Photo By David Švihovec on Unsplash
When mobile apps have become part and parcel of digital presence for most brands, every company or organization is developing their own branded apps. Building an app is one thing and shaping an app to success is another thing.
As per the tried and tested principles and the best development practices, quality mobile app projects involve considerable efforts, resources, and input. Most industry experts are of the opinion that the following considerations are essential to successful mobile app development.
The Development Method and Platform
Now you need to choose a development method and the operating system platform for your mobile app. You can go for a common hybrid app that doesn’t offer any platform-specific attribute, or you can opt for cross-platform development with technologies that allow you to create platform-specific native layers. Lastly, you can also create separate native apps for individual iOS and Android platforms separately.
Hybrid app development is already obsolete as it doesn’t offer a platform-specific native user experience. Cross-platform development with Flutter and React Native is popular because it allows you to build a robust app for both platforms while maintaining a native user experience. You can hire a well-known Flutter app developer in India and build a cross-platform app that looks and feels every bit native. Native development for one platform is still most popular because of the superior user experience on each platform.
Carry Out Extensive Research
The first and foremost requirement is to carry out extensive research on your target audience and market. Without advanced and ahead of time research that helps you know about your audience and the competitors in detail, your app doesn’t stand a chance to take on the competition.
To begin with, you need to know the target audience for the app. You have to find out the people who are going to use your app and how these users are going to shape the app user experience. Once you find out your app audience, you need to understand the ways your app can meet their needs.
You also need to find out the competitor apps with similar value propositions in terms of features and user experience. You also need to find out the common pain points for most users with all the competitor apps. These findings will help you build an app with the required features, UX attributes, and solutions to common pain points.
Create Prototype
Once your app idea is finalized, and you know the key considerations for shaping your app, don’t just jump into core app development instantly. Take a breath and first engage in creating a proof concept or an app prototype that clarifies the app project.
Once you have a rough sketch of your app idea’s look and feel, you can further furnish it with technical attributes and business ideas that correspond to the app idea. Take a lot of opinions from all around, including the experts, your target app audience, and potential investors, before finally knowing about the changes you need to incorporate into your app design.
Adhere to the App Store Guidelines
When you have decided to build and launch your app for a particular mobile OS platform, you need to adhere to the platform’s respective guidelines. Remember, the guidelines of a platform are not there only to get permission and publish your app. App Store or Play Store guidelines help you fine-tune the user experience of the app as per the guidelines and develop an app that every bit looks like a quality app.
Apart from the statutory rules and guidelines that make rounds across development teams, it would help if you also had a very clear idea about the best practices for developing apps for Apple iOS App Store or Google Android Play Store. Though you may build app versions for both platforms, concentrating on one platform at a time followed by the other will be more beneficial.
Avoiding App Store or Play Store rejection is not a big thing if you follow the respective guidelines and the industry acknowledged the best development practices for your app.
Create a Scope for a Personalized Experience
We all know that user experience remains the single most important factor driving traction and engagement for any mobile app across the niches. But user experience only stands a chance with a personalized experience for the app users. Since users always like to be addressed individually as per their specific needs, preferences, and constraints, creating a personalized user experience is of extreme significance.
Build an app with ample scope to incorporate sophisticated analytics engine and AI tools to know the user pain points and user intents in different contexts. As per the analytics and intelligent tools’ insights, your app can personalize the user experience and ensure a better engagement.
For example, an e-commerce app based upon the customer’s buying and browsing preferences and earlier transactions can send notifications that are more likely to find traction.
Give Extreme Emphasis on App Testing
These days faulty performance, slower loading speed, and glitches with features are very counterproductive to any mobile app’s success. This is why app testing is given such serious regard in any app project.
Unlike the traditional end of the funnel app testing, app projects leverage continuous testing to detect and solve errors and bugs early and often. Thanks to this approach, app output is unlikely to come with any significant errors and performance glitches. They are offering a beta version released before the final app launch is a great idea to gather feedback on app performance and faults.
Conclusion
Building a successful mobile app is not a one-time task. It involves too many twists and turns and a lot of learning from all the mistakes and development problems that continue to occur every now and then. You need to listen to user feedback and keep an eye on key metrics on a constant basis so that from time to time, you can come with crucial value additions and changes through app updates.
