The development lifecycle starts with application design. It is important to think about the functionality of your app as well as about the specifics of mobile devices.
Here is the list of the main differences across different mobile devices which you should take into account during the app design process:
- Screen resolutions. All the devices have different screen resolutions starting with very small screens (for low-cost Android devices) up to high resolution screens (e.g. 1136 x 640 for iPhone 5).
- Mobile operating system concepts. Design of main UI controls differs across platforms. The best example is tabs: the appearance of a screen with multiple tabs is different for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. That is why the design of a mobile app should be adjusted for each platform based on its peculiarities.
Screen Resolutions
The number of mobile screen resolutions is huge. This is mostly because of Android devices.
Let’s consider 3 main mobile operating systems:
- iOS (iPhone & iPad). Apple devices have 3 different resolutions:1136 x 640 (iPhone 5), 960 x 640 (iPhone 4S) and 1536 x 2048 (iPad).
- Android. Android devices are the reason why there are so many different resolutions. Plenty of devices running different versions of Android operating systems represent the main pain for mobile developers (here is a detailed report about Android fragmentation). At the same time there are 3 most widespread mobile resolutions for Android devices: 480 x 320, 640 x 480 and 800 x 480, that is why we recommend starting mobile development for Android with these resolutions (sometimes it’s even worth to develop only for these resolutions and refuse from other Androids, because the shares of others are comparatively small). But you also should take into account that more expensive devices have higher resolutions (e.g. 1280 x 768) and you may want to maintain those resolutions as well to target richer users.
- Windows Phone (7 and 8). Windows Phone devices fortunately have the same screen resolution, it is 800 by 480. This fact makes application design task for Windows Phone the easiest out of all 3 platforms.