Building Your Own Mobile App - Here Things You Need To Do

 

Mobile apps have penetrated our lives in a multitude of ways and transformed digital interactions forever. The bottom of pushing digital transformation beyond the limit now rests in the hands of mobile apps. Naturally, every business and startup idea now revolves around mobile apps. 

There are already close to seven million apps across both App Store and Play Store. How does a new app make its place beating this huge and overwhelming competition all around? How can you build a mobile app that can win this competition and come out victorious? Well, this is why you need to learn from the leading apps and their development practices. 

Below, we will provide some guidance on developing mobile apps and critical steps to follow.  

Focus on solving a problem

An app comes as a solution to one or several problems faced by the users. If you want to build a great app, the first thing you need is a great app idea that focuses on solving real-life problems or the needs of people. 

Successful apps actually solve problems or innovatively satisfy needs is challenging to grasp. Every excellent app product is created to solve problems, but they bring a fresh new approach to solve the issues. 

Give a shape to the app idea. 

Like any app, you also have started with an idea. Now, this app idea needs to be sketched on paper so that it can offer a tangible conception of the app you are going to build. The sketch should clearly define your core app idea and the corresponding user experience. 

While sketching the app idea, explain visually how the app works and how users interact with various app features. You can either use a tool to create this sketch or just put the idea down on paper. 

Go for MVP development 

When you have sketched the app idea, it is time to segregate the features into two large groups, such as must-have features and nice-to-have features. The first category gets the priority, while the second one will be put in queue for further development. 

Focus on building the basic app with elementary features first. This approach called Minimum Viable Product (MVP) will help you stay focused on the core user experience while leaving options open for further improvement and value additions through updates. 

Moreover, app ontwikkelaars can bring changes and make value additions validated by the users with this approach. Lastly, the MVP approach also helps you keep the initial development cost lower and spread the cost across different stages. This approach will help you bring the most straightforward app product thoroughly resilient against unwanted failure. 

For prioritizing the elementary app features, ask the following questions. 

• What are the features that you can leave out from the app project? 

• What are the features to boast of unique value propositions? 

• What are the features that are not necessary for the core user experience? 

• What are app features likely to slow down app performance and still need improvement? 

After getting answers to these questions, you can see which features you need for the initial app release and which features you can still improve and keep for future updates. Remember, a great app does best what it primarily promises to users instead of focusing on too many things at once. 

Know your competitors and the audience 

A successful app product needs to be grounded solidly upon competitor research. Your app is not the only one to represent a particular niche. There are hundreds and thousands of apps belonging to every niche and purpose. Naturally, to create a value proposition for your app, you need to deliver over and above what your competitors offer. 

Get details about the competitor apps and all their strengths and weaknesses. Make a list of competitor apps offering something close to your intended app product. Come up with a clear strategy to outpace the competitor apps, find unique features and functionalities that none of these apps offers, and find ways to provide a better user experience than competitors.

Another essential facet of your preparation is carrying out extensive audience research. You need to know the people for whom you are building the app. You need to know the demographic characters of your audience along with their preferences, typical spending capability, and features and interactions of their choice. Only by knowing your target audience, you can orient the app user experience accordingly. 

Select the development method

For developing an app, you have several ways and methods at your disposal. Here we explain a few scenarios in brief. 

• Native app development: Native development is building the app for one particular mobile OS platform at a time. You can create separate native Android app and native iOS apps. This method requires using platform-specific technologies and ensures a better user experience. On the flip side, native development is time and resource-consuming. 

• Hybrid App Development: Hybrid app development builds one app that can run on multiple OS platforms such as iOS, Android, web, and desktop. These apps mostly use time-tested web development stacks such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and involved less development time and resources. Ionic, Apache Cordova, PhoneGap are some of the popular hybrid development frameworks. 

• Cross-platform development: This is the most popular development approach balancing the best of both hybrid and native development. While it ensures reusing maximum code in app versions for different platforms, it also utilizes the native UI layer to deliver a more native user experience. React Native, Flutter and Camarin are the leading cross-platform development frameworks. 

Conclusion 

We just described here the preliminary steps and things to do for your mobile app project. These steps will give your app a solid foundation and help you excel with the final app product.