The mobile app development process is a crucial part of creating the ideal app for providing the best digital solutions for businesses.
Since the pandemic, there has been a spike in the adoption and use of mobile apps. In fact, since 2020, mobile app development and downloads have skyrocketed.
Today, the mobile app development industry is one of the most bubbling and profitable ventures. This growth has also brought about the relevance of mobile app development companies, especially their roles in designing and creating the right apps for businesses at different levels.
This blog post is a step-by-step guide to navigating the process of developing an app
You can read our related blog on how an app idea becomes an app.
What to Identify Before Developing A Mobile App
Do you want to invest in mobile app development solutions for your business? let us discuss some important considerations.
Define your target audience
Ensure you have a good understanding of your target customers and their persona. This includes knowing their goals, their online behaviours and their preferences.
Also, know what type of mobile devices they use and their operating systems.
Lastly, define your goal with the knowledge of your customers most preferred social media platform.
With such knowledge, you can easily design and implement effective and rewarding marketing campaigns. You will also be able to follow the best mobile app development process and build the ideal mobile application for your business.
Perform competitor research
Ask the right questions about your ideal mobile app solution. Ensure that you tailor your researching efforts in other for you to create something very unique and visually appealing to your users. Very importantly too, make comparisons with your competitor’s app solutions and see how you can improve.
You must avoid redundant efforts so if mobile app type is also ready in use in the market, you may want to clone the app and customise it to your own taste. Quality research can save you from unnecessary stress of mobile app development services.
While conducting your research, ensure to create an effective and unique mobile app development process with the customer in mind.
Exploring the Processes Mobile App Development Timeline
Decide on your operating system
Ask yourself the following questions on the operating system of your mobile app;
- Will your mobile app be an IOS
- Will the app be an Android?
- Will the mobile app be cross platform?
- Is it going to be a native or a hybrid app?
Consider that if you make the wrong decision, it will affect the mobile app compatibility as well as its functionality.
Alternatively, you can go for the cross-platform app development solution which works for both iOS and Android. Cross platform apps are very important for growing businesses as it can accommodate more goals.
Incubate your app idea
Incubating your app idea should happen before you implement your mobile app development process. Incubation enables you to ascertain how relevant your mobile app solution is.
For example, what problem does it solve for your business? is your app applicable to your business? how does it fit into your business development goals?
This is the stage where you stop to think about the importance of development of mobile applications. Look at your goals and vision and see where your mobile app comes in as a viable tool.
As per your goals and your team, try to ensure that there is an agreement. This will enable you to establish strong foundation for long term growth.
Plan your app design and security
Mobile design and security are two important things to figure out during the development of a mobile application. In fact, ensure the providers of your mobile app development services understand how these things work. They must build with the users and their safety in mind.
The ideal mobile app solutions are easy to use, are visually appealing and secure enough for data safety and protection.
Prioritise to enhance your app user experience and include privacy and security features. For example, your app security should include; encryption, storage, security audits, etc.
Need a reliable mobile app development company? We can offer you the best of the best. Get a free consultation with us.
Now that you know what to identify before implementing your mobile app development process, let us discuss how to develop an app in 6 Steps.
Mobile App Development Process – Step 1: Planning Your Mobile App
A. The Conceptualization in Mobile App Development Process:
1. Identifying your app idea and its purpose
The first stage in app development is creating or conceptualising an idea with a purpose. This is where you determine why you need an app and what the app will do for you. Is it going to be in the health industry, transportation industry? ecommerce, or in other sectors?
You can also map out the important features of your app at this stage. Let us help with your mobile app conceptualisation
2. Defining your target audience and their needs
Furthermore, take your mobile app conceptualisation further by clearly identifying and defining your target audience.
Including the needs of your audience and how your mobile app will offer valuable services to them will give you a strong foundation for business growth.
B. Market Research and Competitive Analysis
Quality market research and analyses are also two vital aspects of the mobile apps development process. They help you in the following ways;
1.Understanding existing apps in the market
After identifying your target audience, their needs and the ideal app for your business, look at your competitor tools.
What type of mobile apps are they using and who do they target? How do they serve their customers and what are the main features driving the app?
These are important questions that will help you in prioritising the features and functionality of your app. You may also check their customer reviews and feedbacks on areas of improvement and implement the relevant recommendations in your product.
2.Identifying potential gaps and opportunities
Here, you need to bring in the knowledge of the market you are joining or operating in.
Remember that over 1.8 million mobile applications are used by Apple users while about 3.5 million applications go for Android users. Which of these are your competitors using more?
Which of these are your customers using more? What are the gaps and what are the feedbacks from the customers? Are they lacking some important updates and features?
These are important questions to help you identify gaps that will give you an edge and smoothen your mobile app development process.
C. Feasibility Analysis:
Performing feasibility analysis is a crucial part of planning your mobile app development process. Here are the two ways to go about this;
1.Assessing the technical viability of your app idea
Ask important question like what type of mobile application have you come up with and how viable will it be in solving your challenges?
Look at the features and functionalities and put them against the business challenges. See if they will be useful in driving the best solutions.
2. Estimating development costs and timelines
Do a mobile app development cost survey and see how much your mobile app may cost you. remember, some mobile app development companies may have hidden cost.
However, the ideal mobile app development company will be transparent with their prices and will offer post launch support.
Mobile App Development Process – Step 2: Design and Prototyping:
This is the mobile app development services that tend to bring your digital solution to life. It seeks to give it the best interface with the users in mind. Let us see how to go about this.
A.User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) Design in Mobile App Development Process:
The number one importance of this process is to ensure the best user experience. It must be clean, slick and responsive. No lagging, no breaking and no slow loading of pages.
1.Creating user flows and wireframes for optimal user experience.
This requires you to create some important rules which will form part of your information architecture.
