Mobile apps are expected to produce good amount of revenue from app stores and in-app ads in years to come. What’s more, by 2022, market mobility is expected to be worth over billions.
Although many businesses are attempting to take advantage of this trend, many do not know how to effectively develop an app. Progress will become a reality for your business within the competitive environment of these growth forecasts, but unless driven by a correctly developed mobile app development process.
The right solutions of app development processes occupy six main phases. We will take a closer look at each one in detail in this post.
Irrespective of the quality and complexity of your project, it will make your business mobile app development programmer a success following this development phase.
Strategy
The very first step of the process of mobile apps developing is to identify the strategy for turning your concept into a successful product. In your overall business mobility plan, you can include a more critical part of this. Because the aims of one app which vary from another, there is still an app-specific effect on the mobile strategy to be addressed during the phase of growth.
In this step, you would indeed:
- Identify the users of the app
- Researching the market
- Establish the priorities and goals of the app
- Pick the app’s mobile channel
Your approach helps to concentrate your imagination on a simple picture of your concept for the app. You will move further into the next step of the process of designing mobile apps with this in mind.
Analysis and Planning
Your app concept begins to take shape at this point and turns into an actual project. Research and preparation start with the description of use cases and comprehensive functional specifications being captured.
Prepare a product roadmap after you have defined the specifications for your app. This involves prioritizing the criteria for the mobile app and grouping them into targets for delivery. If time, resources or costs are an issue, identify and priorities your minimum-viable-product (MVP) for the public introduction.
Part of the planning process involves defining the skills required for your project to build your app. For instance, mobile platforms for iOS and Android use different stacks of development technology. If your goal is to create a mobile app for both iOS and Android mobile platforms, iOS developers and Android developers should be included in your mobile development team.
Mobile app names are like domain names, and within each app store, they must be exclusive. Study each app store to guarantee that the name of your app is not already in use!
UI / UX Design
The aim of the design of an app is to provide a sleek look with smooth and effortless user experiences.
A mobile app’s success is measured on the basis of how well users adopt and benefit from all its features. The aim of the UI/UX mobile app design is to create outstanding user interfaces that make your app interactive, intuitive and user-friendly. Although polished UI designs can assist with early adoption, to keep app users interested, the app needs to have intuitive user experiences.
Information Architecture & Workflows
The very first step of designing of your mobile app is to decide the details that will be presented to the users by your mobile app, the data it will collect, user experiences with the finished product, and the usability testing inside the app.
For businesses, enterprise mobile solutions include users with various roles and rights, and as part of the knowledge infrastructure of your app, it is important to implement these laws. Workflow diagrams help to define and potential contact a user has with the navigation structure of the app and the app.
Wireframes
Designers of mobile apps frequently begin app design with sketches on paper. The digital representation of sketches is wireframes.
Wireframes are conceptual layouts, often referred to as low-fidelity mockups, which offer the functional demands of your app a visual structure.
The emphasis is more on design and customer experience with wireframes, not on colour combinations and patterns. Creating wireframes is a simple and expense approach to designing and iterating app templates in the process of design review. You should remember device-specific design when making wireframes. So, if your app is used on iPhone, iPad, or Android phones and tablets, it offers user experiences that are intuitive and device specific.
Style Guide
Style guides are “living documents” where design standards of an app are registered, from the branding rules of the organization down to the navigation icons.
Guides to style include:
- What font family cans the text of your app use?
- What’s going to be the colour scheme?
- How will the app design represent your corporate brand?
Style guides make a contribution to the design approach of an app. As part of your mobile app development process, creating a style guide early on increases your mobile app developers’ productivity.
At the same time, following a style guide helps keep the look and feel of your app consistent. You should follow app design guidelines from Apple for iOS apps and Google for Android apps as part of your app design.
Mockups
The final designs of the graphic design of your app are mockups, or high-fidelity sketches. By applying your style guide to the application wireframes, mockups are produced. As the design of your app begins to complete, expect more improvements to its layout, workflow, and aesthetics of details. The most common tool for making high-fidelity mockups is Adobe Photoshop.
