Mobile App Development - From An Idea To Results

Every day, thousands of mobile apps appear on the Google Play and Apple App Store. Social networks, instant messengers, games and many others - all of them are made by professionals according to the same development algorithm. 

And today I will decompose it into understandable steps to show you the inner mobile development kitchen. It includes six stages - designing an idea, developing a strategy, working on a design, directly developing, entering the market and monitoring the situation.

Idea

As trivial as it sounds, a good application starts with a good idea. If you don’t have it, think about the problems existing in the world and possible ways to solve them. Go through the options until you find a suitable gap in the market, and then look for the best way to fill it. This is half the success.

The key to the answer can be understanding why this problem exists at all, and there are still no applications to solve it. Immerse yourself in the topic, collect data and discuss it with the team. And if you have enough development resources, get down to business.

Strategy

The next step after the birth of an idea is to draw up a project work plan. It is easiest to start with a competitor analysis. Find similar mobile apps on the market and analyze the following factors:

A number of downloads - if the application is downloaded, then someone needs it.

Ratings and reviews - will help to identify weaknesses and adapt the chips that users like, for your product.

Company history - be prepared to face the same challenges as your closest competitors. At the same time, try to understand how they won the audience’s recognition.

Monetization

If you are not engaged in the development of mobile applications solely for pleasure, then you are probably interested in getting a good profit from the product. In-app purchases, payment of a subscription or premium version, advertising, data sales - all these methods of monetization can be used even if you are not distributing the application for free. To choose the best option, look at what your competitors earning, and decide at what point you will start monetizing. If you catch yourself too late, you run the risk of getting into difficult times.

Marketing

This stage of mobile development is associated with an understanding of the main challenge facing any mobile app developers company Australia or even an individual developer. You will have to promote your application to find out about it and start using it. Hundreds of high-quality mobile applications gather dust on virtual shelves because their developers did not have a marketing strategy and budget for its implementation.

Product Roadmap and MVP

The strategic planning stage ends with a roadmap for your mobile application, which will capture its ideal path from a minimum viable product (MVP) to get to the top of stores. Make a list of control points and arrange them according to your own priorities. Consider the functionality of the application, the possible wishes of the audience and the following updates. But you will think about them when you receive feedback from the first MVP users. In the meantime, you can focus on other things.

UX design

The internal architecture depends on the functionality of the mobile application and the selected method of processing and storing data. Usually, developers make two lists - the characteristics that the application should have, and key visual elements. They become the foundation for all future architectural work.

The easiest way to check how good your UX design is to test it on future users. Send them a link, after clicking on which they will be able to poke on rendered wireframes. I am not talking about functionality, but about checking navigation. Listen to the comments, go back one, two or three steps, fix the problem and test again.

It is time to connect developers who implement well-thought-out and repeatedly tested design with high quality. What could go wrong? For example, you ordered a design from one company and development from another. Or they have an internal split. It sounds so messy. Therefore, I recommend working with a professional team that is engaged in mobile development from an idea to a result.