The Benefits of Microapps Explained

Microapps are small applications designed to perform specific tasks. Many companies have leveraged the benefits of microapps because of the poor user experiences associated with monolithic enterprise apps and their overly burdensome features. As a result, microapps offers a suite of productivity improvements to many organisations and enhance the usability of large enterprise applications.

The move toward microapps is also taking place within individual departments. Today’s managers see that enterprise software often comes with a wealth of features. Unfortunately, they also lack the features that the department needs to produce accurate results efficiently.

If you’re not familiar with microapps and the benefits they offer, start by reading DreamFactory’s post What is a Microapp: An Emerging Trend. You can also schedule a DreamFactory Q&A session to learn more about how microapps can benefit your specific organization.

Microapps Don’t Need as Much Storage Space

As remote work continues to trend, your employees may not have as much processing power as they did in the office. As a result, you may suffer from lower productivity as employee laptops struggle to keep up.

Mobile apps were already causing problems as more companies embrace BYOD policies. The average iOS file size is 37.9 MB. Android apps don’t take up quite as much space, but they still take up 14.6 MB of space on employee devices.

Microapps don’t need nearly as much storage space or processing power to do their jobs correctly.

Microapps Give You More Flexibility

Monolithic apps often demand that users follow specific processes established by developers. You end up going through steps that have nothing to do with your current project.

Microapps offer exceptionally more flexibility because they don’t have to follow long sequences.

The microapp approach to development also gives professionals more opportunities to build separate products quickly that can interact when needed.

Start a free, 14-day trial to see how DreamFactory makes it easier than ever for all of your apps to communicate through automatically generated APIs.

You Could Get Better Security from Microapps

Huge apps can include security vulnerabilities that take time for developers to locate. With so much code to sort through, a team might not find a patch for days.

Microapps function better from a security perspective because they’re small, and users only need to keep essential tools on their devices. The fewer people have on their devices, the harder it becomes for cybercriminals to hide their tracks.

Microapps Help Developers Build Better Products

If you haven’t worked in application development, you might not understand the frustrations that many professionals experience trying to coordinate massive building projects for enterprise apps. It’s a tedious process that includes writing code for infrastructure, monitoring, authentication, testing, and so on.

To make matters worse, every project requires a slightly different approach.

Microapps offer an entirely new approach to development. Developers can place microapps inside a larger application, so they don’t have to rebuild everything from scratch. The application’s infrastructure already contains all the essentials, so developers can add and remove microapps as needed.

Of course, developers can encounter struggles getting microapps to cooperate. The approach doesn’t eliminate all concerns. Still, it works better than trying to overhaul a monolithic app with features that don’t communicate with each other well.

Use Cases Showing the Benefits of Microapps for Enterprises

Companies have used microapps for years, so there are plenty of use cases showing how well they can work. DreamFactory has worked on several projects. Two of these that we will discuss in more detail below include expense request microapps and interactive web table microapps.

Expense Requests Microapps

Getting expenses approved can take a lot of time and effort when relying on standard systems. You would think that submitting an expense approval and getting a response would only take a minute or so. Instead, it can take weeks.

DreamFactory worked on a microapp project that bypasses bottlenecks and gives users step-by-step directions to make the process as easy as possible. After submitting the request, managers only need to press buttons that say “approve” or “send back.” Microapps streamline the process and make it easier for everyone to do their jobs.

Interactive Web Tables

Extracting and sharing business metrics often involves a multi-stage process that includes tasks like talking to the database manager, requesting a report, exporting data to Excel, and sending the attachment to team members.

Interactive web tables become simple when you use microapps set up through DreamFactory API and the platform’s Tabulator Integration. Suddenly, you can pull your own tables without help from a database manager. You don’t even need to know SQL.

Get Started with a Microapps Strategy

Start a microapps strategy that gives you more value from your enterprise system by signing up for a free trial from DreamFactory. DreamFactory comes with ample tools that make it easy to adopt the right strategy for your organization. You get live API docs, an admin console, application deployment, and API publishing, just to name a few.

Sign up for your free trial today so you can see DreamFactory in action. You’ll love what the technology brings to your group.

Tony Harris

Explore Dreamfactory’s collection of blog articles written by Tony Harris.