Mobile application development using Salesforce has been a hot topic for the last few years, starting with the use of various well-known mobile frameworks, such as jQuery mobile, and AngularJS, along with Salesforce's own APIs, including OAuth for authentication, and the Salesforce REST API to access Standard and Custom Object records, leading up to the current development around the latest Salesforce Mobile application.

The interesting thing about this is that it has evolved in a different way to the browser UI, which started with the standard declarative-driven UI and could then be augmented with a more developer-driven solution, such as Visualforce. For a mobile UI, up until the release of Salesforce Mobile, we only had the option of building a custom UI with a developer.

As things stand today, we now have both options available for building mobile UIs. As such, make sure that you understand first and foremost the capability of the Salesforce Mobile application and its ability to surface your objects through its standard UI. Lightning Actions provide an excellent way to enhance the Chatter feed presence of your application and also add the same actions to your users' Salesforce Mobile experience.

Salesforce Mobile's UI model is not for everyone; it is, like the browser UI, mostly data-centric if you wish to expose a more fine-tailored, process-driven user experience for a very specific mobile application. If this is something you feel you need, you can review the Salesforce Mobile website to choose the architecture and APIs that suit your needs the best (https://developer.salesforce.com/mobile).