Smartphones have changed the way we consume information, get entertained, and interact with our friends and family. We can order food, book a cab, find a job, get the groceries, and use a magic box called the ‘smartphone’. An average person in the US spends about 3 hours daily on their mobile phone. Marketers and Brands have realized the trend. Almost all big brands have their own smartphone Apps. What’s more, even traditional businesses realize the potential of online markets. They all are aware that their target customers are shopping online.
As you plan your move to developing your own App, we lay out a step-by-step guide for you to get work done efficiently and with ease.
Mobile App development primarily involves hiring an app development agency or a freelance developer. You can find more information about freelance developers on this blog by hiremotely.com. The shortlisted developer will help you define App’s features and functionality. The initial stage requires a certain introspection level where you try to understand what problem your App will solve and how it will deliver the solution.
A properly carried out market research is the key to a successful App. As you carry out the research, you segment the prospective users, defining market audiences, determining their specific problems, needs, and requirements. These steps literally let you deep-dive into your customer demographics.
The market research part of the App development process is essential as almost 80% of users uninstall Mobile Apps after their first use. The reason is simple if the user does not find value in the App or it does not solve the user’s problem, the user will uninstall it.
The next steps are to prepare a pre-release beta or a prototype. It helps chisel out bugs and apply suitable fixes. Your team can test drive the App several times to suggest tweaks in the user interface, thereby making it more user-centric. As you achieve a Minimum Viable Product status, you are ready to take your App out of the works and show it to a testing panel or even investors.
You may use a focus group to test the App or seek insightful user feedback by sharing screenshots of App features and functionalities. This would be the penultimate stage in testing. It also ensures a relatively stable App (Release Candidate) when you release it to the online App Store. This step aims to work towards perfecting the User interface (UI) Design and ensuring compliance with User Experience (UX) standards.
As you proceed further, you are required to select the most viable software architecture suited for your App. This is critical to the proper functioning of the App on the user’s smartphone operating system. Choosing the right development framework is integral to your App development process. Technical aspects like storage space usage, API consumption, and use of smartphone resources like Camera or GPS; are determined at this step. Your App’s responsiveness and flexibility for future upgrades makes it a candidate for future sustainability. Choosing the right framework suited for the needs of your App, ensuring its smooth functioning. e.g., you may select the open-source ‘ionic’ framework, which is famous for its cross-platform mobile app development. Or choose others like PhoneGap, Xamarin, jQuery Mobile, or even Corona SDK.
The technologies fragment out from here and there are multiple options to carry our different steps. For example, for superior performance and full utilization of your phone’s resources, you may consider developing a Native App. It can be created using Objective- C or Swift language. Another alternative is the hybrid Apps that rely more on the network and are based on HTML5.
While the App is readying to hot up on the App Store, you might want to consider optimizing it for the Store search engine.
As long as your App continues to solve the users’ problem, a few mistakes here and there can be overseen. Your App is poised for success and fame as you keep ‘user delight’ at the center of your App development endeavors.