Start Building Your Business’s First Mobile App in 7 Steps

In recent years, the concept of corporate mobile app development has changed from being innovative to becoming crucial for all businesses. Businesses are discovering how to build mobile apps and using them to promote consumer relationships with their brand, offering the workforce new resources to boost productivity, and finding possibilities to develop new business opportunities.
Although businesses are keen to create mobile applications, many still lack the knowledge necessary to set up and build apps. Therefore, it is crucial to have a strategy at first to define the objectives to ensure that the app once released serves the business interests.

Let us examine a practical step-by-step process for app development.

Step:1. Prepare a business plan

In this initial step, we will lay out the plan that will turn your app suggestions into a profitable business model.
During this stage, you

Find out who will use your mobile app.

What group of people do you want to appeal to? Your app must be mainly built to benefit your intended user base. Which aspects of this app are the most appealing and will keep your users interested?

Find out who your competitors are.

You can learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of current mobile apps by conducting a competitor study. When comparing apps in the industry, consider how well a rival product addresses a user’s issue. You might want to outperform the competitor’s mobile app from all standpoints. How well-known is their app? Is a similar app required or in demand? To find out what could be required to develop a better app, do some analysis on their price, organization, collaborations, amount of funding received to maintain their businesses, and organizational culture.

Define clear business objectives for your app.

These will serve as the foundation for the entire design and development process. Progressive steps might be confusing when you begin creating your mobile app if these aren’t specified precisely from the inception of the project. Set measurable goals instead of just vague goal. You can define end-user goals as well as company goals.

To host your app, select the mobile operating system.

Which is better, iOS or Android? Ideally, you ought to develop one app for each. However, due to time and cost restrictions, you often want to take a decision. Observe out there which operating system your target users favour after conducting the aforementioned research, then design your app first on that platform.

Step:2. Analysis and preparation

Your original app concept will now begin to materialise as an actual project. Begin your research and planning by identifying use cases and gathering comprehensive functional requirements. Consider the primary purposes of your app before deciding on its features. Many people are eager to include supplemental and superfluous functionality in an app. However, certain of its functionalities detract users from the main objective. The cost and duration of development also increase with each new feature addition.

You can produce a comprehensive schedule after determining your app’s requirements. This necessitates prioritising and organising the requirements for mobile apps into delivery milestones.
Try establishing your MVP (minimum viable product) and making it your focus for the first release if time, money, or resource constraints are your top concerns.

You must determine the talents necessary for the app development project during the designing phase. It is difficult to find a specific individual developer who is proficient in UI design, programming, QA testing, and product management.
There are a few choices you can make on how you wish to build your team.

a) Hiring internal developers can be a wonderful option if you want to keep things internally in some circumstances. The staffing and team building can take many months, depending on your expectations and budget.

b) Hiring freelancers or independent contractors with a variety of expertise to design an app is another versatile option. Locating freelancers in the same region and time zone can be a challenge when recruiting them. Also, it can occasionally take a lot of work to manage them.

c) Therefore, the majority of businesses depend on app development companies for such tasks. They assist you in removing the fixed expenses related to in-house engineers. Additionally, it reduces the costs and difficulties of managing a team of independent freelancers.

With end-to-end solutions, the majority of app development companies can take your project from conception to launch.

Step:3. UI/UX Design

Your app’s design should always be flawless and offer consumers a simple, interactive experience. This is because it is so important for user engagement. Therefore, the primary goal of your new app’s UI/UX design is to provide the best overall experience so that your app is simple, responsive, and user-friendly.

A. Information Architecture & Workflows

Such a process will decide what your app’s user will see, how much data it will collect, how it will look when it’s finished, and how users will navigate through it. Workflow diagrams show all the ways a user could interact with a programme and its menu system.

B. Wireframes

Typically, we begin creating an app by drawing on paper, and this is where wireframes are useful. Conceptual layouts sometimes referred to as low-fidelity mock-ups, are the digital equivalent of sketchers and provide the necessary visual organisation for the functional requirements of your programme. You can focus on user satisfaction and appearance with wireframes. To develop and iterate through app layouts, a simple and affordable method is to make mobile app wireframes.

C. Style Manual

These are the current legal documents that contain
i) the font family used in the text of your app,
ii) ii) colour palette,
iii) iii) How does the app design reflect the company brand?

Style manuals are a part of the design approach for apps. Your app developers will work more efficiently if you create a style guide early on in the development process. Additionally, it will support maintaining the uniformity of your app’s look and feel.
You should also look at Apple’s and Google’s app design standards for iOS and Android, respectively.

D. Mock-ups

These are often the final graphics for the visual design of your app and are high-fidelity designs. Mock-ups are produced when your style manual is applied to the app wireframes.

E. A prototype

Prototypes aid in improving the user interface and workflow of the application. Making a prototype may take some time, but the effort will be worthwhile because it will enable early experimentation of the features and operation of your app. Prototypes typically help in recognising the modifications made to the app’s suggested feature.

Step:4. App Creation

Planning is, in fact, a crucial step in the creation of apps. But before the actual construction begins, you must:
Set development milestones, define the technological framework, and select a technology stack.
A mobile app project usually includes three essential components:

Back-end/Server technology, API(s), and Front-end.

