Category Archives: PhoneGap

appMobis privateStack Gives Enterprises a Secure Cloud Backend for Mobile HTML5

 

Image representing appMobi as depicted in Crun...appMobi today announced privateStack, a licensable enterprise version of its industry-leading mobile HTML5 app development and cloud services stack. privateStack was created in response to overwhelming interest from businesses, organizations and government agencies that require complete end-to-end control of mobile app deployments for security reasons.

With the recent explosion of mobile smartphone and tablet devices, many enterprises want to create hybrid and Web-based mobile apps for a variety of audiences – sales staff, service technicians, executives, operations personnel and customers. Unfortunately, CTOs have legitimate concerns about data security, service quality and the difficulty of distributing corporate apps in public app stores. Unless they wanted to build it themselves, CTOs were forced to hold off on participating in this exciting trend. privateStack was created to address this need.

“While the consumer market for apps has skyrocketed along with explosive smartphone and tablet sales over the past few years, enterprises and government agencies who wanted to develop mobile apps with data security and deployment control have had no real way to do so,” said Dave Kennedy, appMobi CEO. “privateStack provides enterprises the mobile application management capabilities to develop and deploy apps using the same technology appMobi uses in its commercial cloud services. Ironically, privateStack illustrates how open Web technologies like HTML5 and the mobile Web can be used to create highly secure mobile solutions that can’t be duplicated in closed, vendor-owned mobile ecosystems such as those of Apple and Google.”

privateStack gives enterprise CTOs the ability to support native-quality, HTML5-based, cross platform mobile apps with complete control over hosting geography, security, gateways into corporate data silos and user authentication. For enterprises, hybrid apps are very appealing because they greatly simplify app creation and deployment. Unlike native app development, which requires programming in arcane languages like Objective C, existing corporate Web development teams can create hybrid apps using HTML5. Using privateStack, those apps can be built into iOS and Android store-ready apps or they can be deployed on secure corporate intranets, avoiding the complications of commercial app stores.

In addition to appMobi’s HTML5 development tools, which support hybrid app development using appMobi or PhoneGap, privateStack incorporates the entire appMobi cloud services platform which includes:

  • Authentication
  • Rich Media Push Messaging
  • Mobile App Analytics
  • Remote App Updates
  • In-App Purchasing
  • Gamification – Badges and Leaderboards
  • Social Network Interfaces

appMobi offers privateStack as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that gives enterprises world-class uptime and instant, effortless scalability. privateStack is the first mobile HTML5 backend to be offered on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) store as an installable AMI, and it is available in both managed and custom configurations. For customers who want to host privateStack in their own corporate data centers, enterprise source licensing is also available. More information is available at www.appmobi.com/privatestack.


appMobi Offers Free Remote Debugging Tool for HTML5

Today appMobi added to its lineup of free and open source HTML5 development tools with the immediate availability of debugMobi, a free remote JavaScript debugging tool.

Until now, HTML and JavaScript have been difficult for developers to debug on mobile devices because of the closed environments of smartphone hardware and Web browser software. An open source tool called “Web Inspector Remote” (WEINRE) provides remote Web debugging for mobile devices, but it requires developers to configure and run their own servers in order to work.

debugMobi dramatically reduces the complexity of remote debugging on mobile devices with a configuration-free, hosted version of WEINRE that developers and mobile devices can tap into from anywhere on the Internet. Like all appMobi cloud services, debugMobi is hosted on the global Amazon AWS “cloud,” which offers dependable high performance all over the world.

debugMobi provides Web developers with a remote window into the target mobile device while the hybrid app or site is actually running. JavaScript and CSS variables can be examined, and JavaScript code can be viewed and modified on the desktop viewer in real time. Because debugMobi is hosted on the open Internet (as opposed to the more typical WiFi or Intranet hosting), debugMobi can be used to debug devices that are physically anywhere in the world – making it the first truly worldwide “remote” debugging tool for mobile HTML5.

This new HTML5 developer tool can be used by anyone who is developing Web-based code for mobile devices, including Web app developers, and hybrid app developers using appMobi or PhoneGap. debugMobi is available immediately at www.debugmobi.com. For developers who use the Google Chrome browser, it is also available as a  Chrome extension.


storeView Offers Free Cross Platform App Store Analytics Service for HTML5, PhoneGap Developers

Image representing appMobi as depicted in Crun...

appMobi today announced storeView, a new, free, cloud-based reporting service for PhoneGap and hybrid HTML5 app developers that aggregates and displays detailed app analytics across all the most popular app stores in a single dashboard.“As game and app developers have begun to leverage HTML5’s ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ power, the issue of app store fragmentation has emerged as these apps have become successful across multiple stores and platforms”

With the explosion of new cross platform app development, developers are increasingly posting their apps to multiple app stores. Each of the app stores uses a different method to report sales and activity, creating massive fragmentation. This “App Store Fragmentation” issue prevents developers from understanding app performance and trends information that every developer needs to achieve maximum profitability. With the release of storeView, appMobi has stepped up to provide a completely free service that solves this issue for PhoneGap and HTML5 hybrid app developers.

“As game and app developers have begun to leverage HTML5’s ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ power, the issue of app store fragmentation has emerged as these apps have become successful across multiple stores and platforms,” said Sam Abadir, appMobi CTO. “We experienced this issue ourselves with Boom Town, the first massively cross platform HTML5 game, currently available in 7 different app stores. We also realized just how little information is provided by many of the app stores. For example, the only analytic provided by Apple’s App Store and Google Play is download count – that’s all they can tell you about your app! We created storeView for internal use and found it to be an invaluable tool. Now we’re giving it away for anyone who’s using HTML5 to create apps.”

storeView is a completely free cloud service. There will never be any charge for setting up an account, for adding apps to the system, nor for the number of users a particular app has. Adding storeView analytics to any HTML5-based app is extremely easy, with the addition of a single include file and just one line of JavaScript code. storeView provides deep, granular insight into the performance and activity of developers’ apps in each of today’s leading app stores, including Apple, Android (Google Play), Facebook, Amazon, Chrome, Mozilla and Barnes & Noble.

To view storeView analytics, developers simply log into their account and select from a variety of reports. The available reports include monthly uniques on all platforms, iOS starts by device, Android starts by device, app starts by platform, and 30 day uniques vs. app starts. Armed with this important data, developers can make informed decisions on allocating development and marketing resources, uncover unseen relationships between devices and platforms, and most importantly, optimize app store profits.

PhoneGap and HTML5 Developers can sign up for storeView free at http://www.appmobi.com/storeView.