This year has been transformative for our industry. The idea of being “Mobile” has changed—mobile devices are used everywhere, with 66% of customers using them both at home and outside. The proliferation of the cloud and mobile frameworks and tools has been constantly growing to match the changing industry. The need for synergy between tools and services that support multiple devices, operating systems and business models has never been growing as Fast as it is now. Our understanding of the internet has also evolved from a browser, a mouse and a keyboard to a whole new set of devices (or things) that we need to support moving Forward.
In December, we will release the Telerik Platform 2.0—a Mobile, Fast, Forwardrelease that will unveil what the future holds for developers challenged to deliver high-quality apps faster than ever before.
Multiple Platforms, Multiple Approaches, One Solution
Today, mobile developers are required to deliver cross-platform mobile apps with powerful backends, insightful user analytics and engaging notifications, all while keeping development costs to a minimum. With this release, we will be announcing a new app-centric interface that makes it extremely fast to integrate cloud services into your app development process. The new interface brings the focus on the tools and services that make your mobile app, instead of brand names of products.
We have taken the extra step of bringing this integration to the API layer, so you'll be able to use a single App ID that works across all services and SDKs integrated in your app. We know seeing is believing, so we've created an interactive prototype that gives you a sneak peak of the upcoming changes here.
To help you move to the new interface, we will be releasing a migration wizard that lets you combine existing AppBuilder, Backend Services, Analytics, and Feedback projects into a single app.
Easier App Building and Publishing
This release isn’t just about making it easier to add runtime services to your apps, it’s also about making the app development and publishing experience even more efficient. As an Enterprise developer, you will most likely want the ability to include cloud builds in your existing Continuous Integration workflow. With this release we'll be offering a beta version of our CI builds with a Jenkins plugin. You also want to save time publishing updates to your apps, which is why improvements to AppManager LiveSync are just around the corner.
The capability to develop truly native apps with the Telerik Platform is taking some huge steps forward as well. Not only will we have the latest NativeScript bits available, but we will also be releasing a Verified Plugins Marketplace for NativeScript, along with enhanced LiveSync and debugging capabilities.
If you want to use the latest and greatest from Apple and Google, we have enabled iOS 9 cloud builds as well as support soon for Android 6 (M). Not to mention our industry-leading support for building Apple Watch apps! You’ll be able to build, test, and debug all of these apps using our expanded debugging capabilities in Visual Studio—along with a completely redesigned set of Companion Apps.
Last, but certainly not least, we are getting close to releasing a public beta of our exciting new cross-platform Desktop Client (codenamed “Proton”). Look for more details soon!
Mobilizing Data
Using an existing enterprise database when building a new generation of apps is a common requirement. In December, we'll be further enhancing our support for existing enterprise data using our enterprise data connectors. You will be able to use existing enterprise data residing in MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgre or Salesforce to build offline-ready mobile apps. We will also unveil the latest additions to our Backend Services, including a preview of our Aggregation queries and support for Scheduling of recurring cloud code jobs. You'll also get the latest in our Analytics, including new top level Dashboards, Engagement Cohorts and much more!
Pricing Updates and More
In order to support our unified strategy and simplify purchase options, we have decided to discontinue selling our single subscriptions for Telerik AppBuilder and Telerik Backend Services in December. Customers who are currently using these subscriptions will continue to renew at the same rate, but won’t receive any of the new features that will be part of the Telerik Platform subscriptions. They will be able to upgrade to a Telerik Platform edition with discounts.
As part of our unification strategy and building a more robust mobile development story, we will be discontinuing the web projects that are not specifically targeted at Cordova Hybrid or NativeScript. Customers working on web projects will be notified well in advance with in-product notifications to export or backup their projects prior to the change in December.
For all those who are looking into a pure web development approach to build apps that run responsively on desktop and mobile browsers—there’s a major initiative in this regard on our side and the results of it will start to appear later next year.
Webinar Coming Soon
We will host a live session on December 3rd demonstrating all of these capabilities in our upcoming Telerik Platform 2.0: a Mobile, Fast, Forward release. Join us as we walk you through how to build next generation mobile apps with the new features of Telerik Platform in our upcoming webinar! Sign up here.
