Comparison of Mobile Website and Application Development

The smart car parking system is designed for Shire city council for the management of the request of the users and generate real time information for maintaining a transparency in the system. The application is designed for eliminating the manual steps and automate the different operations of the parking lot. The manual system takes much time for the users to park their cars because they needs to find free space in the parking lot and the system application is designed to mitigate the problem and provide real time feedback to the users regarding the parking space availability, tariffs, etc. The report compares the different platform for the development of the application and extend it for future use. Preliminarily a web application is designed for the parking system and it is extended to develop mobile and web application such that the system can be used by different users using different handheld devices.  

The Mobile application is similar to website which contains a set of HTML pages that are linked with each other and opened in the browser. The main difference of the mobile and the normal websites is that the mobile websites are designed for small mobile device with touch interface. The mobile application differs from it because they are needed to be downloaded to the handheld devices and installed rather than opened in browsers (Wasson 2015). There are different app stores for different operating system such as play store for android, apple app store for IOs black berry app world for black berry. The application pulls out data from the internet in a similar way as the web browser but it can be assessed without internet because the interface is already loaded.

In case of development of a responsive website the choice is depended on the end goals. Here the end goal is to develop a user friendly interface to interact with a large number of audience to use the car parking system efficiently. It is important to develop a mobile responsive website and then the mobile application because it is not safe to create a presence in the web (Irvine et al. 2015). The application can be developed for a specific purpose and the functionality can be added later and it cannot be achieved with the development of the website or web based application.

The advantages of the mobile websites over the application are listed below:

Immediacy – The availability of the mobile websites are instant and it can be opened from all ranges of devices irrespective of the platform or the operating system whereas the application needs to be installed form the application store and cause a barrier for the engagement of the user.

Advantages of Mobile Websites over Mobile Applications

Compatibility – Different range of devices are supported by the mobile websites

The mobile websites can be used to reach different mobile devices and users but the application needs separate version and device type. Moreover the website can be integrated with QR codes and NFC allowing the user to open the website on a single tap.

Upgradability – Fro updating the website there is no need of involvement of the user and it can be done instantly but on the other hand for updating the mobile application the users need to download and update for each of the device (Papadopoulos et al. 2017).

Find-ability – In case of the mobile website the user can find it easily because the pages are suggested in the search result and it is listed in the specific directory defined by the developer. Moreover the website automatically fits the screen size of the device when accessed from different handheld devices. Whereas the applications may not be visible on the app store on searching the key string and it depends on the app store itself.

Share ability – The links of the websites can be shared with the users and the user can take a print out of the receipt of the booking of the parking space for reference but this is not possible in case of mobile application (Meng et al. 2015).

Reach – The mobile websites are used for reaching more number of people in different ways such as via the search engine, QR code, SMS, etc. while the native application can be installed if it is known to the user.

Life cycle – The mobile websites can last for a longer period of time than the mobile application because the application have a short shell life for 30 days and the user can uninstall the application for saving the memory space.

Interactivity and gaming – the mobile application is best suited for interactivity and gaming because no data are required to be downloaded and it can work offline (Yildiz, Lekesiz and Yildiz 2016). For the development of the smart car parking application interface the mobile application would need to fetch rea time data from shire city council server and thus the mobile website would be best suited for this scenario.

Regular usage – For the regular customer the application may be useful but for the majority the application needs to be downloaded and woud consume extra space in the mobile device.

Native functionality and processing – Different function can be used by the mobile web browser such as call, gps, sms, etc. but some other functionality such as the usage of the camera are not supported and thus the application is required for getting all the features effectively (Gosper et al. 2014).

Outsourcing the Development of Mobile Application

No connection required – It is used for providing offline access to all the content and perform the different function without any network connection.  

The work breakdown structure is created by including all the phases of the project development and it helps the project manager to monitor the progress of the development. The success of the project depends on the completion of each of the phases in time because increase in time incurs extra cost in the development process.

