Daria Lymanska
CEO & Founder

Too many requests! You have made too many requests!! No more requests!!!
– How many times do you have to hear that before you get really angry?Amazon Chime API’s request throttling tested our patience like this. But all we ever wanted was to make a simple text chat app work! In this article, you’ll find out why Chime was so unkind to us, what we did to turn things around, and how you too can follow the path we forged.

Perhaps you are one of those people who believe that any experienced software engineer can be involved in any project. But in reality, it doesn’t work like that: depending on your task, you may need different expertise from the core members of your development team. Below, we will highlight existing types of software development and briefly consider their specifics.

Types of Software Development

The division of software development into types primarily depends on the platforms for which the created project is intended, that is, the user environment where it will be deployed. This could be a web browser, cloud, mobile, desktop, IoT, or embedded operating system. There are also platform-independent solutions that can be run on several operating systems without any restrictions. 

Ultimately, the deployment environment turns out to be one of the main factors influencing the choice of the project’s technology stack, and, therefore, the developers themselves, who have the appropriate expertise.  

Web Development

Web development involves creating different types of software – web applications and websites – that run through an Internet browser. Along with this, you have to understand that to implement your web solution, you will need several specialists at once whose scope of work will be concentrated within the following subtypes of web development.

Frontend Development

Frontend development concerns the creation of that part of the project with which the end user directly interacts. In particular, this consists of creating a user interface as well as functionality that is performed without the participation of a server and database.

Backend Development

Backend development lies in the implementation of the business logic of the project and its connections with the database/databases. This is its server part, which is hidden from the eyes of end users.

Full-Stack Development

Full-stack development involves a combination of frontend and backend development, but unlike them, it requires the participation of more general specialists who are well-versed in both server and browser technologies.

Mobile App Development

Mobile app development is aimed at the implementation of projects for mobile operating systems – usually iOS and Android. At the same time, there are also cross-platform projects that work equally well regardless of what OS is installed on the end user’s device.

iOS App Development

iOS app development involves creating applications completely tailored to work on the iOS operating system. Such projects require developers to have knowledge of Objective-C, Swift, and Java programming languages, as well as platform-native technologies and tools.

Android App Development

Similarly, Android app development is aimed at projects tailored to the specs of the Android mobile OS. To do this, developers need to have strong programming skills in Java and Kotlin, and be able to work with the Android Toolkit.

Cross-Platform App Development

Cross-platform development allows developers to cover several mobile platforms at once. In this case, they create a universal code base based on a single technology stack, regardless of which OS will run on user devices. From a business perspective, cross-platform projects allow you to achieve faster launch and lower budget since instead of several separate applications and teams that will work on them, you can hire just one that will create a software solution that can be simultaneously deployed on numerous platforms.

Embedded Software Development

Embedded software development involves creating solutions to control machines or devices that are more primitive than computers, called embedded systems. This software development model is completely tailored to the specific hardware on which the software solution runs and has significant restrictions on the consumption of its resources.

Desktop Application Development

Desktop application software development consists of creating applications that are used to work offline on user PCs and laptops. Instead of applying the computing power of servers on the hosting provider's side, they rely entirely on the resources of the user device on which they are installed.

DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

DevOps is a set of interaction practices between developers, testers, and other IT specialists in a project team needed to increase their performance and improve the quality of the work results. Typically, DevOps is applied to launch new versions of software regularly. In turn, CI/CD is one of the DeOps techniques, which consists of automating the software development process to ensure a recurrent development life cycle with a continuous delivery of the program code.

IoT (Internet of Things) Development

IoT development, also called M2M development, is aimed at creating software for systems where devices exchange data with each other without human intervention. These could be physical security systems, smart home and smart city solutions, logistics systems, and so on.

Cloud Development

Cloud development involves creating software that is run on a remote web server using a subscription-based delivery model. From the point of view of end users, this approach ensures the high availability of such software products since they only need to have access to the Internet.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) Development

While the development of augmented reality solutions involves using the camera of a smartphone or tablet on the user's device (this is necessary to overlay digital objects in the user's real environment), virtual reality solutions also need the use of special wearable devices, such as VR glasses. 

Blockchain Software Development

Blockchain software development involves the creation of decentralized platforms, consensus protocols, smart contracts, and other blockchain-related solutions. Although this type of development became popular thanks to crypto projects, today, it covers a long list of niches, from logistics and healthcare to insurance and finances.

API Development

API development is the creation of software tools that allow independent software components to interact with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. Typically, APIs are used to integrate systems, services, and applications to ensure seamless and secure data exchange between them.

Choosing the Right Development Type

At the very beginning of the article, we already indicated that the deployment environment is the main factor influencing the types of software products that you should focus on creating. However, there are also a number of other aspects that will help you make the correct choice. These may include the following:

  • Project needs and objectives – they will help your team to define not only the tech stack but also the most suitable software development methodologies (usually, they are related to Agile)
  • Your business niche – it can be finance, healthcare, entertainment, e-commerce, industrial, education, logistics and supply chain, or something else
  • The resources you have – the specialists you’ve already hired, the project budget, access to data that will operate your software solution, etc.

As for small projects, they are usually dedicated to web development, mobile development, or desktop development — in such software development types, the talent pool is usually wide, and you will be able to choose specialists with the optimal ratio between expertise and rates. However, don't forget that choosing development services that are too cheap may mean you end up having to redo the project from scratch because it doesn't meet your expectations.

Trends in Software Development

Finally, let's take a brief look at the technologies that will be trending in the coming years and which ultimately can provide a strong competitive advantage to your project:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning – today, these technologies find a wide variety of applications, from personalized search results and chatbots to smart analytics and forecasting
  • Augmented and virtual reality – we have already mentioned these two trends above, so we would like to emphasize that their implementation becomes more and more affordable to project owners 
  • Internet of Things – we also talked about this trend above; its relevance is explained by the possibility of on-site data collection from devices to which the user does not have physical access
  • Personalized user experience – in general, it can be achieved not only with the help of machine learning but also through predefined algorithms
  • Blockchain – it’s needless to say that the number of blockchain software development projects is growing every day, and currently, they cover not only the crypto industry

Conclusion

Now, after reading this article, you will be able to understand what type of project you can classify as and what specialists you will need in your project team. At the same time, whichever of the above-described examples of software development you choose, you can always contact us, and we are guaranteed to implement your business idea according to your requirements.

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