To be perfectly honest, we’re having a hard time containing our excitement about next week’s Volt MX release v9.5, code named “Curie”. Whether you’re new to Volt MX or you’re already a customer, our two-part webinar event will show you how our multiexperience, low code platform for professional developers empowers you to build innovative, secure app solutions that solve your customer and employee experience challenges. And by pre-registering, you will be among the first to get a link to watch the release unfold.
One of the most exciting innovations we’re introducing is support for super and micro app development. This blog post will show how it can both supercharge your multiexperience app development strategy and harness new opportunities for your business.
Super Apps in the Real World
If you’re not familiar with the definition of a micro or super app, you might be surprised to know that you’re probably already using and interacting with one today. For instance, many companies today already have a B2E portal, which is often a super app that bundles several individual micro apps. In these portals, employees can access different enterprise systems, which can handle such functions as internal communications, requests for time off, or claims for expenses.
Similarly, in the B2C world, a major airline might deploy a super app with multiple microapps that serve a specific functionality: searching for a flight, booking a flight, checking in, checking flight status, integrating with a third-party ride-sharing service and so on.
The user experience of micro apps within super apps should be seamless; but sometimes it’s not. A bad user experience in an airline app might include being redirected out of the app for features such as viewing inflight entertainment options or gaining Wi-Fi access. This usually happens when a company chooses to create single monolith apps that are more complex to maintain and evolve. Or worse, companies might utilize multiple standalone or progressive web apps, often resulting in disconnected digital experiences for the user. These shortcomings aren’t just frustrating for the customer…they’re bad for business.
Now that you get the idea, let’s get down to some definitions.
- Micro apps: Like a microservice, microapps are single-purpose apps designed to help users perform a single, specific task quickly and efficiently. They support rich media and other semi-complex functions but are faster and easier to create than traditional web and multiexperience applications and are easy to reuse.
- Super apps: A web-based or mobile application that provides end users with a set of core features and gives access to independently created micro apps. In effect, a super app serves as a platform to deliver a micro app ecosystem.
Benefits for Your IT team
With this release, not only can Volt MX enable micro apps to act as your gateway to super app development, but it also enables increased agility and productivity for your IT team and your greater organization. That means that you can do more–in less time! Consider the following benefits:
- Improved productivity for dev teams — “Bite-size” pieces of development allow for better use of dev resources and allow the creation of parallel teams to tackle different apps, significantly reducing inter-squad dependencies.
- Enhanced ease of maintenance — Micro app strategies can make an Agile development team far more impactful in both initial app development and ongoing app support. It enables easier patching, facilitates the addition of new features, and streamlines the debugging process.
- Adherence to coding best practices — Building micro apps entails coding to an architectural pattern—which means that once your reference architecture is defined, any developer expanding on the existing code base can just build on that foundation without having to decipher what was done before. That ease of development also promotes easy reuse of micro app components into other applications. The reference architecture also helps define security and data protection requirements for microapps by establishing an ecosystem governance reinforced with shared platform capabilities.
Benefits for Your Business
If you’re not already building superapps, you might be falling behind the competition. In fact, the whole landscape is changing at a rapid pace. By 2027, Gartner predicts that “more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of mulitple superapps.”
The time to change is now, and it’s clear that building super apps into your app dev strategy will create both business and technology opportunities. Consider how making the switch is mutually beneficial:
- Better user experience and digital journey – Super apps should be built as a platform to deliver consistent and personalized app experiences. This allows for a seamless, all-in-one app experience with no switching between PWAs.
- Increased ROI — With super apps, your company can create a “stickier app” by enriching it with an entire ecosystem of microapps from third-party services, finding capabilities and services that pair well with your current app offerings.
Also, by offering your employees an easy developer experience with convenient dev tools, you can keep your IT team happy, which means better retention and the attraction of new talent excited to be in the forefront of app development.
From a business perspective, super apps help to increase engagement with your customers, partners, and employees with functionality that will keep them coming back for more.
To learn more about how these and other new capabilities in Volt MX can supercharge your developer productivity, don’t forget to pre-register here [https://hclsw.co/vmx-curie] for the release webinar on January 17. We’ll see you there!
Developers, take notice! You can deliver cutting-edge experiences to any and all digital touch points, leveraging the latest front-end frameworks (ie: Vue, React, Angular) and the new self-describing OpenAPI set of REST services. This has our competitors worried as we are empowering developers to access headless services to continue to integrate to critical business processes and applications securely, using their tools and front-end frameworks of choice.
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