Liferay, Inc., which makes enterprise open source portal software, today announced the availability of Liferay Screens to help companies develop native apps for the iOS and Android platforms. With Liferay Screens, organizations can easily extend the reach of their websites, portals, and intranets to mobile devices, and maintain a consistent experience for its users across all channels.

The release is part of Liferay’s larger push to provide a mobile platform for companies developing several native apps across business units. With this strategy, Liferay hopes to save companies time and money by making it easier for mobile apps to reuse core data and services. The platform also ensures that users encounter consistent data and processes—such as registration, login, activity history, or documents—regardless of which interfaces they use to interact with the company.

“The problem we’re trying to solve for companies is, ‘how do we quickly build great mobile apps that integrate with the overall customer experience, while keeping development costs to a minimum?’” said Juan Fernandez, Product Manager at Liferay. “Companies have to respond to the mobile explosion, but they need to do so with a strategy. With Liferay Screens, you can develop high-quality, elegant mobile apps quickly without compromising on these long-term considerations.”

Liferay Screens also helps make native apps more useful to business units by removing the requirement for apps to be re-coded when business requirements change. For example, without Liferay Screens, a Customer Satisfaction Survey App would need to be updated and re-submitted to app stores whenever survey questions were updated. With a Liferay Screens-powered app backed by Liferay Portal, business users could update the questions in the portal, which would dynamically update the questions in the mobile app. The form submission could even be configured to trigger a workflow, which can also be updated by business users.

For mobile app developers and systems integrators, Liferay Screens provides several benefits over standalone or third party app development toolkits:

  • Fully compatible with standard development tools for iOS and Android
  • Lowers learning curve for developing apps backed by reusable backend services
  • Helps developers comply with UX and Brand requirements using Screens Themes, which follow Apple and Google’s design languages and allow for custom colors
  • Adaptive layouts automatically ensure apps function and appear correctly on phones and tablets of any form factor
  • Reusable services like registration, user management, localization, and authentication help developers focus on more important business logic

Early beta testers of Liferay Screens have been enthusiastic about its benefits for mobile developers who need better mobile app development tools.

“I think the key differentiator of Liferay Screens compared to other mobile solutions in the market is the focus on native,” said Nazaret Helices Perez, mobile developer at Near Technologies. “Working with native technologies is a must when you want to deliver high quality, high performance apps. Liferay Screens greatly facilitated this for our Liferay projects.”

Salvador Tejero, mobile developer at Indra, added: “Liferay Screens is a breakthrough for the Liferay platform. After initial tests with Liferay Screens, we believe we will now be able to quickly create new screens in our mobile apps, easily feeding in content and services. This will add value to the end user and increase their loyalty… I’d highly recommend Liferay Screens to native app developers looking for a powerful and reusable backend.”

Learn more about Liferay Screens and view a demo video at http://www.liferay.com/screens.