For the development of the smart car parking system application the mobile platform should be chosen because there is more number of smart phone users. New features and functionalities can be added to the application and engaging a third party development team for the maintenance of the application can help in increasing the efficiency of the application. For outsourcing the development of the mobile application a professional vendor should be selected because a big vendor have a complete development team such as developers, system testers, UX support, etc. and the application can be developed in a less time. It also makes a financial sense because outsourcing can reduce different risk that can arise if in house development process is selected such as shortage of IT skill of the employee and unavailability of the hardware or software required for the development and testing of the application. For the development of the application hardware, software and other resources are required that required maintenance and incurs extra cost in the development of the project. The cost can be eliminated with outsourcing the development of the application and new features can be included with addition of extra cost.

Thus it is recommended that for the development of the mobile application the outsourcing would be the best option and it would help in develop the application at a nominal cost.

Conclusion

From the above report it can be concluded that with the development of the mobile websites the shire city council would be benefited because it can reach more number of people irrespective of the platform or operating system used by the user. The URL of the website can be shared to the user using different medium such as NFC, QR codes and SMS and the user can use the link for using the service. The website is easy to maintain and can be developed at less cost when compared with the development of the mobile application and thus it is a cost effective solution for shire city council. More over the mobile website can be converted into mobile application and it can act like a native application. Thus the mobile web application can act as a practical alternative for the development of the native application. Lest time is required for the development of the mobile website and the support and maintenance of the website are less complex because the errors can be fixed easily and the compatibility issues can be avoided.

Bonde, D.J., Shende, R.S., Kedari, A.S., Gaikwad, K.S. and Bhokre, A.U., 2014, January. Automated car parking system commanded by Android application. In Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), 2014 International Conference on (pp. 1-4). IEEE.

Gosper, M., McKenzie, J., Pizzica, J., Malfroy, J. and Ashford-Rowe, K., 2014. Student use of technologies for learning–what has changed since 2010?. ASCILITE2014.

Irvine, A.B., Russell, H., Manocchia, M., Mino, D.E., Glassen, T.C., Morgan, R., Gau, J.M., Birney, A.J. and Ary, D.V., 2015. Mobile-Web app to self-manage low back pain: randomized controlled trial. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(1).

Meng, R., Shen, S., Roy Choudhury, R. and Nelakuditi, S., 2015, May. Matching physical sites with web sites for semantic localization. In Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Workshop on Physical Analytics (pp. 31-36). ACM.

Mundhenk, P., Steinhorst, S., Lukasiewycz, M., Fahmy, S.A. and Chakraborty, S., 2015, June. Security analysis of automotive architectures using probabilistic model checking. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference (p. 38). ACM.

Negahban, A. and Smith, J.S., 2014. Simulation for manufacturing system design and operation: Literature review and analysis. Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 33(2), pp.241-261.

Papadopoulos, E.P., Diamantaris, M., Papadopoulos, P., Petsas, T., Ioannidis, S. and Markatos, E.P., 2017, April. The Long-Standing Privacy Debate: Mobile Websites vs Mobile Apps. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 153-162). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

Pham, T.N., Tsai, M.F., Nguyen, D.B., Dow, C.R. and Deng, D.J., 2015. A cloud-based smart-parking system based on Internet-of-Things technologies. IEEE Access, 3, pp.1581-1591.

Shin, J., Shin, S., Kim, Y., Ahn, S., Lee, S., Jung, G., Jeon, S.J. and Cho, D.H., 2014. Design and implementation of shaped magnetic-resonance-based wireless power transfer system for roadway-powered moving electric vehicles. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 61(3), pp.1179-1192.

Spieser, K., Treleaven, K., Zhang, R., Frazzoli, E., Morton, D. and Pavone, M., 2014. Toward a systematic approach to the design and evaluation of automated mobility-on-demand systems: A case study in Singapore. In Road vehicle automation (pp. 229-245). Springer, Cham.

Wasson, C.S., 2015. System engineering analysis, design, and development: Concepts, principles, and practices. John Wiley & Sons.

Yildiz, B.S., Lekesiz, H. and Yildiz, A.R., 2016. Structural design of vehicle components using gravitational search and charged system search algorithms. Materials Testing, 58(1), pp.79-81.