Prototype
Although mockups view the functionality of your mobile app using static designs, tools such as Invision and Figma can transform these into click-thru prototypes. Prototypes are extremely useful to model the user interface and the workflows of the app anticipated from the completed product. Although production of prototypes can take time, the efforts are well worth it, as they provide early-stage testing of the design and functionality of your app. Prototypes also helps define improvements to the proposed functionality of the app.
Some businesses also prefer to make prototypes at a wire framing level, mostly when the functionalities of an app are not very well planned out. Or, through a focus group, there’s a need to review the proposed features of the software.
App Development
In the mobile app development process, planning remains an important part of this phase. You will have to: before actual development/programming efforts begin, you must:
- Defining the technological framework
- Choose a pile of technology, and
- Define the milestones in progress
There are three integral parts of a typical mobile app project: back-end/server technology, API(s) and the front-end mobile app.
Back-End/Server Technology
This section involves the database and server-side artifacts needed to support your mobile app features. If you are using an existing back-end platform, modifications to support the desired mobile features can be needed.
API
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a communication medium between both the app as well as a server/database back-end.
Mobile App Front-End
The front-end is an end-native user’s mobile app to use. Mobile applications most often consist of immersive user interfaces that use an API and a back-end for data management. In certain situations, the software can use local data storage when an application needs to allow users to operate without internet connectivity.
For the back-end, you can use almost every online programming language and databases. You must choose a technology stack required by each mobile OS platform for native or hybrid mobile apps. You may build iOS apps using the programming language of Objective-C or Swift. Apps for Android are mainly designed utilizing Java or Kotlin. You can also build hybrid mobile application using cross platform frameworks using Reactnative, Flutter, and Ionic.
Through new models of mobile platforms, mobile developments progress even quicker. In addition, every few months, new mobile devices are launched. With platforms and devices evolving rapidly, agility within timelines and budgets is important for developing mobile apps. Using an agile growth strategy if time-to-market is a priority.
This strategy encourages regular product updates with completed features. As part of the agile development strategy, identifying development milestones facilitates the development of the mobile application in iteration.
Because each development achievement ends, it is passed on for validation to the software testing team.
Testing
During the mobile app development process, conducting rigorous quality assurance (QA) testing makes applications stable, functional, and safe. You first need to plan test cases that cover all aspects of software testing to ensure extensive QA testing of your app.
The test cases drive mobile app testing, similar to how use cases drive the mobile app development process. Test cases are for test measures to be taken, test results to be reported for software quality assessment, and fix to be monitored for retesting. The presence of your QA team in the phases of research and design is a best practice technique. Familiarity with the functional criteria and priorities of your app can help generate precise test cases.
To offer a quality mobility solution, the software should undergo the following testing methods.
User Experience Testing
In mobile app testing, a crucial phase is to ensure that the final implementation fits the user interface generated by the design team of the app. Your app’s graphics, workflow, and interactivity are what will give your app a first-hand experience of your end users.
Make sure consistent fonts, style treatments, colour scheme, padding between info, icon design, and navigation are used in your app. It will have a direct effect on its consumer acceptance to ensure that the software matches the initial design guidelines!
Functional Testing
The quality of the features of your mobile app is crucial to its success. It is difficult to predict the actions and consumption scenario of any end user.
To cover as many potential testing scenarios as possible, the functionality of your app should be checked by as many people. When two separate users try the same function but get varied results, you may be shocked to catch bugs. Both users may, for example, fill out the same form, but both will enter different data, which could lead to a flaw being discovered.
The aim of testing phase is to guarantee that users can use the features and functionality of your app without any problems. It can be further broken down into device testing (the entire running app) and test automation.
If you are developing an app for mobile platforms running iOS and Android, then a functionality comparison between both versions of your mobile app should be included in your functional tests.
Performance Testing
For evaluating your app’s success, there are several quantitative metrics to use.
- How well does your app respond to requests from users?
- How quick are the screens loaded by the app?
- Does your system drain the phone’s battery or cause memory leaks?
- Can your software successfully exploit network bandwidth?
