As far as acronyms go, MADP, short for mobile application development platform, starts to roll off the tongue pretty easily, but then gets stuck there at the end on the “P.” It’s like you’re about to say something cool and then…”P.”

When you think about it, that’s probably how most technologists feel when they hear “mobile application development” and then “platform” together.

In the old days (pre-2012ish), the term platform brought to mind fully self-contained software environments, proprietary and clunky. They were useful, but developers viewed them with the same dubious distaste usually reserved for things like portable bathrooms and foie gras.

But those feelings are going away, because the “platform” has been reimagined, and it is fundamentally changing the face of application development for mobile use cases.

“Coincidences Mean You’re on the Right Path”

(Simon Van Booy)

Gartner recently released its Magic Quadrant for multiexperience development platform vendors, and—no surprise to us—OutSystems is again a Leader.

Don’t forget about that; we’ll come back to it.

Now harken back to Gartner’s LCAP report that came out in April. In its evaluation criteria, it identified a number of characteristics that define a true hpaPaaS solution, including:

  • High-productivity development
  • Mobile and multichannel support
  • Data, process and business logic functionality
  • Professional and citizen developer support

SURPRISE! Nearly all of the evaluation criteria Gartner identifies in its MXDP report, are also evaluated against vendors included in its Enterprise High Productivity Application, Platform as a Service (hpaPaaS) report, in which OutSystems was also named a Leader.

Is it a coincidence that the tools mobile app developers should be using (e.g., low-code visual development, support for IDEs via API, AI capabilities) include the same things some of the most successful enterprise software developers are using? To quote the late, great comedian Jon Pinette, I say, “Nay Nay!”

We’re All In the Same Gang

What was once considered the purview of internal enterprise IT teams (i.e., operations, robust design, delivery, and deployment capabilities), is also now within the domain of mobile app developers. In fact, as core and internal systems evolve to include the same characteristic needs of mobile apps and as mobile developers are expected to deliver multiple experiences like personal assistants, wearables, AR and VR, the typically different skills of mobile, web, and enterprise developers will move more to the middle in a Venn diagram kind of way. Gartner predicted this eventuality in 2015, when it said that, by 2017, the demand for mobile developer services in the enterprise will outgrow IT’s ability to deliver by 5x.

In the coming weeks, we will explore the key points of this report more fully, but for now, we invite you to download your own copy of the Gartner report and learn more about the future of mobile app development.