Byte poses a good question: Do businesses need to spend resources building custom mobile apps when Apple and Google already offer hundreds of thousands of apps that could do essentially the same thing? It’s a question many CIOs have thought about at some point, and Byte goes on to defend custom apps and databases, arguing that they are easy to build and can prove valuable in a wealth of scenarios, including content management surrounding special events and IT support-ticket tracking during software migration.

Writer Dino Londis cites programs such as FileMaker Pro and QuickBase that not only take databases and make them mobile, but even allows employees to do it themselves.

“Once you understand just how detailed these apps can get, then you understand the need for customizable database software. In fact, you start to envision applications everywhere,” Londis writes.

That sounds like a potential productivity booster to us, but is the development still worth the effort when there’s an app for practically everything these days? What does your company do? And what enterprise needs still aren’t met in the app market today?

More: Do Smartphones Make Us Superhuman, or Super Stupid?

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