Oracle thought a lot about the integration with their products with their wider portfolio of products, their own premise applications. That's fine, where people are using a very straightforward integration but more and more you see people that have got a landscape that no one had considered, or it's their first time with Oracle and the rest of that portfolio is very, very different.

There is lots of different things that people want to integrate with and some of that needs to be improved. There needs to be more integration points, more APIs. The obvious ones are all there and they are all catered for, but for almost every customer, you find something new. One of the great things about cloud is these come along very quickly once they've been identified.

One of the features that would interest me would be mobile app analytics, which would allow us to track mobile app usage.

I think they need to invest more into the functionality of this framework. That's one reason for my rating. Another reason is the performance. Unfortunately, it's still not the best.

There are internal processes that need improvement, such as time-off requests and expense report workflows. With the expense reports, for example, we need to collect all physical tickets, fill in an Excel report with the details of each expense, print it, sign it, and send it for approval. They should develop an app in order to just take a photo of the ticket, fill in the app the details, and submit it electronically for approval. 

The performance of animations could be faster. Also, the applications archive is quite big and could be better.

From my point of view, it would be desirable if Swagger would also be supported as a valid description format for custom APIs. Currently, there's only support for RAML.

In addition, it would be good to include further security mechanisms, e.g., allowing authentication via client certificates, which is currently not supported.

Custom API can be based on RAML documents (v0.8) and it is also possible to export the RAML document of an implemented Custom API. This makes custom API creation as well as Mobile app implementation more efficient since there is a common API description available.

With respect to other Cloud Services, like Oracle API Platform Cloud Service, it would be desirable if Custom APIs in MCS can also be based on the Swagger, respectively, Open API documentation format, to be more consistent regarding the overall Oracle Cloud platform, and to be more interoperable between different Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

A second thing that I wanted to mention is that it would be nice to include more features, in the area of security, with respect to authentication and authorization.

Currently, Mobile Backends can be secured by leveraging HTTP Basic Authentication and OAuth2. I’d be happy to see support for a further mechanism, like allowing authentication via client certificates, which would also allow to uniquely identify the device sending specific requests.

Currently, you’d need to fully establish a Mobile Device Management solution to achieve this, which is not required in every case. Adding more features in the security area would give users more flexibility.

Deployment and run time performances can be improved. Takes lot of time to support new versions of the OSes and platforms.

IPA/APK file sizes are very large compared to builds generated using other technologies.

It needs more control on gestures and animations.

• Performance
• Size of the applications

The first one is re-use. There are some concepts of re-use in MAF however, there could be more, and at a more granular level. Currently one can only re-use complete features, whereas it would be nice to also be able to re-use individual 'taskflows'. Furthermore, better support for UI templating would be a very welcome enhancement. What I'mr referring to here is to have UI templates available that enable us to implement Oracle's ALTA UI patterns easier, and not only ALTA UI look and feel.

One of the key areas in which MCS needs improvement is documentation. New features, like Zero Footprint SSO, need better documentation with detailed integration steps.

Performance and size of the applications produced can be improved.

There is a lot of room for improvement. MAF has enabled ADF developers to work with mobile devices, but the way the framework works might be confusing to a newcomer. There is not a lot of third party literature on the framework.

As Oracle MAF is a heavy product, it doesn’t allow much space to convince customers to go with the product suite. Also, the plug-ins and out of the box features need to be added into the library to offer an easy to use PPR. Also, enabling push notifications would certainly increase its popularity.

They need to enhance it to allow older smartphones to work smoothly without hanging.

A few times, what we encountered is that when we need some things to be patched, or some security bugs, they are not available on time. We need to wait a lot for the patches to be available. So if the patch cycle can be quickened, that would be very helpful.

It needs more native capabilities built into the platform, and alert messages without the need for plugins.