Lipson said the boom in mobile devices and platforms has created a development headache for software companies, especially at smaller firms like ShareFile. Building applications just for the Web, he said, is a relative walk in the park.
"Now it's getting back into this fragmented situation where every time you build a new feature you have to build it for the Web, iPhone, Android, now with tablets there are different screen sizes, BlackBerry, Windows Phone," Lipson says, noting that there's fragmentation even within Android. "It gets to be very cumbersome, so we've chosen to try to work with this higher-level platform."
ShareFile used PhoneGap to build the core of the application in HTML and JavaScript. Its own development team then wrote the native code for the iPhone and Android apps. "Overall, it definitely saved it quite a bit of development effort to do it that way," Lipson says. Tablet optimization is next on the horizon for ShareFile, and will eventually supersede smartphones in terms of the company's product development priorities. Though the core functionality of its mobile app will work on tablets, ShareFile is looking to tailor its mobile interface for various screen sizes and operating systems. Given the influx of new tablets on the market, that is easier said than done.
"Our team is working through: How do we efficiently build out a tablet strategy without having to build 12 different versions of the ShareFile app?" says Lipson. "Over the long term, the tablet will probably be more of a development focus for us than the phone."
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