MOBILE APPLICATIONS

Mobile application(in short Mobile app) is application software designed to run on smart phones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. Some apps can come preloaded on the handheld device as well as can be downloaded by users from app stores (such as Apple App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Store, and BlackBerry App World)or the Internet There are different stores depending on whether you have an iPhone (App Store), Android (Google Play), BlackBerry (App World) or Windows Phone (Windows Phone Store) device. You should find an icon (or shortcut) to the store on your homescreen. Normally you will be asked to set up an account before you can download anything.
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Mobile apps were originally offered for general productivity and information retrieval, including email, calendar, contacts, and stock market and weather information. However, public demand and the availability of developer tools drove rapid expansion into other categories, such as mobile games, factory automation, GPS and location-based services, banking, order-tracking, ticket purchases and recently mobile medical apps

Usually, when people hear “mobile app” they assume you mean native app. This is a program that runs on a handheld device (phone, tablet, e-reader, iPod Touch, etc.) which has a “smart” operating system which supports standalone software and can connect to the internet via wifi or a wireless carrier network. Usually people download native mobile apps from app stores such as the Apple app store or the Android Market.
A native app can only be “native” to one type of mobile operating system: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone, WebOS, etc. This is why an iPhone app works only on iOS devices — so if you want to also make your app experience available to Android or Blackberry users, you’ll need to develop and maintain a separate piece of software. That gets complicated and expensive.
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In contrast, a mobile web app is software that uses technologies such as Javascript or HTML5 to provide interaction, navigation, or customization capabilities. These programs run within a mobile device’s web browser. This means that they’re delivered wholly on the fly, as needed, via the internet; they are not separate programs that get stored on the user’s mobile device.

The popularity of mobile apps has continued to rise, as their usage has become increasingly prevalent across mobile phone users.