About apps

There are many ways to you can build mobile or web apps for your Particle device. This guide is intended to help you narrow down which option will work best for your specific scenario.

Early decisions

Cellular vs. Wi-Fi

This is actually one of the most important differentiators, because there Wi-Fi devices need a way to configure Wi-Fi credentials for your customer's Wi-Fi network. This is typically a custom mobile app.

With cellular devices, you generally don't have to directly communicate with the device to set it up, so there are many more options available.

For more the options available for Wi-Fi setup, see Wi-Fi setup options.

Web app or mobile app

If you don't have to worry about setting up customer Wi-Fi, you may prefer to use a web-based user interface instead of a mobile app. This is often easier to implement, and you don't have to worry about mobile app testing, app store submissions, and so on. And your customer doesn't need to install apps.

Developer Devices:

For personal home automation tasks, using a web-based app is often the easiest way to build a custom solution. Both iOS and Android allow you to bookmark a page on your mobile device home screen, making it easy to get to. Of course you may want to experiment with creating a mobile app, and you can do that too.

Framework or native mobile apps

There are many mobile app frameworks available now, and some can make it significantly easier to implement apps for both Android and iOS out of a single code base. Some popular frameworks include:

  • React Native
  • Flutter
  • Xamarin
  • Ionic
  • Apache Cordova (Adobe PhoneGap)

In addition to making development easier, these frameworks are popular, and if you are contracting out mobile app development, it may be easier to find a developer to do the work for you. Some of these frameworks can also generate web apps.

You may prefer to use the native tools and SDKs for iOS and Android. If you only want to support one platform, this is often a good choice.

Customers

We recommend that you implement your own user management features on your front and back-end. You may want to use common third-party login features such as login with Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. instead of implementing your own from scratch, but this not required.

Instead of issuing Particle access tokens to your users, encapsulate all Particle REST API calls within your back-end. This will greatly simplify your implementation and eliminate the need to manage user-specific Particle access tokens, customer accounts, and device claiming.

This also encapsulates Particle-specific API calls to a small part of your back-end. This eliminates the need to have a Particle-specific mobile or web app developer if you are contracting out your app development.

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