From iOS to Mendix: Navigating the Apple Ecosystem for Mobile App Excellence, What are the advantages and disadvantages

Bahadır Seyfi
3 min readOct 8, 2023

Hi, I want to introduce myself before the article. I have been working as an iOS engineer for three years. I have gained several industries for the development of native mobile applications. I am just learning Mendix nowadays and would like to contribute to the Mendix Community. It caught my attention about the Mendix platform developing native mobile applications. I have wanted to do some research about it.

As we know mobile application sector is growing and subsequently worldwide app consumers spend a lot of money. In this situation, companies decide to develop their mobile applications for users and clients, but web and desktop applications do not suffice. At this point, companies were absorbed in their ASO (Application Search Optimization) because growing means reaching a lot of people. When we are looking for ASO for Apple market store principles we encounter many cases.

Image — A

This article is not about general infrastructure SEO(keywords, localizations, rating and reviews, tracking…). These principles are independent of your development platform. I want to examine closely 2 items:

- Apple technologies and devices(support iPadOS, WatchOS, etc.)
- Native device capabilities(camera, authentication, GPS, and Bluetooth)

You can easily add these capabilities and widgets to your native mobile app projects and configure them in Mendix Studio Pro. Still, you can not support your mobile applications with WatchOS or iPadOS yet. Apple store editors love Apple device-supported applications and contribute to you displaying these applications at the forefront in the AppStore. Now It seems not important but the situation is not what It seems. We couldn’t predict how the sector is growing and we’ll not predict. As you can see in Image B, App Store searches are major for app downloads and advertising.

Image — B

If we need to take a closer look at different native apps and Mendix, we encounter package management. If you want to build your app in a simulator or real device you need Cocoapods but Lately, Apple has shown its strength with SPM(Swift Package Manager). If you just want to use a robust, reliable, well-crafted, and well-tested framework SPM great choice. On the other hand, Cocoapods is a centralized dependency manager for Swift and Obj-C Cocoa projects.

mendix.com

As we know dependency problems arise always when we build projects with different platforms. However, applications require long-term support, because it is so important to choose the type of app that can easily maintain and update with future releases. I think the Mendix has done a really great job for these.

Conclusion

We can give Mendix a chance to develop mobile applications for large-scale or basic projects. Systems have leaks, you can’t choose the completely right way, some way you’ll have advantages, In response to this you’ll have disadvantages. Only you should know what you want to do and what you need to do.

In the coming days, we will build the same apps with different platforms like Mendix and Swift. In this way, we’ll examine how you can maintain performance differences.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahadirseyfi/

GitHub: https://github.com/bahadirseyfi

Twitter: https://twitter.com/bahadirseyfi

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