Developing apps for smartphones is one of the most profitable ventures around. A hit mobile app can reap millions of dollars for the company that owns it as there are virtually unlimited number of opportunities here. A mobile app which goes viral can bring in profits for a number of years without fail. So companies look for mobile app developers that can help them such an app.

While there are many ways to create an app, there are platforms like Microsoft Azure which offer exceptional support to developers in this concern. Let me offer something about it in this blog now so that you can have a good idea in this concern.

This blog is aimed at offering support to beginners about Microsoft Azure app services. This is just a snapshot that you need to know about this service quickly and easily.

Microsoft Azure App Service

Azure is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) which is like a bliss for developers looking to produce excellent apps. By using it, developing apps is easy and a rich experience to say the least. There are many ways in which the mobile app feature of Azure app service is what developers look for as the platform is highly scalable and globally available.

The Need for Mobile Apps

There are numerous benefits of a mobile app feature for developers. The top ones are:

Building Native and Cross Platform Apps is Easy

Building native iOS, Android or other OS based apps or cross platform Xamarin apps, the SDK engine is what offers great support to developers.

Connect to Enterprise Systems

Connecting to enterprise on-premise or cloud resources for corporate features is one way where Microsoft Azure app feature offers excellent support to developers.

Offline Ready App

Building apps which can be run even in the offline mode is what that really offers developers a way to use mobile apps to sync data in the background. This enables connectivity with any of the enterprise data sources, etc.

Push Notifications

This is where things get really spicy as there are many ways in which push notifications offer excellent opportunities for a company to reach millions of app users within seconds. The time and number of notifications send to app users is entirely upon the discretion of the app owner. So in a nutshell, push notifications is akin to holy grail of marketing through mobile apps.

Mobile App Features

There are a number of features which are important to cloud-enabled mobile development as it is what can be termed as really cool. The top features are as follows:

Authentication and Authorization

The support for identity providers which includes Azure Active Directory is what you need for enterprise authentication. It is also perfect for social providers like Twitter, Google and Facebook to name a few.

Data Access

Mobile apps offer a mobile-friendly OData v3 data source that is promptly linked to Azure SQL Database. Any other SQL server can also work here. As the service can be based on Entity framework, there are many options that to integrate it with other NoSQL and SQL data providers. The list includes Azure Table storage, and office 365 to name a few.

Offline Sync

Through Client SDKs, it becomes easy to build highly responsive mobile apps so that there is every chance for it to operate with an offline dataset.

Client SDKs

A complete set of client SDKs covering native app development like iOS, Android and Windows are offered here. Each client SDK is offered with an MIT license and the best part is that they are open-source for easy editing.

Final Word

There are many aspects to Microsoft Azure app service that you need to know. If you are interested in looking into this topic more deeply or want to offer your valuable feedback for this blog, please use the comments section below.