Two digital interfaces such as web and mobile apps remain the two most popular career path choices for developers worldwide. While web development has been a career path for years, mobile app development is fast catching up, offering excellent opportunities to IT students and seasoned developer professionals worldwide.
What career path as an aspiring developer should you choose? What difference do they have? What are the learning curves you need to deal with each of them? Here we are going to answer all these questions as vividly as possible.
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Web Development Career Overview
Web development as a career path has expanded into diverse specifications and categories. Here we explain these career paths and job titles.
Programmer or Developer
The programmers or developers need to write code for developing the frontend or backend of a website. Generally, web development needs to be versed with coding in several key languages.
Front End Developer
Front end referring to the customer-facing features of the website project require coding skills with leading web languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Back End Developer
Backend referring to the server-side features of a web project need coding skills to determine how a website processes and uses the information to serve user requests. PHP, Ruby, and Python are the most common and widely used backend languages.
Full-Stack Developer
Full-stack developers are versed with coding skills for frontend and backend languages and ensure easy data transmission and collaboration between server-side and client-side development.
What is it like being a web developer?
Web developers generally have two principal career paths: working as a salaried dedicated developer in a company or working as an independent freelance developer. While the full-time position in a development company ensures a better career growth path and sustainable remuneration, working in the capacity of freelance contractors may involve bigger challenges and volatility.
What is it like to be a Mobile App Developer?
Just like working as a web developer, you can work either as a salaried dedicated app developer in a mobile app development company or independently as a freelance contractor. An experienced mobile app developer with great exposure to quality projects can earn a decent earning in a mobile app development company besides having growth opportunities. On the other hand, if you have a zeal to take challenges and make your brand footprint, you can start as an independent contractor, and the sky’s the limit for opportunities.
What do mobile app developers do?
Mobile app developers in an app project carry out different responsibilities such as the following.
- They build, test, and enhance mobile apps.
- Meet the client and project needs in terms of quality, features, performance, and user experience.
- Code using different programming languages as needed by the particular operating system environments.
- Prototype, design, iterate and build the interface of the app.
- Create and write testing scripts for different testing needs.
- Troubleshoot issues, fix errors and bugs, and detect performance and usability issues, and solve them.
Mobile app developers generally work and collaborate with analysts, project managers, designers, software engineers, the QA testing team, and the Business operation team.
Key trends you need to watch out for in both Web and Mobile App Development
There can be hardly any doubt that web and mobile app development are fast-evolving fields of expertise with several key technology trends. Several major tech skills have been in high demand from aspiring developers for both web and mobile app projects in recent years. Here we are going to have a brief look at these technologies that would-be developers should focus upon.
Internet of Things ( IoT)
IoT representing the connected reality of gadgets is already used by the vast majority of smartphone devices worldwide. From the GPS sensors tracking your location data to the barcode scanning performed by your smartphone, we often overlook the numerous instances of using Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets. Since IoT remains the answer to smarter mobile interactions of the future, developers with IoT expertise will face higher demand in the time to come.
AR or Augmented Reality
AR-powered mobile user experience has already broken new grounds in app development resulting in never-before sophistication and smooth user experience. Augmented Reality or AR has made the mobile user experience more sophisticated and smooth by blurring the dividing line between lived reality and the digital interface. AR is high in demand across most customer-focused app projects, including retail, real estate, gaming, entertainment, and many others.
PWAs or Progressive Web Apps
Progressive Web Apps or PWAs representing a unique web technology offering native mobile user experience to the users has become tremendously popular. PWAs allow instant loading time, smooth access from the mobile screen, offline access, and intuitive interaction with device features, just like native mobile apps. No wonder many startup and small business web projects are embracing PWAs to make their digital footprint more mobile optimized. This is why web developers having experience and skills for PWA will continue to enjoy increased demand.
AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages
Since the web traffic on smartphone devices continues to rise, mobile user experience has become crucial for web projects. This is where Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP has come as a popular technology to alter the ball game. AMPs are instant loading mobile-optimized web pages that will be a mainstay in the web development of the future. For an aspiring web developer, it is essential to get versed with AMP development skills.
Conclusion
Both mobile app development and web development offer huge career promises for the aspiring developers of the future. How you can sharpen your development skills by embracing the latest technologies and adapting to the latest trends will be decisive for your career growth.
