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What Are Mobile Apps?

A mobile app is a software application that is developed to be used on smartphones and tablets rather than on desktop computers and laptops. These mobile apps are usually purchased or downloaded in the app store. However, some apps come built into the phone such as messages, mail, safari, weather, and camera. The use of mobile apps has become extremely popular, especially because most people today use smartphones and tablets. [1] Mobile apps relate to new media because they are meant for people with smartphones and tables around the world to use. Some mobile apps allow people to communicate with others, play games with others, and some allow people to post pictures and videos for others to see. The social media apps include Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. Other mobile apps allow people to shop from their favorite stores or use apps that give coupons for those stores such as RetailMeNot. Other common apps include those that allow people to search for and listen to music such as Pandora and Spotify. Mobile Apps are a modern and technological way for mass communication.

Mobile app development is important because it is already deeply integrated into our society, and is necessary to further business operations. From gigantic businesses to small business owners, such as for small business, they are able to accept payment from their customers instantly from hoovering them phone over the credit card machines. Furthermore, most food establishments nowadays have online order over apps for takeout such as grub hub, seamless, while larger establishments create their own apps for easier access to consumers. People are being able to shop online for practically anything them heart desires either online or a shopping app without having to leave their home, or while they are on break during work. Without mobile app development, the economy wouldn’t have been booming so much and a portion of business wouldn’t be existing today. There are many benefit-able perspectives from mobile app development, such as economic, technological, and even educational. Moreover, mobile apps have made health care relativity easy to access. If needed the patient could talk to a doctor via video chat at the comfort at their home if something were prohibiting them to visit their doctor. They could get diagnosed then can fully understand the problem from further discussing it or after care for a wound of some sort.

News App/ CUNY ALERT/ AMBER ALERT

Mobile app development has greatly improved and made sharing or viewing news virtually anywhere. News is accessible anywhere as long as the person has a mobile phone with internet access. You could read news articles that is reporting on things such as natural disasters in the comfort of your home. Being able to get the most recent news, getting to know instantly what is happening around the world without having to read most of the articles. Nowadays news apps such as Daily Mail where they shrink the story for you, with a few keys bulletins summarizing it. Other news apps will hook you into their services, such as limiting free users to access a set number of articles before they totally block you off rendering you in need of paying for their services. Paying for their premium services gives users advantages such as having all the articles tagged to specific categories, getting to read the full article, even getting emailed updates or texts concerning articles that interest you. News has expanded to different kinds of distribution feeds such as yahoo, msn, aol, which will give you updates of what is happening, stock prices, manages your email, daily schedule, notes. Its purpose is a search engine, and wants more people to use it as their home page. The reason of wanting people to set it as their home page is it would direct more traffic to generate revenue from advertisement and even collect data from users to sell to data brokers. Mail.png


CUNY Alert is an app made by City University of New York, in 2008 to inform students,faculty and staff of certain days closing because of weather related reasons, gives warnings of affected public transportation, and even shelter locations if needed. It informs students Via text and even email stating that their school is closed on certain day and when it will be open again. [1] Alert_logo.png

Such as the creation of the amber alert notifications built into practically every smart phone out there, other than that it also informs motorist on the highways with those huge orange signs with details of state, age, abductee, last known location and car license plate. The way Amber Alert works on cellphones, an automated message pops up onto the screen with the details of the incident. that will vibrate and beep a couple of times continuously till you acknowledge it. There are mobile apps such as Facebook, that forces users to have in their news feed show Amber Alerts messages concerning missing children. In January 2015, implemented a program to best utilize a social media platform into helping missing children, recent and cold cases[2] There was an amazing instance, that a child was able to return to his parents because of his babysitter from paying attention to his Facebook news feed. Such as in April 2015, what happened was a man was told to take care of a child by his sister as she said it was her boyfriend’s son. He figured it out that the child was a missing child the following day from Facebook's news feed. It’s amazing how useful social media can be for the community as a whole. [3] Amber-alert.jpg

Shopping Apps

Macys-logo.pngMany stores have expanded their businesses by creating mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. Rather than just having a web site for users to shop on, most businesses have mobile apps where customers can browse the items and purchase an order. Some stores that have created mobile apps are Nordstrom, Best Buy, Sephora, and Macy's. Some websites that solely provide business online have also created mobile applications, such as Amazon. Since many people use their smartphones and tablets more than their desktops and laptops, it is a good idea for more businesses to create mobile apps for people to download and purchase.

Banking and Credit Card Apps/Peer to peer payment apps

With the development of mobile apps, people can now keep track of their finances on their smartphones or tablets. Many banks and credit

card companies have created mobile apps that allow people to connect their cards and accounts to the apps in order to do their banking.

Some of these apps include Chase, American Express, Santander, and Discover. The banking apps allow users to pay bills

and credit cards, transfer money between accounts, make deposits, and balance out their transactions. Credit cards company

apps such as American Express and Discover

allow users to see the purchases they made, see how much money they have left to spend,

see credit score, and see when the billing cycle is up. These apps also offer rewards for Unnamed.png

loyal customers who pay their bills on time. Rather than having all statements on paper, the app

allows people to use their smartphones and tablets to check their finances technologically.