This helps you to take care of data visibility issues and filtering. It answers the following questions;
- How will the data be displayed?
- What are the ways that users may interact with these data?
The answers to the questions should enable you create user flows to help you track user interactions.
After that, move on to the next; wireframes. These are simply sketches and they are layouts of your mobile app concepts in terms of structure and functionality.
Wireframes plays important roles in the process for developing an app because it enhances aesthetics and intuitiveness.
2. Process of Mobile App Development with visually appealing and intuitive UI design
Creating user flows and wireframes will set you up for building the user interface of your app to be visually appealing.
It will also support intuitive design and your users will enjoy every moment. At Prometteur, when we offer mobile app development services as regards the user interface, we also create style guides and mockups.
- Style Guides
This is creation of records with different important designs. It plays an essential role in ensuring consistency in the design process of the app development. The designs include different useful design elements like;
- Fonts
- Colour scheme
- Spacing and positioning instructions
- Buttons
- Widgets
- Mockups
This is a follow up for your style guides. It handles the final rendering if your visuals in the mobile app development process. This is actually the stage where you apply the style guides to the wireframes.
B.Prototyping:
This is considered the last mobile app development process for UI/UX designs. It is predominantly about simulation of the workflows. You can do two important things here;
- Building a non-functional prototype to test app functionality and user flow.
- Gathering user feedback and iterating on the design.
These will help you to get an overview of how everything works after finishing the designs.
Need the best UI/UX design for your mobile app solution? Reach out to us now
Mobile App Development Process – Step 3: The App Development:
This is one of the stages in app development that help in building the core of your mobile app solution.
A. Choosing the Right Mobile App Development Process
When we offer mobile app development services, we work with the client to choose from any of these three approaches;
This is the development of mobile applications solutions that are platform specific. It other words, native apps are exclusively created for each app platform.
This can be very expensive for several reasons. For example, the codes cannot be refused, and you need to create separate apps for separate operating systems and devices.
- Cross-platform app development process: This is the development of mobile applications solutions for different platforms but with a single codebase. It offers great compatibility with different operating systems.
This is highly recommended for reaching wider customers, reusable codes and for saving the cost of mobile app development services.
- Hybrid app development process: Hybrid mobile app development process is a combination of the functions of apps that are platform specific and web apps. The application programming come in standard forms and they get executed in the native shell. This is a great alternative for running apps for multiple platforms.
B. Front-end Development Process:
This generally involves building the user interface using programming languages specific to the chosen platform.
It is the front end that your users interact with so ensure to make it visually appealing and interactive. Do not make it complex, rather make it very simple to use and straight forward.
B. Back-end Mobile App Development Process
It is also one of the very important stages in app development as it involves the creation of secure databases and server-side objects. All of these are crucial for the operations and interaction of your site.
Backend development of mobile applications involves;
- Developing the server-side functionality to manage data and logic
- Integrating with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) if needed
Backend development requires the use of a programming language for coding. It also requires the use of database for scalability and hosting.
We highly recommend you go for the most experts in mobile app development to handle your project.
Learn how to choose the best mobile app development teams here.
Mobile App Development Process – Step 4:Testing and Quality Assurance (QA)
Our fourth mobile app development process is testing and quality assurance. This does not necessarily come after, but is an integral part of the mobile app development process.
Its main goal is to ensure that the app is working well, follows development best practices and comes out flawless.
Learn about mobile application testing with Selenium here.
At Prometteur, our process for developing an app follows 5 methods of testing.
Our testing processes for development mobile apps;
- Functional testing for mobile app to ensure all features work as intended
- Usability testing for mobile app development to evaluate user experience and identify any issues
- Performance testing for mobile app development to assess the app’s speed and stability
- Security testing for data protection, and vulnerability checks/fixing.
- Compatibility testing to ascertain how the mobile app works with different devices, networks and Operating System.
Get a full knowledge on our QA and testing services for mobile app development lifecylce.
Deployment and Launch – Step 5: Sharing Your App with the World
Mobile app deployment requires your app development company or team to go through different distribution models.
For us, we follow a simple distribution model, thus, we submit to either the App Store of Google Play Store. App store being for iOS apps while Google play store is for Android mobile apps.
Here are some additional values that we offer during mobile app deployment stage;
- App Store Optimization (ASO):
- We focus on optimizing your app listing for discoverability in app stores.
- We do also put in the efforts in choosing relevant keywords and crafting a compelling app description.
- App Launch and Marketing Strategy:
To put up a highly valued product of the development of a mobile application, we also do the following during app launch;
- Develop a launch strategy that will generate all needed excitements and increased downloads.
- We also use our expertise on mobile app development services and marketing to implement marketing campaigns to reach your target audience.
Learn how to improve visibility on App Store and Google Play Store here.
Post-Launch Support and Maintenance – Step 6: Keeping Your App Up-To-Date
The is the after-launch stage in the app development process. At this stage, your mobile app is already live and your users are downloading the products.
Ensure to follow up with an analytical eye and get all the necessary post launch support from your mobile app development company.
According to Velvetech, at the post launch level, you need to look out for certain KPIs. These may include;
- App downloads
- Active users
- Average visit time
- Retention
- Churn
- Conversions
- Customer lifetime value
- Ratings
- Reviews
At Prometteur, we also offer best post launch mobile app development services, covering areas of performance monitoring and analytics as well as bug fixes and updates.
Stages In App Development: Here is Our Suggestion for You
We have been in this field for over 8years and the best way to create the app solution for your business is to play with the pros.
So, we will advise that you hire a top mobile app development company that understand the nook and crannies of mobile app development process.
Not just that, the ideal mobile app development company should offer ample explanations and guidance on their mobile app development services.
Need the best mobile app development services? Let us discuss your project now.
