Did you hear about the new partnership between SAP and Apple ?
What kind of apps will be built based on this partnership?
It will be native apps running on iOS iPhone and iPad. We call them enterprise apps for iOS as they will be integrated to HANA Cloud Platform and S4HANA.
How will they be built?
Using a new SDK for iOS on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
How will they look like?
Similar to the current Fiori apps. Keep in mind that Fiori started as the simplified SAP user experience a few years ago, then it was mostly browser based. In the meantime, Fiori has evolved to the new user experience design paradigm (https://www.sapfioritrial.com/). With this partnership we take Fiori further to native iOS.
Why do we need native apps going forward, can’t everything run in a browser now or soon?
No question, simpler apps can run in a browser and having a browser based app has a number of advantages including no app updates or the same app running on multiple platforms. However, special purposes and use cases require a better user experience including speed, more complex functions accessing services like the camera or locations, full offline capabilities and more. This can only be done well with a true native app. Just think about how you read e-mails or access your calendar on your phone or tablet. Theoretically you could also do this in a browser interface but no one does it. Because it would be slower, harder to use when scrolling and offline would be impossible. Even social media apps that were HTML for a while are back to native, just for the user experience.
Which key apps are we looking at first?
An app for mobile field service and asset maintenance workers is certainly on top of our minds and we plan to include features for geo-spatial, graphics, IT/OT integration, analytics, alerts, cloud services and much more.
Here is a preliminary ‘labs’ showcase app:
So stay tuned, there is a lot of exciting development.
Cheers,
Robert
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