Examples of payment apps in America; Venmo, Square Cash, Google Wallet, PayPal, Dwolla, and Clinkle. The difference between them all is they vary from having more features, and ranges from being able to link debit cards, credit cards, bank accounts, and have nearly low to no fees. Users can pay back their friends or family electronically from their phone to paying for items they want to purchase at stores or online. To name some restrictions these apps have, PayPal has a limit of $3000 per week/transaction compared to Google Wallet with the limit of $10,000 per week/transaction[4]. It is possible to link credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts with both Google Wallet and PayPal.Besides M-Pesa being used Africa, other parts of the world uses different apps as Smart;used in the Philippines , bKash; Bangladesh, EasyPasia; Pakistan, and M-Pasia; Afghanistan. Similar money services that are international are MoneyGram, Western Union, but they do not have enough retail locations in less populated areas and are more costly. All of them have transformed themselves into leaders of mobile money services in their own countries, and have almost successfully replaced the need for a bank account. It cannot fully replace a bank account because they are not able to get loans without one and mobile money has a low limit on deposit.

Social Media Apps

Social media apps are very popular amongst a majority of smartphone and tablet owners today. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are used by a massive number of people all over the world. These apps allow people to share pictures, videos, and commentary with other people that they follow.

Facebook allows you to set up a profile and become friends with other people. You are able to post pictures and statuses, as well

as share your friend's pictures. You can also "like" and comment on your friend's pictures and statuses. It is also used by

many corporations to advertise their business. You can also message people to have a private conversation.

Facebook also enables people to create pages for people that have similar interests.

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Twitter is another social networking site which allows you to set up an account. You can follow other Unknown.png

people and other people can follow you. You are able to tweet but are only limited to 140 characters.

You can also post pictures and your followers could retweet, like, or reply to your tweet. Like Facebook, you are

able to message people privately. On Twitter, most people communicate through hashtags.


Insta.jpegInstagram is a social networking site that only allows users to post pictures. Like Twitter, Instagram allows

you tofollow people and have followers. You could like and comment on other people's pictures. You could also tag

other people in your pictures. Instagram also connects with location services on the iPhone and allows users to post

where their picture was taken. There is also a popular page on Instagram that allows users to see other people's pictures

that have gotten a lot of likes. Like Facebook and Twitter, Instagram allows it's users to message each other privately.


Snapchat is a social networking site that allows its users to send pictures and videos to other Unknown-2.png

for a maximum 10 seconds and then deletes. Your snapchat friends post "stories" which consists

of pictures or videos over the past 24 hours.

Snapchat also allows you to use filters which could effect the pictures and videos. You could send pictures and

videos to people directly. These social media apps are a way for mass communication through smartphones and tablets.

Social media apps does have ups to it, but there are a darker side to it. Such as people making cell phones more a component of their life, like drug addicts. Where they have to keep the phone with them even when about to sleep or go into a huge fit when they cannot find their phone. Instead of people going to sleep at a certain time, they are dragging it out and shortening their sleep. Depriving them of much needed sleep makes anyone grumpy, when people have their phones kept with them 24/7. It just makes working with people very unpleasant even a good morning can set them off or a slight brush against their shoulder. Besides, it is increasing the amount of anti-social teens and adults in society. In addition, even when there is no notifications majority of users check their phone over 35 times a day [5]. Besides those, people are gaining a strange interest in videos containing violence, drug use, or doing actions that they normally would not do with inappropriate attire. Such that they are starting to become psychopaths due to viewing videos of people harming themselves or others to be a joke. More of society are watching illicit videos such as people consuming drugs as entertainment, physical fights, verbal fights, and many other actions. The incredible growth of the mobile app development has made younger adults out there immune to what is actually horrifying. Nowadays when students have fights, their friends always seem to always tag along with them to instigate and record the fight.

Traveling Apps

Many people who live in busy cities such as New York may need to depend on the MTA for transportation. There are apps for both the subway and bus. These apps help commuters see the bus or train routes and let them know where the stops are. They also help commuters that have to transfer to a different train or bus. These apps also make the commuter aware of when the bus or train is going to pass and how long it would take to reach the destination. These apps are extremely helpful when traveling because people have all the information on their smartphone or tablet. Mta.png

Development

Mobile application development can be achieved through programming.

Android Development

Android applications can be coded through Google's Android Development Kit, which mainly focuses on Java based development. Applications can be tested on an emulator provided by the development kit or on an Android phone.

iOS Development

iOS applications can be coded through Apple's custom language: Swift. Swift is basically a customized version of C and Objective C. Developers who are familiar with either programming languages will be able to code iOS applications. Developers can also code through Apple's custom IDE: XCode.

References

What Are Mobile Apps Starbucks Mobile Order Dunkin Donuts Mobile App

1. http://www2.cuny.edu/news/cuny-alert/

2. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/amber-alerts-come-to-facebooks-news-feed/?ref=topics&_r=0

3. https://www.aol.com/article/2015/04/17/man-realizes-child-he-was-babysitting-was-abducted/21173525/

4. http://www.onlineeconomy.org/peer-to-peer-payment

5. https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-technology-making-people-less-sociable-1431093491