Back End

The databases and server-side objects needed to enable the operations of your programme are included in this section of the project. You might need to make adjustments to your back-end infrastructure if you want to offer the envisaged mobile capability.

API

You might want to integrate third parties such as a payment gateway, navigation or chat component which can be achieved via API integration. An API is an application programming interface, which is a form of communication between both the app and its database or back-end server as well as third-party services.

Front-End

The front end is the actual mobile app that users will utilise. Mobile apps provide interactive user interfaces that frequently handle data via an API and a back-end. However, an app may employ local data storage in particular situations where it requires users to operate during the absence of internet connectivity.
You can choose any web coding language and database for the back end. You can create a mobile app for your company using a variety of programming languages and technological stacks.

Step:5. Testing

After being developed for mobile devices, the app is given to a team of professional testers for quality check.
You can achieve a functioning, reliable, and secure app by having your app go through QA testing. You must develop test scenarios that could address each component of testing mobile applications before you begin your app testing.
Test scenarios stimulate app testing in the same way that uses cases do for mobile app development. Test scenarios carry out tests, record test results for quality assessment, and monitor fixes for repeat testing. It is advisable to include your QA specialists during the Analysis and Design stages. Your app’s test cases will be produced fast and accurately after they are familiar with the goals and functional requirements of the app.
If you want to deliver the highest-quality solutions and services, you can submit your apps to the testing protocols listed below.

A. Testing the user experience

It gauges how simple and intuitive your app is. This kind of testing focuses on how user-friendly the application is, how well it can manage controls, and how well it can accomplish its goals. Make sure that the typefaces, colours, aesthetic approaches, icon style, spacing between content, and menus are all consistent throughout your mobile app. Also, to actually influence user adoption, make sure your software complies with the initial design specifications.

B. Testing for Functionality

To make sure that each app feature is operating as intended, functionality testing is done. Additionally, it ensures that users may use the app’s features and functionalities without any problems.
This testing process must compare the features of both variants of your app if you are creating an app for both the Android and iOS mobile operating systems.

C. Testing for Performance

The effectiveness of an app is examined through various non-functional testing scenarios. Performance testing is crucial since it provides knowledge about the app’s characteristics, such as reliability, efficiency, and extensibility. App users can experience poor usability without this.

D. Testing for Security

For mobile apps, security is a key concern. Any conceivable vulnerability could lead to a hack. By taking a few easy steps, you can keep your app secure. Security testing helps to ensure that the app is devoid of any dangers or risks that could result in a loss. The goal of this kind of testing is to identify any system flaws and weaknesses that could compromise the organization’s information security or reputation.

E. Testing of Devices and Platforms

Every year, new mobile devices with updated firmware, hardware, and designs are typically released. Every few months, mobile OSes also get updated.
Although many mobile device makers use the Android platform, they modify it for their products. And the sizes and shapes of mobile devices also vary.
Apple has a more regulated environment since it controls both the operating system and the hardware.
To ensure that a mobile app works well for all users, it must be tested on a wide range of smartphones or device emulators.
Because of the expense of ongoing support, the difficulty of testing enterprise apps across various mobile platforms, and device management, businesses typically prefer to develop their company apps for a particular mobile platform.

Step:6. Implementation & Support

You must submit your app to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store before you may launch the actual app. You would require a developer account also with Apple App Store and Google Play Store prior to the release. During this phase, it is crucial that the Product Owner has well-defined Terms and Conditions including privacy policies and the definition of cookies used in the App. Google and Apple stores are stringent in the way in which user data is handled by the Mobile App.

An app release requires setting up information in the app stores, including:
Title of the App, Category, Description, Keywords, images from the app store, Start-up icon
Following your app’s submission to the Apple App Store, it must through a review procedure. According to the quality of your app and how well it adheres to development standards, this process could take a few days or even several weeks.

The Android Play store will have your app available for download a few hours after you submit it because there is no review process involved.
You should use analytics systems to track user behaviour and KPIs to gauge the success of your app once it has been downloaded from the app stores by the users. Support your users by regularly updating the app with enhancements if you want them to remain active.

Step:7. Actively promote your app

In the realm of marketing, just because you created a fantastic app and put it up on the app store doesn’t guarantee that users will flock to download it. This means that even if you know the solution to the problem of how to create an app, you still need to consider how to market it.
When designing an app with the intention of providing a solution to an ongoing issue, businesses must be anticipating the possibility that people are already using a specific solution. In that case, you need to consider your strategy for persuading them to change.

Marketing can help here, of course!
Not as bad as we have made marketing out to be. Even the best companies require marketing assistance to reach the intended audience. The app stores have millions of apps, therefore you need to stand out, and marketing is the method to do it! The process of marketing does not proceed logically from one step to the next. In reality, there is a good likelihood that you will make mistakes even while using the best tried-and-true marketing techniques.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that it has been released, mobile app development continues as you gather customer insights and add new features. Watching your users use your app is definitely the best approach to obtaining feedback from them. In this manner, you may detect app engagements that weren’t going as you had anticipated. This is an excellent approach to gauge how well your expectations match up with actual outcomes. For every mobile app Kodsmith develops, you can use the same procedure. The only way to determine what actually works better for your app is to appropriately define and test out your strategies and measure the outcomes.