AWS Service – The New Age Choice For Mobile App Development

A common question that customers frequently ask mobile development companies is –

Which is the platform that is fully functional with a flexible technology infrastructure that has the capability to develop stable and user-friendly mobile applications?

Before digging deeper into this question, let’s first list down the requirements for a modern, robust and industry-leading technology infrastructure platform that can provide mobile solutions with all these benefits.

Some basic requirements that instantly come to the mind are -  security, global infrastructure, storage, application services, management and developer tools, integration with existing Infrastructure and finally support.

Traditionally, mobile application development companies established an eco-system that provide all these necessities either by creating them from scratch or by accruing third-party services from different service providers.

However, developing these requirements from scratch involves a huge amount of investment in terms of manpower, resources and of course money. An alternative to this is to rent or purchase different third-party services and integrate them with existing systems. But doing so may raise questions about security, reliability and maintainability.

So, what could be the real solution?

It could be a single cloud platform that satisfies all your requirements.

But does this exist?

It most certainly does.

Amazon Web Services or AWS mobile services are one-shot solutions for all the problems mentioned above. It will give you all facilities that one needs to develop and deploy great mobile applications.

Here is an insight into a platform that is all set to revolutionize the way we build mobile applications:

AWS Mobile Hub

The AWS Mobile Hub provides an integrated console that helps you build, test and monitor your mobile apps. Use this console to choose the features you want to include in your app. Mobile Hub then provisions and configures the necessary AWS services on your behalf and creates a working sample app.

Features:

• Simple Mobile Backend, quickly store and retrieve app data in Amazon DynamoDB.

• Server less Backend for Mobile Apps, configure server less backends using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.
• Build a Secure Enterprise App, develop employee and customer-facing mobile apps.

Supported AWS Services:

• App Analytics
• App Content Delivery
• Cloud Logic
• NoSQL Database
• Push Notifications
• User Data Storage
• User Sign-in
• Connectors
• Conversational Bots
• User Engagement

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito is a service that enables you to create unique identities for your users and authenticate them using either your own user pools or by using federated identity providers. You can save mobile user data, such as app preferences or game state, in the AWS Cloud without writing any back-end code or managing any infrastructure.

Features:

• User Pools
  • Create and maintain a user directory and add sign-up and sign-in to your mobile app or web application
  • Simple, secure, and low-cost

• Federated Identities
  • Create unique identities for your users and authenticate them with federated identity providers (Amazon, Facebook, Google, and SAML)
  • Data synchronization and Direct access other AWS services
• Sync
  • Cross-device syncing of user profile data

Pricing:

• Federated Identities
  • Free - First 50,000 MAUs (Monthly Active User)
  • Other charges: aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/
• Sync
  • Free - 10 GB storage, 1,000,000 sync operations / month for 1 year
  • $0.15/10,000 sync operations, $0.15/ 1 GB per month

Device Farm

AWS Device Farm is an app testing service that lets you test and interacts with your Android, iOS, and web apps on many devices at once, or reproduce issues on a device in real time.            

Features:

• Automated Testing

  • Choose to test a native, hybrid, or web app
  • AWS Device Farm tests your app against your choice of real phones and tablets
  • Get results in minutes that pinpoint bugs and performance problems

• Remote Access

  • Select a device by attributes like make, model, and OS version
  • AWS Device Farm displays the device’s screen in your browser
  • Gesture, swipe and interact with the device.
  • Reproduce customer issues and test new functionality

Pricing:

• Free - 250 device minutes
• Top up - $0.17/device minute
• Unlimited Access - $250/device

Pinpoint

Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted campaigns to drive user engagement in mobile apps. Amazon Pinpoint helps you understand user behavior, define which users to target, determine which messages to send, schedule the best time to deliver the messages, and then track the results of your campaign.

Features:

• Collect Usage Data from App
• Analyze Usage with Built-in Analytics
• Target Your Campaign by Creating Segments
• Build Your Campaign Message
• Schedule One-time or Recurring Campaigns
• Analyze the Results of Your Campaign
• Build Out Adoption Funnel Dashboards
• Easily Integrate External Data

Pricing:

• Monthly Targeted Audience
  • Free - first 5000 MTA
  • $0.0012 per MTA for 5000 to 10M users

• Events collected

  • First 100M events per month are free
  • $1.00 per 1M events per month thereafter ($0.000001 per event)

• Notifications sent

  • First 1M push notifications per month are free
  • $1.00 per 1M push notifications per month thereafter ($0.000001 per push notification)

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fast, flexible, fully managed push notification service that lets you send individual messages or to fan-out messages to large numbers of recipients. Amazon SNS makes it simple and cost-effective to send push notifications to mobile device users, email recipients or even send messages to other distributed services.

Features:

• Send updates, promos, and news to individual users or Group
• Broadcast messages to many devices with a single Publish request.
• Push notifications to Apple, Google, Fire OS, and Windows devices
• Send push notifications to MacOS desktops and Voice over IP (VoIP) apps on iOS devices
• Cloud-based enterprise Pub-Sub Messaging

Pricing:

With Amazon SNS, there is no minimum fee and you pay only for what you use.

• Users pay $0.50 per 1 million Amazon SNS Requests
• $0.06 per 100,000 notification deliveries over HTTP
• $2.00 per 100,000 notification deliveries over email.
• For SMS messaging, users can send 100 free notification deliveries, and for subsequent message charges vary by destination country.

Amazon SNS also includes a Free Tier, where users can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers pay no charges for the first 1 million Amazon SNS Requests, no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP, no charges for the first 100 Notifications over SMS and no charges for the first 1,000 Notifications over Email.

Please refer to the Amazon SNS Details page for additional details on pricing and data transfer costs.

Mobile SDKs

The AWS Mobile SDK makes it easy for your app to directly access AWS services, including Amazon Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Mobile Analytics, Machine Learning, Auto Scaling, and more.

The Mobile SDK supports:

• iOS
• Android
• Xamarin
• React Native
• Unity apps

AWS is a one-stop solution that enables you to develop and deliver secure, robust and stable mobile applications to market. Whether you require compute power, database storage, content delivery or any other functionality. AWS is a revolutionary platform that has just the right services to help you build erudite applications with augmented flexibility, scalability and reliability.

Get in touch with our experts today to find out how we can make AWS work for you.