Low-Code IoT App Development Platforms: What Are the Benefits?

A low-code IoT app development platform allows companies to create an IoT application faster, using less source code. These platforms come with reusable and sharable components that enable users with less know-how to craft their own solutions and do so at a greater speed. Ultimately, this is how you streamline the IoT development process.

Industrial digital services and IoT cloud solutions are on the rise. Companies are pressed to keep up with the pace of innovation. Manufacturers and machine builders are required to release new updates even faster than before.

This demand calls for new approaches to building, deploying, and managing industrial applications. This is where low-code IoT app development platforms come in. These platforms aim for standardization and complexity reduction at the IoT solution level, which ultimately requires fewer IT resources.

"Low-code development will account for more than 65% of application development in 2024." Gartner

Equipped with a low-code IoT development platform for building and deploying apps, companies are relieved from infrastructure, deployment, and maintenance spending whereas the emphasis is on ease of use and visual components. Developers are able to create customized applications in the cloud and deploy them with one click.

Accelerating the path from code to real-life applications translates into streamlined business processes, better customer experience, and improved operational efficiency. But what exactly is the great advantage of these platforms? Here is a breakdown.

How do you benefit from low-code app development?

Low-code app development can be leveraged in a wealth of industrial scenarios, speeding up the introduction of use cases.

Process automation

Low-code process automation makes it possible for industrial companies to build apps that monitor and control business processes, create an audit trail, and automate various process steps along the way. This immediately translates into less resource spending, fewer manual tasks, and more accurate decision-making. Further, with low-code development platforms, users get a bird-eye view of automated workflows, manage these, and ensure standardization plus high adaptability across the entire company.

A boost in productivity

Companies are empowered to spend their resources on more sophisticated tasks as low-code app development platforms abstract most of the complexity in development and deployment. The low-code approach allows companies to take advantage of reusable building blocks, making it easier for IT departments to create and oversee applications while helping teams focus on what is essential. Further, applications that are already created can be reused for various processes and leveraged at multiple levels, from the connected IoT device to building in-house IoT software development solutions.

Speed and ease of deployment

Low-code app development platforms are highly visual, with drag-and-drop features, reusable IoT tools and multiple components that facilitate access to those with less technical know-how. Without having to rely on highly skilled technical staff to do the job, companies are now well-positioned to deploy and update apps at a greater speed. This way, it is becoming easier to respond to volatile market demands and keep current with the latest innovations.

Lower costs

Thanks to reusable building blocks and a modular approach to app development, companies can significantly reduce development spending. Rather than starting from scratch, developer teams can now focus on building custom functionalities while benefiting from the standardized design and uniform core functionalities that come with the IoT cloud platform’s building blocks.

Cross-functional company-wide collaboration

Another essential aspect is the capacity to coordinate development efforts across departments, bringing together people from many different backgrounds, mindsets, and levels of know-how. Collaborative functionalities have become a must-have for low-code development platforms, enabling global teams to seamlessly come together and work in the same environment, achieving full transparency and fast-tracking decision paths.

Some IoT cloud platforms additionally offer even more differentiated user roles, making it possible to switch from no-code to low-code or expert levels depending on the expertise or customization needed to complete a task. Here, some users will only be able to see dashboards and oversee processes whereas others will have access to the full developer suite for IoT application development. Ultimately, the collaborative functionalities boil down to getting the information to the right teams faster and enabling informed decision-making while retaining a bird-eye view of people, data, processes, and task progress.

Why are low-code IoT development platforms so effective?

Using drag-and-drop interfaces, form builders, and visual process modeling, IoT developers can produce a working IoT app that they can deploy, download, open, and start using in just a few hours. These apps can involve device management, connecting to IoT hardware, harvesting IoT data from a connected device, and even building a new development tool to serve the entire IoT system. The IoT development service can accelerate the creation of a new IoT project by up to 80%.

The high reusability of the platform components also extends to IoT development tools and new functionalities. So if any custom coding is required for the app, developers can package the logic into modules that are readily available for other teams to reuse in similar projects.

New apps are created and deployed in only a few clicks. All functionalities related to app lifecycle management, process oversight, app performance, and maintenance are also available within the platform and accessible as a web application in the browser.

Ultimately, this facilitates a more streamlined development cycle. The new forms of agility that come with low-code platforms mean that sophisticated app development becomes more readily available. Even larger systems can be redesigned in months to meet new forms of demand.

This approach ultimately supports digital transformation efforts as it allows companies to meet their goals faster, reap immediate results, and get customer feedback that can be incorporated into later improvements.