How we develop mobile sites for users in developing markets
Google published a report outlining that most the world is running on affordable Android devices. For many organizations who need websites and web services, tech agencies fall short on delivering a working deliverable.
The affordability of Android devices has brought internet access to millions, helping to bridge the digital divide particularly in developing markets. The report finds that nearly two-thirds of smartphones shipped in 2022 in a sample of developing countries were Android devices under $200.
Android devices are inconsistent with what browsers they're shipped with and with what their users are using. And because of that it's difficult to develop websites and webapps for them as many browsers have slightly different standards.
For organizations with web-facing services in these areas, it's important that they work for who they're serving and for all their devices (no matter how niche).
Every website and service we build at Will Helps is considered crucial. Crucial means it needs to be accessible, run on what users use, and of course be intuitive.
Developing is an iterative process for us that starts with understanding the use cases of what we're building and the devices it'll be run on.
We test extensively on the devices that matter.
Building iteratively needs a process for quickly testing changes.
We use two services for quickly and remotely testing on mobile devices:
You find other similar services through some searching, but we've been happy so far with those.
But we've found that remote testing services don't catch everything, especially interaction-related bugs. So, we have our own little collection of affordable mobile devices that we regularly test on too. We've built a beautiful testing and automated local deployment flow for our projects that makes it easy to build, push, and test on all our devices on the name network. If you want to learn more about that, reach out!
We think of this approach to mobile web development as a bottom-up approach. Starting with the phones with the most limited featureset, we ensure they work first and in the process ensure everything continues working all the way up to top of the line Android and iPhone devices.