For every modern business, mobile applications have become an integral part of extension. In case you’re an enthusiast with a unique idea for a mobile app, the primary point to succeed is to outline a structured approach and strategy to implement the project idea accurately. Within this guide, we will disclose the core stages of a mobile app software development lifecycle, beginning with the current market exploration, then determining the basic functionality, and selecting the appropriate platform to make your app flourish.
Step 1. Start With Market Research
Before starting the software development process directly, you should consider the current market conditions. This step is valuable as it enables you to comprehend your target audience, determine the existing competitors, and identify the relevance for your product concept. But how to do it? Let’s list some key activities:
- Identify your target audience. Determine the demographics, pains, and needs of your potential users. These details will formulate your app's interface, features, and entire user experience.
- Conduct the competition assessment. Discover the current apps similar to your idea and determine their potential, weaknesses, and original value. Such a research will help you make your app outstanding and ensure a compelling value proposition.
- Understand market trends. Keep up with the ever-changing trends, user requirements, and emerging solutions in the mobile app world. Consequently, you will be allowed to incorporate relevant features and ensure your app remains competitive.
- Assemble user reviews. Complete surveys, feedback collection, or focus groups to gather more demands-related data from your target audience. Understand their struggles, expectations, and necessary functionality to cope with their challenges. This feedback will help you build your software development flow properly and set priority to core features
Step 2. Decide on the Features
Once you have a clear picture of your target audience and current landscape within the mobile app market of your industry, you should outline basic features that your mobile app will offer. It will determine the functions with which your future product will be filled to build MVP app, which is the software comprising only essential functionality that can be further upgraded.
- Define the core functionality. Identify the core components of your app and define its indispensable features. Concentrate on delivering a smooth and intuitive user experience and addressing the critical challenges and points of your target audience.
- Put your functionality on the list of priority. Draw up a list of extra functions that may grow your software uniqueness and demand. Prioritize these features based on their value, feasibility, and potential utility level for users. You can also adopt an iterative development approach to deploy updates with new functionality elements further.
- Concentrate on conciseness. Stick to the methods that may result in the feature excessiveness and support a clean and user-friendly design. Laconic view is integral to guaranteeing customer attraction and retention.
- Keep scalability in mind. As every successful business, your product will engage more and more users, leading to an increased workload. Thus, cater for the ongoing expansion and scalability by implementing your software architecture and infrastructure with flexibility prioritized. It also provides for smooth integration of new elements and accommodates increasing user demands.
Step 3. Choose Platforms
When the features of your app are determined, it's critical to select the platforms on which your product will run. Consider the above-listed factors during this stage:
- Target audience tastes. As we’ve already mentioned, while gathering the user requirements, you should also select platforms preferred by your target audience. The user behavior within diverse operating systems can help you make a more wise decision. As we know, the global major OSs are iOS (Apple) and Android (Google).
- Development resources. Evaluate the resources you possess to bring your idea to life, covering specialization, finances, and milestones. Every OS incorporates its distinctive software engineering needs, tech stack, programming languages, and instruments.
- Market assessment. Find out the current global market reach of each platform. iOS tends to have a more significant presence in certain regions, as well as more users who tend to make in-app purchases.
- Monetization options. Various platforms offer diverse monetization models, such as in-app purchases, subscriptions, or promotion. Determine and select the platform that aligns with your app's monetization model.
A systematic approach will help you flawlessly design your product and make it maximally relevant for the market. Put your focus on grasping the needs of your target audience, staying upgraded with market tendencies, and ensuring a perfect app usage experience. These are vital elements in creating a mobile app that stands out in our digital and highly competitive landscape.
The implementation of a successful mobile application involves numerous fundamental phases. When it comes to the part where the development pipeline is compelled, we move on to the designing stage. Let’s explore three key aspects of app development: the significance of UI/UX design, the development process itself, and the final step of releasing your application to the world. By understanding these essential components, you can ensure that your app stands out, engages users, and achieves its intended goals:
Pay Attention to UI/UX Design
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design take a vital point in the success of any mobile solution. How to make the design smooth? Here are some recommendations:
- Make the design relevant for users. Obviously, the primary design requirements lie in the user requirements we’ve collected before.
- Strive to achieve simplicity and intuitiveness. Concentrate on a clean and user-friendly interface that enables consumers to interact and navigate seamlessly and accomplish their activities effortlessly.
- Add pleasing and eye-catching aesthetics. Create visually appealing designs that reflect your brand identity and evoke positive emotions in users.
- Guarantee responsiveness. Build your app to make it flexible for various screen resolutions and gadget orientations to deliver a consistent roadmap within various devices.
- Fulfill usability testing. Check your app's interface with real users to identify the areas for enhancement and elaboration of the product design according to their view and opinion.
Development Process
Once you have a solid UI/UX design, you’re all set to take your app to the release state. Here are the crucial phases engaged in the development flow.
- Defining requirements. Use the strategy and features specifications you’ve accomplished in the earlier steps.
- Choosing the right technology stack. Opt for the relevant programming languages, frameworks, and tools based on your app's requirements and your team's expertise.
- Implementing the product prototype. Create a working prototype that shows the app's core functionalities and indicates an initial glimpse of the user experience.
- Iterative development. Break down the development process into smaller, manageable tasks and consider shifting to an iterative model to numerous boost and improve the app.
- Implementing backend functionality. Move on to creating the server-side components, integration, and databases to maintain your app's functionality and data management.
- Conducting tests and guaranteeing quality assurance. Execute the utter testing to determine and get rid of any bugs or the other performance issues prior to the app release to ensure smooth app running, and validate the app against the desired functionality.
The Final Step: App Release
Within the extensive development and testing, you should also make sure that your solution reflects the requirements of the platform you want to deploy your app on. Therefore, you should prepare for the exciting moment of the product release. Don’t neglect the suggestions described below:
- App store guidelines. Get acquainted with the submission acts and policies of the app stores (such as Apple App Store, Google Play Store) to achieve compliance and an accelerated review.
- App store adjusting. Optimize your app's listing by selecting relevant keywords, writing compelling descriptions, and developing engaging visuals to achieve a perfect discoverability and engage potential customers.
- Promotion and advancement. It is also wise to compile an all-around marketing plan for the product together with experts to generate engagement around your software. Make use of social media, content marketing, influencers, and other channels to bring higher awareness and drive downloads.
- User feedback and updates. Precisely focus on user reviews and reviews, promptly address the suggestions they provide, and implement frequent upgrades to boost user satisfaction and maintain the maximal retention.
Building and sticking to a well-structured development flow, and compliantly releasing your app, you can maximize the chances of creating a successful and user-friendly mobile application. You can also select outsourcing software development which will make you get rid of all the project implementation and management challenges, as well as fitting in your budget effectively.
Author’s bio
Yuliya Melnik is a technical writer at Cleveroad. It is a web and mobile app development company in Ukraine. She is passionate about innovative technologies that make the world a better place and loves creating content that evokes vivid emotions.