Mobile App: definitions and uses

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Mobile App: definitions and uses

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A mobile Application, or mobile App, is a program written specifically for smartphones, tablets or any other mobile device.

The aim of Apps is to improve the inherent capacity of the mobile device they are installed on so that users can take advantage of new services or tools. Mobile Apps were initially aimed at offering services to improve private and enterprise productivity, including e-mail, calendar, CRM tools and databases. With the rapid growth of the mobile device market and ever-increasing public demand for new Apps, solutions for new categories quickly appeared, and today there are hundreds of thousands of Apps available for just about anything you can imagine: playing games, reading magazines and newspapers online, banking, finding a phone number or an address, buying tickets, clothes, services, and much more.

Click to expand/collapseTypes of Apps

Two other types of app exist, besides the mobile Apps:

Web App: unlike mobile Apps that are installed directly on a user's device, web apps work through a link to a remote application. In order to work, you need an Internet connection and their performance depends on the speed of the connection.
native App: these applications are created for a specific operating system and use the API (application programming interface) provided by the OS maker.
Click to expand/collapseApp distribution

Apps are usually developed for particular operating systems, and not all of them are always compatible with every OS.

Each digital distributor that distributes Apps is bound to a specific operating system.

The main operating systems for mobile devices, and their distributors, are:

Android: the official distributor is Google Play but it's also distributed on Amazon's App-Shop.
BlackBerry OS: the official distributor is BlackBerry App World.
iOS: the official distributor is Apple's App Store.
Windows Phone: the official distributor is Windows Phone Store.
Click to expand/collapseWebSite X5's mobile Apps: WebSite X5 Manager

WebSite X5 Manager is an app for website administrators so that they can manage their websites even when they are not at home or in the office and are working from a tablet and/or smartphone.

WebSite X5 Manager is available for both iOS and Android and it can be downloaded, free of charge, from either the App Store or Google Play. Once it has been installed, administrators can easily log in, using their credentials assigned in the Access Management section, and access the dashboard that provides a panorama of all the information available in the various sections.

The administrator can carry out a number of operations from the dashboard or the menu, depending on the features that have been set up on the website, such as:

display the website hit statistics,
manage comments for the blog and Comments and Ratings Object,
manage user registration,
manage orders and stock availability,
display the list of dynamic content objects,
access the diagnostics tools.

If you want to be kept up to date with what's happening on your website, you can set up the app so that it sends you a push notification each time you receive a new comment, a new order or when stocks are running low, and so on.

WebSite X5 Manager lets you manage all of your websites and move quickly and easily between them: remember though, that WebSite X5 Manager can only  be used with websites that have been created with WebSite X5 Pro as from Version 13.