich user experiences instead of dealing with tedious back-end infrastructure. However, this put a burden on the enterprise to pair a best-of-breed MADP with a best-of-breed MBaaS, resulting in similar slow, complex and expensive approaches.

Come 2014 and Gartner established the category of rapid mobile app development (RMAD). These next gen solutions came to market promising to create mobile apps with faster and simpler development, and by a wide range of lower-cost resources such as a business analyst.

https://www.enterprise-cio.com/news/2017/jun/13/new-generation-enterprise-mobile-app-development-welcome-rmad-30/