Everyone has a smartphone; you can’t deny this fact. Imagine a couple of decades ago, mobile phones were considered a luxury. Not everyone had one, probably one in a hundred, I guess. However, now mobile phones are a necessity, even some are addicted to them.
This indicates people are more familiar with applications. Right from setting up an alarm, booking a movie ticket, ordering food, checking the weather, we use an App. According to Statista, 218 billion have been downloaded last year alone. This opens an opportunity for you (if you are a business owner) to boost your business drastically just by developing a mobile App.
If you are one of them who strives to start a profitable business, you would have had these doubts. How do I start my App development process? What do proper App development stages look like? What things should I keep in mind to build a solid App for a better digital presence?
The answer to all these questions is pretty simple – Follow a reliable and proven App development process like I explained below.
Major phases involved in a Mobile App Development Process
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Choose a Fitting Software Provider
This is the first and foremost step, go for a trusted App development company to design and develop your App. You can analyze their competency by enquiring about their portfolio, previous experience working with similar Apps or industries, methods to tackle a technical challenge, etc.
Moreover, if they have worked with start-ups earlier, they would know the budget and time constraints. So, make sure you select a suitable development partner.
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Product Discovery
Before jumping into the work, be clear about what you expect from your App. Besides, defining things like who is your target audience, what’s your product’s unique trait, what’s your App’s vision are crucial. However, communicating the same to your development partner is also mandatory.
Areas you should focus on during this stage,
- What’s your business goal? What are the problems your customers face and how do you solve them?
- Who are your competitors and how can you stand out from them?
- What are the features to be added to your App and will it increase user experience?
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Determine App’s UI / UX design
Building an App with a stunning UX and UI design will give your business great converting results. Besides, it plays a vital role in customer retention rate. Everyone loves innovative and engaging designs. Running a profitable business is all about making a positive impression about your business.
For better App designing works, follow these techniques.
- Make a user journey map. It is nothing but a visualization of the user flow during App usage.
- Create a compact wireframe that states structure, hierarchy, and relationship between the elements of the App’s design.
- Check whether designers work on the visual language of the App, its style guide, User Interface, and motion design.
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Project kick-off
This is the last stage before the actual development starts. Make sure everyone in the team understands their role as an individual and as a team. Further, examine what tasks have been assigned to whom and pick only one person to get regular updates and to express your thoughts. This will avoid unnecessary confusion in the future.
Successful cooperation and good teamwork will help to make the process quick. This stage also involves integration setup, beta distribution tool setup, adopting a code architecture, libraries & SDKs, etc.
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Quality Assurance and App publishing
This is where all the technical work goes on. Developers would start to write the code and try to produce a stable product. This involves breaking up all the workload into smaller milestones and building the App in a series of cycles. In addition, these cycles will combine refinement, planning, development, testing, and of course review. In short, this stage will be something like a plan, code, build, test and repeat.
After the first version of the App is developed, you can upload it to the google play store or Apple store whichever is applicable. This will be guided by your development partner, for instance, helping through marketing materials, description, and legacy issues.
Winding Up
Although each App needs specific plans and techniques to seize an awesome product, the above stages are common. All you have to do is make an elaborated version of these. Additionally, maintaining your App after the launch is also significant. For this, monitoring tools like Crashlytics, Google Analytics, Firebase, etc come in handy.