What Are Micro-apps and Why Do Businesses Need Them?

The idea behind building a mobile app has been to offer a faster, easier, and innovative experience on various devices to users, doing away with their need to browse websites. However, in a bid to stay relevant to consumers amidst competition, companies try to bundle up a million features together rather than offer a full-proof and specific solution for a certain user need. Being overwhelmed with numerous unnecessary features and functionalities, an app poses various inhibitions to a great user experience. In this blog, we will take a look at how a micro-app can help enterprises solve this issue.

What Is a Micro-App?

It is a web/mobile-based, a customized app built to enable end-users to perform a certain, narrowed-down function. Unlike a conventional mobile app, which is bundled with multiple features and pages, the micro-app is smaller in size, more consumer-oriented, and built to offer certain functionality, has an easy user interface, with a dynamic loading that bypasses the app store. For instance, a Personal Banking app has several functions, such as viewing the balance, getting mini statements, changing the ATM password, money transfers, etc. However, if you build a micro-app for this, it will accomplish only that specific task, such as getting transaction history. 

Using a Microservices Architecture to Develop Microapps

Microapps is an extremely hot topic right now. But frankly many of us don't really know what a "microapp" is, nor do we understand the benefits. Is this another tech fad? Is it really something new or is it an evolution of an existing construct? Do I really need microapps to be successful?

The concept of a "microservices architecture" commonly gets confused with microapps. Microservices are small, maintainable, and easily testable backend services. They are organized around specific business capabilities as well which, as we will see today, makes them a perfect candidate to work with microapps.