- Is the app size greater than what it should be?
By simulating the maximum number of concurrent users, even when your app passes simple performance requirements, evaluate the app, API, and backend for load. And when usage increases, the app should be able to control the load and perform well.
Security Testing
For business mobile applications, security is of the utmost concern. Any possible vulnerability can contribute to a hack. In order to conduct rigorous security testing on their applications, several businesses employ outside agencies. A few simple steps can be taken by your QA and development teams to make your app safer.
This log in sessions should be monitored on the computer and the backend if your app needs users to log in. The device can terminate user sessions when a user has been idle for an extended period of time (typically ten mins or less on a mobile app). To make it easy for them to log in again, if your app stores user credentials on the computer, you must ensure that you use a trustworthy service. For instance, iOS provides the Keychain function that can be used to store the account information of a user for a particular app.
To ensure there is no data leakage, data entry forms inside your mobile app should be checked.
Device and Platform Testing
New mobile devices, with new hardware, firmware, and design, join the market on average every 12 months. Every few months, mobile operating systems are modified.
The Android platform is used by various mobile device manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola, but they customize the platform for their mobile devices (since Android is open source). The tools come in many sizes and forms compare this to Apple, which, as they control both the hardware and the OS, has a much more controlled environment. Multiple iPhone & iPad (Apple iOS) devices are on the market, however.
This is where research varies greatly from web app testing during the mobile app development process. In a Windows environment, you can get away with checking your web app only on the Chrome browser. But to ensure the smooth running of your app for all users, your mobile app has to be checked on several mobile devices or device simulators.
The difficulty of mobile app testing on all mobile devices, ongoing maintenance costs and mobile device management headaches are the key reasons why businesses choose to develop their mobile enterprise applications on a single mobile platform (and often provide mobile devices to their users). In our knowledge, most businesses prefer to first create their enterprise mobile app with Apple’s iOS mobile application; they then build an Android platform app where appropriate.
Testing is important to the potential success of an app; it covers a large portion of our overall mobile app development process. To produce a reliable mobile app, having a robust mobile testing strategy is a must.
There are several ways to deliver the software development components to the testers during the testing process. The most common approach for iOS apps is the installation of the Testflight and Android apps via email or Over the Air (OTA).
Deployment & Support
Going to release a native mobile app needs uploading the app to the app stores, iOS apps from the Apple App Store and Android apps from Google Play. However, before releasing your mobile app, you will need an Apple App Store and Google Play Store developer account.
The release of an app in the app store includes metadata planning, which include:
- Your app’s title
- Description
- Category
- Keywords
- Launch icon
- App store screenshots
When presented in the Apple App Store, iOS applications go through a review phase that can take from a few days to several weeks, depending on the nature of the app and how closely it complies with the iOS creation guidelines of Apple. If your app allows users to log in, then as part of the release process, you will need to provide Apple with a test user account.
With Android apps, there is no approval process, and within a few hours of submission, they become available in the app store. Monitor its use across mobile analytics tools after your app becomes available in the app stores, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the success of your app. Check crash reports or other user-reported problems regularly.
Encourage customers to provide reviews and suggestions for your app for your business. To keep users interested, timely support for end-users and periodically patching the software with updates will be crucial. Mobile app patches would have to go through the same submission and approval process as the original submission, unlike web applications where patch releases can be immediately available to app users. In addition, you have to remain continuously on top of technological developments for native mobile applications and regularly upgrade your software for new mobile devices and OS platforms.
Conclusion
App development is a continuous process which will continue as you collect user reviews and build extra features after the initial launch. MobiWeb Creations has been a pioneer in the creation of mobile applications in the USA, Australia, and Germany. We have supported companies in healthcare, medical, retail, consumer and electronics industries with mobile app development services. For all of the mobile apps that we make, we follow this same process.
Following the above mentioned mobile app creation process for the enterprise would also ensure a successful launch of the app.
What questions do you have about turning your business idea into a good app after evaluating this mobile app creation process?
If you would like to discuss your initiatives for mobile app growth, please contact us.
