SAP Mobility Applications
In a recent SAP Mobility Conference, I ran across an interesting data point-in 2013 alone, about 1 Billion Mobile Devices will be sold. Half of all U.S. adults own a Smart Phone or about 150 million people. Of these, 28% consider a Smart Phone as their primary way of accessing the web. In fact, while PC sales have declined significantly in recent times, the global demand for mobile devices continues to race ahead.
SAP Sybase Mobile Applications
Of course, mobility is a huge focus area for SAP software development efforts. Witness both the acquisition of Sybase and already extensive list of mobile enabled business processes, such as the SAP DSD app or Direct Store Delivery. Other mobile enabled, mission critical SAP apps already out there include executive dashboards delivered on devices, such as the iPAD and SAP Mobile CRM, where the sales force can check on inventory availability right in the store and potentially close the deal. The challenge is building apps that work on all platforms!
Which Browsers Are Compatible With Which App
Today, in addition to the huge number mobile devices, there are numerous mobile browsers, including:
Mobile Safari- 63.84%
Android- 18.87%
Opera Mini- 12.05%
IE- 5.8%
Firefox- .02%
Others- 4.62%
You Must Test Compatibility Of Every System
What should jump out from the above is that if you are developing an app or even delivering a marketing message, you will have to test every App on many systems or else you will miss a large number of potential users.
Grade Your Target Browsers
Looked at another way, you probably have limited resources with unlimited needs, and will need a way to focus your efforts to get the biggest bang for the buck. If you grade your browsers by their ability to support HTML5 and provide support to the following client side APIs, you get a very clear picture of which browser should be your focus for development.
This is not to say you can’t deliver to every platform. There are vendors out there that can deliver Apps that are automatically and robustly tested on all platforms simultaneously. Typically, to do this, they have spent many years developing specialized, globally deployable, mobile technologies
Graceful Degradation
An approach to development called “Graceful Degradation” is a good approach to quickly get an app to the market, then work backwards toward full compatibility with all mobile browsers. What is it? The idea behind graceful degradation is to first build for the latest and greatest mobile browser, then add “polyfills” or handlers for less capable devices.
Don't Let Old Browser Limitations Limit Your Development Options
Stated another way, you must not let the limitations of older browsers limit what you build today. At the same time, you need to provide fallback functionality for older browser so no one is left in the cold. Otherwise, you may lose money you don’t even know about.
What about the world between worlds? You know, the old reliable desktop and the new shiny Smart Phone. When it comes to business processes, it takes a bit of imagination to determine how best to model an enterprise business process that works (because it either begins or ends) on the mobile and desktop devices. For instance, many people today are researching a product in-store using a QR Code 
, then going home to order it on their desktop (or they can order it from their Smart Phone).
In this scenario, you need to talk to marketing, sales, and fulfillment, and possibly numerous layers of suppliers, to make a process like this work seamlessly.
Speaking from experience, I would advise you to also keep in mind the demographics of your target audience of users. Older people frequently need slightly larger, er hmm, text to take advantage of any mobile application.
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