iPhone App planning

Mobile App Development:
Everything You Need To Know

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Did you know that over 69% of U.S digital media is spent on mobile apps, while 49% of people open a mobile app over 10 times a day? These statistics just show you how significant mobile apps are for businesses.

Mobile App Development is no longer considered a tool to help businesses stay ahead of the crowd. With their popularity, mobile apps have become an essential tool to help businesses stay in the competition and not lack behind. If you are a small business owner, you need to take mobile apps seriously as they can promote your business’s growth and development.

Why is mobile app development important for businesses?

  1. It can help businesses enhance their visibility

    Mobile apps can help improve your business visibility. It is no secret that mobile phones and tablets are among the most used devices these days. This poses a good opportunity for marketers to use these devices as an instrument to expand their brand visibility. By taking advantage of the frequent use of mobile devices, mobile apps can help keep the company’s image fresh in the mind of consumers. This makes mobile apps a crucial tool for businesses that want to increase their brand visibility.

  2. Cultivating customer loyalty

    Nowadays, business owners have a great opportunity to establish quick and direct contact with their customers with the help of mobile apps. Business owners can offer online coupons and discounts and then display them in the app. This not only helps in boosting sales but also in establishing a sense of brand loyalty.

  3. Reinforcing brand value

    The best way a marketing campaign can succeed is by capturing customers’ attention. With the help of mobile app development, a brand can easily retain its image with a long-lasting effect and build a strong bond with its customers.

  4. Improved accessibility

    Mobile apps can help you improve your business accessibility. With the help of mobile apps, businesses are now able to send notifications about their products’ availability and anything else important to their customers. This way, customers can get information about the products they need in real-time. This accessibility can help build a customer base while also increasing brand loyalty.

  5. It improves brand awareness and recognition

    Mobile apps are often considered a perfect tool for increasing brand awareness. Once it’s downloaded on a user’s phone, they will come across your brand’s logo frequently. Plus, the more often a user interacts with the app, the more likely and sooner they will make a purchase.

Mobile App Development Stages

The process of developing a mobile app can be quite challenging. You need to follow the stages properly to ensure that you end up with a well-functioning app.

Stage 1: Ideation and product discovery

Before you commence your mobile app development process, you must do a proper market study around your idea or concept to identify exactly how your app would benefit you and your customers.

In this stage, your team will discover new ideas and solutions, as well as come up with a list of requirements needed to for your app. It is crucial for you to adapt your idea to the end user’s, or customer’s, needs. To ensure the success of your product discovery, you need to determine things like the main goal of the app, your target audience, how your app will differ from others on the market, target platforms, and app expenditure.

Stage 2: Strategy and Product Planning

In this stage, you begin to transform your idea into a live project. You need to come up with a robust and effective strategy and planning that can capture detailed functional requirements. In this stage, you’ll develop:

  • Product roadmap

    The product roadmap is the visualization of the mobile app development strategy. It outlines the key points, such as the vision, mission, product features, strategy, time frame, team, technology, etc. in a document for better and timely implementation.

  • Product structure

    You can determine your minimum-viable product [MVP], which is basically like a prototype of your app. It will have enough features to attract early customers to adopt it and provide feedback before the main launch. This is especially helpful if you have time, budget, or resources limitations.

  • Product team

    The mobile app strategy and planning stage also requires identifying the skills required for the project execution. For example, Android and iOS platforms use different tech stacks. If you are looking to create an app that is compatible with both platforms, then it is crucial that you include both Android developers and iOS developers in your mobile app development team.

Stage 3: Mobile App Design — UX/UI Designing

The User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are two important factors that play a significant role in the success of a mobile design process. A great user interface is focused on the appearances of the app, while user experience design focuses on the several aspects of human interaction with the app, including functionality, usability and branding.

Stage 4: Mobile app development

If your mobile app design passes the usability test, then the real fun can begin. In this stage, your team will take care of coding and begin the actual realization of your app. This stage includes multiple activities like establishing the appropriate development environment, developing various parts of the code, preliminary testing, and coming up with a mobile app that can be tested and installed.

It is imperative that your team fully understands the goals of the application as a whole and for the specific features they are working on. No one should be more familiar with a specific feature than the assigned developer.

Stage 5: Mobile app testing

Testing is one of the most important stages of mobile app development. This should be done throughout the entire process, as it can help keep the overall cost of the project low. The further you go into the mobile app development cycle, the costlier it will become to fix any bugs that are found, which makes testing early on crucial. You should also have a separate team for testing to ensure a more genuine testing experience.

Here are some of the tests that should be done:

  • Functional testing
  • Usability testing
  • Performance testing
  • Fit and Finish testing
  • Security testing
  • Manual testing
  • Automatic testing

Stage 6: Mobile App Deployment and Launch

At this stage, you need to analyze all the details thoroughly to effectively and efficiently market your mobile app. Be ready with your backend deployment before publishing the app on various app stores for downloading. It is a perfect idea to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or a beta version, among your in-house team and get genuine feedback.

However, if you want to launch your app as a market-day product, it is better to publish it on Google Play Store or Apple Store.

Stage 7: Mobile App Maintenance & Support

When downloads and installations of your app increase, then you need to identify any inefficiencies users may be experiencing or add new features to meet their needs. Mobile app maintenance is crucial as it can help you improve your app’s performance. Your app developer can help you with any maintenance requirements that may arise after you have launched your mobile app.

Final words

It is no secret that the mobile app development process can be pretty challenging and tedious. However, you cannot neglect the fact that all mobile apps need a systematic and definite approach to stand out from the crowd. Therefore, it is crucial to follow the right process. That’s the only way your team can create a well-functioning app that can yield a better ROI.

At Mauka Digital, our team of developers can help streamline the app development process and take care of all the challenging and daunting tasks that come with it. Let us help you bring your idea to life without the extra hassle!

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