mobile applications

So you’ve designed an amazing app and you’re ready to launch it on the Android and iOS markets. However with over 750,000 apps in each market, having an app with pristine code and a great user interface may not be enough. The market is crowded. So to stand out, you may have to do a little old fashioned marketing, and it starts before you even launch your app.

One of my favorite services here at Rackspace is Mailgun, a set of APIs that allow you to send email and manage mailing lists via a REST API. Coming back from a recent trip to San Antonio I decided that I would add an Objective-C interface to send email via Mailgun using my own iOS interface instead of using Apple’s `MFMailComposeViewController.` This library is now open sourced on Github and available via Cocoapods.

In April 1973, Marty Cooper made the phone call that sparked the mobile revolution. The mobile phone wasn’t always as smart and as compact as it is today. Take a look back through the various iterations of mobile phones that have brought us from the now-comical brick phone that started it all to the latest iteration that you’re carrying in your pocket right now.

Mobile applications are a strong vertical with startups within the Rackspace Startup Program. Virtually all serious mobile applications require a significant amount of backend work from server maintenance, provisioning and scaling to custom non-application server code. CloudMine offers a hosted Backend-as-a-Service platform for developers to build rich and interactive apps with full backend features without writing a single line of server code.