2017 Mobility 100: 15 Coolest Mobile App Development Platforms

App Development Platform Innovators

Whether an enterprise is seeking to develop mobile apps for internal users (such as employees), or external (such as customers), the ideal type of platform is going to be same. It's going to be fast and secure, while also being flexible and connectable (to outside data sources). Numerous mobile app development platforms on the market offer all of these advantages and more for the creation of business apps, but which ones really deliver? To give a sense of the key players offering mobile app development platforms right now, we've rounded up 15 of the coolest vendors to know about.

Adobe Systems

Shantanu Narayen, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Adobe's Experience Manager Mobile product offers features including repurposing existing content for use in a business app, such as through sharing assets in Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

Amazon

Jeff Bezos, CEO

Headquarters: Seattle

Amazon Web Services, through its Mobile Hub platform, provides a variety of tools for businesses to create new apps. Those include guiding users to select and configure features, automatically provision AWS services and easily connect to back-end data.

Appcelerator

Jeff Haynie, Executive Vice President

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Appcelerator (owned by Axway) enables the development of native apps, written in JavaScript, for any operating system. Mobile test automation, connections to data sources and measurement (for metrics such as usage and adoption) are other key features.

Embarcadero

Randy Jacops, CEO

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

Embarcadero is a provider of tools for rapid development of enterprise mobile apps, including RAD Studio, which enables developing native apps across different operating systems from the same code base.

Kinvey

Sravish Sridhar, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Kinvey specializes in providing mobile back-end-as-a-service for enterprise apps, which enables fast connections for mobile developers to back-end data sources such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and SharePoint.

Kony

Thomas Hogan, CEO

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

Kony offers a platform for enterprise mobile app creation, the Kony Visualizer 7, that brings together tools for native design, native prototyping, development and deployment. The platform enables development of low-code apps using JavaScript.

Mendix

Derek Roos, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

Mendix's application platform specializes in enabling the development of apps quickly -- without the need for code -- through visual modeling of full-stack applications and leveraging reusable app building blocks.

Oracle

Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, Co-CEOs

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Oracle touts a variety of features for its Mobile Application Framework, including deploying the same code to iOS, Android and Windows 10. Other features include enabling the development of apps through utilizing open standard technologies such as Java, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

OutSystems

Paulo Rosado, CEO

Headquarters: Atlanta

OutSystems aims to stand out with features for quickly building and deploying apps, such as visual development and single-click deployment. The platform also enables in-app feedback and automatic updating of queries when databases are changed.

Pegasystems

Alan Trefler, CEO

Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.

Pegasystems offers options for business mobile app development including point-and-click workflow and pre-configured templates. The company also provides developers with access to its Intelligent Virtual Assistant for adding bot functionality to enterprise apps.

Progress Software

Yogesh Gupta, CEO

Headquarters: Bedford, Mass.

Progress Software's OpenEdge product enables the development of business mobile apps using the Advanced Business Language, which brings advantages around managing relational data to match business needs.

Red Hat

James Whitehurst, CEO

Headquarters: Raleigh, N.C.

Red Hat's Mobile Application Platform provides integration with back-end data sources, support for native SDKs, drag-and-drop features and the ability for developers to choose their own development tools -- as well as whether they work from Red Hat's hosted platform or in their own environment.

SAP

Bill McDermott, CEO

Headquarters: Walldorf, Germany

Through the SAP Mobile Platform, developers can both create new business mobile apps using tools of their choosing and SDKs, and also customize pre-packaged apps from SAP and more than 100 partners.

Salesforce

Marc Benioff, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

Along with offering plenty of choices for developers around tools and environments for app development, Salesforce's App Cloud Mobile product offers options around working on apps while offline and designing massively scalable mobile back ends on Heroku.

ViziApps

George Adams, CEO

Headquarters: Wellesley, Mass.

ViziApps' development platform distinguishes itself by providing visual design (drag and drop) not only for the app's user experience, but also for the app's connection to back-end data sources. The company supports connections to more than 50 data sources.