We're often asked what differentiates us from other app development companies and this has traditionally been a fairly subtle answer - generally one based on our industry credibility, specific experience in certain sectors or categories of app. However, as is often the case in technology, if you wait long enough the answer will present itself!

It's been known for some time in the app world that content is king if you want to deliver an app experience that your users return to day in, day out - whether it's delivering timely, relevant content to your users or integrating it into their daily view of what's important to them on their smartphone. However, whilst simple and clear in concept, this directive has become harder to implement in practice across multiple mobile platforms, app stores, in-app purchase mechanisms and analytics. Each manufacturer's platform has its idiosyncrasies - from push integration to in-app purchase transaction reporting and social integration - before you even get into the actual development differences between the platforms. In the current climate where budgets are stretched and deadlines are tight, re-inventing the wheel several times across multiple mobile platforms just doesn't make smart app strategy.

There are some solutions out there that aim to simplify the cross-platform development challenge - for instance PhoneGap, Sencha and many others, as well as html widget-based development platforms such as BlackBerry WebWorks. However, there are two significant challenges when taking one of these higher level approaches.

Firstly, there's the inevitable compromise associated with trying to address app development using a lowest common denominator approach. This may not be such an issue in a largely content-driven app with minimal native integration or real-time features. But as soon as you get into those areas you'll find that you're limited by development platform APIs not quite offering parity with what's possible with the native device APIs, and before too long you'll find yourself designing your user experience based on the available APIs rather than what's optimum or intuitive for that particular mobile platform.

Secondly, and we think far more importantly, these development solutions don't even address the cross-platform integration challenges of data aggregation, push integration, in-app purchase delivery or analytics - since these challenges can only be solved server-side, not device-side. Traditionally these elements are integrated on an app-by-app or project-by-project basis, but more often than not this is also implemented separately for each mobile platform by independent app development agencies.

It's for this reason that we've taken the approach to develop a unique server-side aggregation layer that abstracts much of this work from each app/project (thus helping your deadline and budget), allowing common tasks such as data feed aggregation & caching, in app-purchase delivery, push integration and cross-platform analytics to be configured once server-side for an app and then integrated using native APIs on each mobile platform, thereby focussing on the optimum user experience for each mobile platform rather than the lowest common denominator. The end result is a single source of integration and reporting across all your mobile platforms, a single cloud platform on which to configure your content integration & premium downloads as well as a single support team of smartphone and tablet experts to call on when you have any integration or content delivery queries - thereby saving you management time as well as maximising your budget and hitting your deadlines.

By taking an end-to-end approach to Total Apps, we therefore feel that this heavily differentiates us to deliver the next generation of mobile apps - whether it's real-time sporting events, premium content delivery or streaming media - we have the ability to not only develop the apps themselves across the leading smartphone and tablet OS, but also the highly resilient, app-centric cloud infrastructure that will ensure your users can't live without your app in their daily routine.