Hardly a day goes by when I don’t come across another really useful app for my smart phone. However, sometimes I get a little frustrated when I learn about a new app that I really could benefit from; but I find that it only runs on (for example) phones with a Windows based operating system. My phone has an Android operating system so I cannot use the app unless I get a new phone! Additionally, as I got more into using apps; I began to get a bit frustrated with apps that would not work if I wanted to transfer some or part of them to my laptop, or desktop, computers. All the time that I was using apps for personal “things”; like finding the nearest Mexican restaurant in a strange town; or, getting commentary when doing the tourist bit at (say) a zoo; the question of cross platform apps was somewhat minor.
However, when I made the decision that I should start to capitalize app use for my business; the minor obstacles became more like major problems. Including myself; I reckoned that the company would need to purchase some 12 phones for use by key employees. Should I insist that we all only use phones with Android operating systems or should I opt for phones with one of the (currently) five alternative operating systems? Then another thought stuck me; I wanted our company’s mobile apps to be capable of being made available to both existing and potential customers; whose choice of operating systems I would have no control over. I was also sure that some of them that could benefit from the data provided by, say, my conference app might well want to access it from a laptop computer.
Multi-Platform Apps Are Available
As it happens, I should not have worried so much about my preference for Android phones; a little research informed me that, since the first one in 2008, Android is (currently) the most popular with something more than one billion Android devices activated. Furthermore, the main Apps Store for Android (Google Play) has more than a million apps available which have been downloaded well over fifty billion times. Meaning that it shouldn’t be too big a deal if my company sets up Conference Apps For Android phones.
Moreover, it transpires that many of the mobile apps development companies design for Android since it is an open source operating system. Additionally, users with laptops, Blackberry, Apple or Windows devices can obtain versions of Android apps for conference calls to suit their own systems; either direct from their systems App Store or from the app developer’s own website.
