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In today’s world, mobile devices—from tablets to phones to watches to fitness bands—are everywhere you look. Having a mobile application can be a big plus for a company, whether it’s used externally, internally, or both.

Azure Mobile Apps, included as part of Azure App Service, is a backend as a service that provides multiple features to make it easier and quicker to create a mobile application. Mobile Apps is both flexible and scalable, so when your application becomes widely used, you can scale appropriately to handle your customers’ needs.

Another advantage of Azure Mobile Apps is that you only have to write one version of your backend. The backend can be used by devices running iOS, Android, and Windows, allowing you to reach every user on every platform without extra work.

The following are some of the features provided by Azure Mobile Apps. You can certainly program a service to implement these features from the ground up, but using Azure Mobile Apps saves you the time and money it would take to do that.

 Data storage You can choose for your data storage to be powered by SQL Database, which has an interface simple enough to use without being a DBA. You can also integrate with SQL Server, Azure Table Storage, MongoDB, DocumentDB, or via an API to software as a service (SaaS) providers such as Salesforce.com and Office 365.

You can write your application to work offline and synchronize the data when the application can go online again. This is helpful when the customer loses Internet connectivity—the customer can continue to work, knowing the work will be stored on the backend when connectivity is regained.

 User authentication and data authorization are greatly simplified You can easily implement single sign-on (SSO) with Azure AD, a Microsoft account, Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

 Push notifications You can send information for customer and enterprise applications to any customer’s mobile device by using Microsoft Azure Notification Hubs. This can come from any backend, whether it runs in Azure or is on-premises. Notification Hubs automatically handles the server-side code to push messages to the push notification services for iOS, Android, and Windows devices.

Notification Hubs has a tagging feature that can be used to target audiences based on activity, interest, location, or preference. In addition, the templates feature of Notification Hubs enables you to send localized push notifications in the customer’s own language.

 Because Mobile Apps runs in Azure, you can easily scale in and out to meet customer demand You can even set up autoscaling that will automatically scale out as demand increases, handling millions of devices.

 You can use Microsoft Azure WebJobs to perform backend processing on the server at a scheduled time For example, you might want to create a scheduled job that requests an update from your on-premises database and stores the new information in a table, waiting to be retrieved by your mobile application.

 You can create a hybrid connection This connection can be used to connect the mobile application to on-premises systems, Office 365, and SharePoint.

Source of Information : Microsoft Azure Essentials Fundamentals of Azure Second Edition