Development Process for Mobile Applications

Developing an impressive mobile application is not an easy task. Developers and business owners have difficulty understanding the many aspects of mobile application development. Often, business owners cannot choose the platform to use for their new mobile application, and developers often cannot understand the exact requirements of their customers. This leads to several problems and incorrect implementations of a mobile application.

Each application is different and our methods are constantly evolving. However, mobile application development is a standard process. This development process for mobile applications usually includes the phase’s idea, strategy, design, development, implementation and post-launch.

Idea

All great applications started as ideas. If you have no idea of ​​an application, it is best to train to always think about problems and possible solutions. You want your brain to instinctively ask, "Why are we doing this? If you find a market problem or inefficiency, you are halfway to your idea!

Next, you need to understand why this problem exists and think about why nobody has created an application to solve this problem. Talk to others about this problem. Immerse as much as possible in the problem area. Once you understand the problem, first check how a mobile application can solve the problem.

Strategy

Competition

Once you have an idea, you must plan the success of your application. One of the best starting points is identifying your competitors. Check if other applications have a similar purpose and pay attention to the following:

Number of installations: Check if anyone uses these applications.

Ratings and Comments: Check if users like these applications and what they like / dislike about them.

Company History: Learn how these applications evolved over time and what challenges they faced. Try to find out what they have done to expand their user base.

Monetization

If you do not enjoy creating applications for yourself, you're probably hoping to make money from your mobile app. Several monetization methods might work, including in-app purchases, subscription payments, premium features, ad revenue, user data sales, and traditional payment applications. To determine what is best for your application, check what the market expects and how you pay for similar services. You also need to choose when to start monetizing your application.

Marketing

This step in the mobile application development process identifies the key challenges you face when marketing your application. Provided you have a solid team for application design and development, your biggest hurdle is likely to be adoption of applications. There are thousands of beautiful and very useful apps in app stores that simply remain unused. At this point, you should understand what your marketing budget will look like and how it should look. In some cases you may not even need marketing.

Road map

The final step in the strategy process is to define the application road map. The goal of this process is to understand what the application might one day be and what it needs to be successful on the first day. This day, a version is often referred to as your minimum viable product (MVP). During this process, it may be useful to write everything your application should do on a blackboard. Start by prioritizing these elements. Determine the basic features of the application, what users need and what can be added later. If you are interested in certain features, think that they are likely to be good candidates for later versions. When you get users with your MVP, you can request comments about the additional features you want. Application Tracking (described later in this article) can also help you with this process.

User Experience (UX) Design

Information architecture

The Information Architecture is the process of deciding what data and features to display in the application and how those data and functions are organized. Normally, we begin this process by writing a list of the functions that the application should run and a list of the functions to be displayed in the application.

Design of the user interface

Style Guides

Style policies are essentially the basic elements of application design. A sound style guide is essential to the usability of your application. You do not want the action button on one screen to be shown below and blue, but green and in the header of another screen. A consistent design language makes users feel more comfortable with the application.

Rendered drawings

Rendering extracts the wired structures and replaces the gray scale elements with elements of your style guide. There must be a rendering screen for each wired screen. Try to stay true to your style guide, but you do not have to be dogmatic. If you want to change your style or style, do not hesitate to update or change your style guidelines. Just make sure your design is consistent when this step is completed.

Design for the development

After so much effort in the form and function of your application, it is imperative that this vision be properly implemented by your development team. I am always surprised how often this step fails in the development of mobile applications. This may be due to the fact that many organizations and agencies provide only design or development services, or the sometimes combative relationship between designers and developers. Whatever the reason, I strongly recommend finding a team that can provide design and development services and manage this step correctly in this process.

Front-end (mobile application)

There are essentially 3 approaches to the upward trend. They are specific to the native platform, native and hybrid cross platform. Here is a brief overview of each approach and some articles that deal with it in more detail.

Ø  Native platform-specific: Applications created with this approach are written separately for each mobile platform. The code cannot be reused between Android and iOS, but these applications can be fully optimized for each platform. The user interface can be completely native (so that it integrates with the operating system) and the application should work smoothly. This is often the most expensive approach, but has proven very successful.

Ø  Native Multi-platform: Applications built with this approach have code (or are fully shared) but are always natively executed. The technologies that are normally used for this purpose are React Native, Xamarin, and Native Script. This is a good compromise between different approaches, as it is more profitable but can be optimized for each platform and made stylish.

Ø  Hybrid: Hybrid applications use Web technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and are installed via a native container. This can be done using technologies like Cordova, Phone Gap and Ionic. This option may be the cheapest, but also involves very real difficulties.

Backend (Web API and Server)

The server is responsible for the most power and scalability of the application. The technologies used here are similar to those for powering web applications. Note the following before writing code:

Ø  Language: There are dozens of languages ​​that can be used to build the API. The most commonly used languages ​​are Java, C, Javascript, PHP and Python. Most languages ​​also have many frames that can be used.

Ø  Database: There are two main types of modern databases, SQL and noSQL. SQL is more traditional and, in almost all cases, the best option. Common SQL implementations include MSSQL, MYSQL and PostgreSQL. In addition to choosing a database engine, you must design the appropriate database schema. Reliable and well-organized data is critical to your long-term success. So make sure it's well thought out.

Deployment

The implementation of your mobile application worldwide is based on two main components. The first is to implement the web server (API) in a scalable production environment. The second option is to implement the application in the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

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