Exploring mobile development at Full Sail offers an education in the fundamentals of computer programming with additional courses devoted to iOS and Android programming. Although this area of study focuses on applications for mobile phones, the iOS and Android programming background that students gain can be used to create applications for devices like tablets, watches, and VR headsets.

How Mobile Programming Goes Beyond Phones

“Pretty much anything that's not tethered to the wall is considered mobile,” says Dr. Rebecca Leis, Full Sail’s Mobile Development Program Director. All mobile devices have different programming standards, and the programming skills students learn when they study mobile development can apply to the standards for wearables and other mobile tech.

The classes include iOS courses, Android courses, and a final portfolio class where students complete an original mobile application using industry-standard environments and programming languages.

The Android-specific courses cover programming languages like Java and Kotlin, as well as Android-specific tools and environments like Android Studio. These skills can be utilized to not only make Android mobile phone applications but also to build smart fitness apps like the ones used by the machines in the Fitness Technology Lab Powered by Echelon on Full Sail’s campus. ­The iOS-specific courses are designed to teach students tools like XCode and Swift, which are the basis for SwiftUI. XCode, Swift, and SwiftUI are part of the essential toolkit for building applications in devices like the new Apple Vision Pro.

Classes That Give You an Edge

Full Sail’s mobile development-focused classes give students an advantage when they’re getting ready to professionally develop apps for phones or other mobile devices.

The Data Visualization and Modeling course teaches students how to take raw data that’s been collected from mobile applications and other digital sources and convert it into something that’s easy for a layperson to understand, like a bar graph. This can help executives make strategic decisions about their business, like how they can improve user experience on a mobile application. Data collected from mobile devices can help programmers develop new applications or help a company make decisions about new application features or other improvements.

“Mobile data is so vast right now, there's so many things you can collect… You can [see] where people are looking on the [mobile device] screen and determine attention hotspots, things that they’re most interested in. And using that data, you can actually make a lot of business decisions,” says Rebecca.

In the Machine Intelligence Systems class, students learn about the applications and technologies that gather, store, analyze, and access data. Covering these technologies teaches students how to program systems that help machines learn and solve problems, which can be applied to mobile apps on phones and beyond.

“You can use data science and data visualization within machine learning or machine intelligence to be able to predict different things. If you get content related to a particular device where you're like, ‘Okay, people tend to click on these products,’ then you can suggest different products to them based off of what they've clicked on… For example, if you have the Amazon app and you're [scrolling] through, it'll see where you've clicked or the things you've searched, and then it'll suggest different types of products to you… [Machine intelligence] is a really powerful tool where people can essentially hold a personal computer with individualized suggestions in the palm of their hand,” Rebecca explains.

Whether students decide to stick to phone applications once they graduate or branch out into wearables and other mobile tech, studying mobile development at Full Sail can prepare them for multiple career opportunities.