Companies want mobile apps without spending much on development

The enterprises engaged in the communications space are increasingly recognizing the perks having a sophisticated mobile app platform, with 42 percent of companies expanding their spending on mobile app development, by an average of 31 per cent in 2016.

However, the companies are averse to spending much on it, as a recent survey by Gartner revealed that the average proportion of the overall application development budget allocated to mobile is only 10 per cent, which is actually a 2 percent decline from last year.

"Demand for mobile apps in the enterprise is growing, but the urgency to scale up mobile app development doesn't yet appear to be a priority for most organizations," said Adrian Leow, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The Gartner survey of IT and business leaders responsible for mobile strategy and/or custom mobile app development within their organizations was conducted in September 2015 across the United States, EMEA, Latin America and Asia/Pacific.

According to the survey, majority of companies believe in developing mobile apps that are focused on custom development, rather than customizing configurable apps or building from off-the-shelf templates. Organizations have about 26 mobile apps in their own enterprise app store on average, with a third of those mobile apps being custom-built, while the remainder are prepackaged apps (such as Box, Evernote and SAP Fiori).