Certainly, with the advancement of technology, tools, and resources, the mobile app development has become a breeze, but it doesn’t signify it has become a work of an average Joe.Under the influence of clickbait articles, if you feel like you can get built an app in a couple of hours with just hundreds of dollars investment, then you are absolutely mistaking because the end product could never be the app that stands up to your expectation and bring the financial gains.
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In a nutshell, when you want to get built anamazing app that hit the massive audience and bringsmillions of dollars in revenue in the year 2019, then from conceptualization to the final launch, everything must be planned, strategized, and pre-determined alongside keeping a room for changes.
Here are the steps to follow to lay down the cornerstone of a successful app:
- Discovery workshop
Checking the app idea feasibility is all-important to avoid the future hiccups that in the end destroy the momentum and double the development cost. The leading app development companies mandate the pre-development research that’s also termed as a discovery workshop where the app’s goal, the problem it solves and user expectations it meets are checked.
Basically, at the discovery stage, the businesses would know the validity and viability of the app idea that whether the idea has the potential to be profitable; identify whether the app will stand out the competition or not with its unique proposition; find out which platforms, devices, and OSs is most embraced by the target audience; explore the ways to get paid through- in-app purchase, premium model, sponsorship, crowdfunding, in-app advertising, and freemium model.
The creation of MVP is also a part of the discovery workshop where the application with minimum features is launched in the market to test its viability in the market and get the user’s feedback. If MVP succeeds, the subsequent iterations are launched with incremental features and improvements.
- Engineer user experience design
It’s not necessary that the users will always find the visually appealing application the intuitive and usable one. The application interface must be designed in such a way that makes the user journey to the app effortless using conventional icons, familiar colors, soothing buttons, apt icons, and pretty more. All in all, from entry to exit, the users should feel like they know everything and it indicates the app design is synced to the user experience.
The UX design can be created for the app by starting with information architecture where the developers design the rough sketches depicting the flow of the app and navigation structure, in addition to lists of the features. The IA process enables the creation of best user journeys that make the app browsing a true delight.
Later, the final sketch is converted into wireframe that’s the blueprint of the app, which works as a skeleton of the app and give an idea of the ‘look and feel’ that future app will have. The wireframing helps in setting realistic expectations and identify the things to keep or remove. Going beyondthe assumption stage, using digital tools, the clickable prototype of the wireframe can be made which aids in knowing how the app will work when you click around and possible flaws can be surfaced.
- Craft the interface that appeals
Unquestionably, the design is not everything, but it’s a big thing in determining the quality of the app. Remember- “The first impression is the last impression,” and design is the key factor that captivates the users or drifts them away.
The designers use the style guide to paint the interface with the rightset of colors, fonts, elements, and icons so that the app screen won’t be filled with different gradients, buttons of distinct size and colors, and complex navigation structure. Post-style guide creation, the style guide is gently applied to the clickable prototype in order to test it before coding.
My two cents: It’s good to stay inside the box and make the aesthetics tempting, follow the latest UI trends, and conduct beta testing for making the app out-of-box and loved by the target audience.
- Mobile app development
Before giving a headstart, it’s essential to narrow down your choice for the platforms on which you want to publish your app. There are three approaches to front-end development that’s native, cross-platform, and hybrid. All the development approaches have their own pros and cons, so choose the one that helps in developing a front-end which lets you accomplish the business goals and meet user’s needs within the budget and timeline.
When the front-end is impeccably ready, it’s time to develop a back-end that’s a server, which effectively stores and sends the data to display on the front-end. Before you start coding for the back-end, it’s a mindful decision to choose the programming language such as Swift for iOS, or Kotlin for Android; decide the database and data structure to use; select the hosting server according to your hosting budget, and the performance and scalability that the app requires.
When the development part is done, it’s necessary to test the application to detect and fix the technical and functional flaws before submitting the app to the app store.
There are myriad types of the testing such as functional testing that determines that functionalities will work as they are designed and described in functional specifications, the performance testing that illustrates how the app will perform under stress like- how fast it loads and respond, the device-specific testing that showcases how the app functions on the wide range of devices with distinct screen sizes, various OS versions, and different resolution, the usability testing to test the app’s functionality wearing the end user’s lens, and finally, the edge-case testing that works as a panacea in the edge case scenarios.
- It’s time for deployment
When you think your app is ready to make it to the app store, it’s a sign that the moments of deploying the app has come, but the app deployment is not a piece of cake. It demands the best practices to follow, a well-defined plan to have, and a few things to take care of. They are:
The release cycle should be kept optimum, the deployment must be done continuously that prevent large file downloads and minimize downtime, automate the app configuration, ensure the developer’s certificate must be up-to-date, and the app submission guideline of the app store must be reviewed so that the app submitted and get in the hands of the users flawlessly.
Conclusion
Hopefully, the post would help you to build an app idea from scratch. If you are interested in shaping your app idea, then get partnered with thebest IT consultants to know the actual cost to build an app and what it takes to develop the next world-class app.
Shahid Mansuri Co-founded Peerbits, one of the leading mobile application development companyUSA, in 2011. His visionary leadership and flamboyant management style have yield fruitful results for the company. He believes in sharing his strong knowledge base with learned concentration on entrepreneurship and business.