Summary

Mobile development with Force.com is a rapidly changing subject, with an active open source community around it. There are a wealth of options for building mobile applications, some directly baked into Salesforce products, some born within Salesforce but supported by the community, and many other general-purpose technologies that can be helpful.

Before moving on to the next chapter, take a moment to review a few highlights related to mobile development:

Salesforce provides three mobile applications that are ready to download and use for Android and iOS devices: Salesforce Classic, Salesforce Touch, and Chatter Mobile. Of the three, the first two are the most interesting to mobile developers because they can be extended with custom Visualforce pages.

There are three major types of custom mobile applications: native, Web, and hybrid. Native is the closest to the mobile device’s hardware and therefore offers the best performance and depth of features. Web runs within the mobile device’s Web browser, and offers the least control to the developer but can be easier to develop and deploy. Hybrid strives to be the best of both approaches, a mix and match of native and Web. Pick the option that makes the most sense for your application, users, and development skill set.

Although Visualforce is a good starting point for mobile Web applications, your Visualforce controllers and pages need to be optimized for this purpose. Visually they should be responsive, adapting to the screen resolution of the device. In terms of data, they should be frugal, requesting data only as needed and avoiding page navigation. Using Visualforce as the container for a Single Page Application is a helpful pattern. A number of open source projects are available to help with Web applications, from data management to responsive design.