These days, mobile app development is mandatory. If you’re running a business or involved in it, mobile apps play a significant role that leads to success and profitability. Each and every mobile app development company practices processes that streamline the entire development for faster turnaround. Creating a mobile application includes several steps that could help create an efficient product fast.
The Steps Involved in a Mobile App Development Process
1. Planning and Research
This step should occur right away after the conception of an idea for an app. This stage should aim to answer high-level questions regarding idea feasibility in the present market scenario. In general, the planning stage includes research and a feasibility study. This is also where to choose what platforms the app would be available on, such as Android, web, iOS, and others. It’s worth noting that, during the planning and development phases, considering specialized services like Python programming services can greatly enhance the technical aspects of your app project. These services bring expertise in Python development, which can be valuable for creating a robust and efficient app.
According to Saigon Technology which is an app development company, planning includes investing a great amount of time upfront to ensure that the app at least has a chance to make it in the market. Determine the people who are willing to use the app in mind and if they are also willing to purchase it. Don’t hesitate to spend a lot of time at this stage.
2. Prototyping
The stage in which you start to produce wireframes fast and iterate on user feedback. The wireframe could be deemed as a low-fidelity guide to the app’s UI and UX and offers a general sense of its flow and functionality. There are tools that could help gather feedback on the wireframes, such as for instance, InVision.
It is absolutely important to get feedback from a great number of people in the target audience. Without it, the app that you design could turn out not hitting the usability mark. In the prototyping stage, having an iterative approach is critical so you could present as many mock-ups to users as you can. Just like the planning stage, you should spend a great deal of time in this step to ensure that the app will truly meet the audience’s requirements.
3. Design
This phase of development has numerous components. Furthermore, it is in this phase that UI and UX designers refine the approved wireframes further. This means building UI elements, defining the user flow, and understanding the relevance of element hierarchy, and so on. In this phase, it’s important to produce high-fidelity mockups that developers could turn into a working application, together with what occurs when elements are swiped, tapped, dragged, and so on.
Moreover, if you don’t have one yet, you should establish a brand guideline so that the branding of the app is well-understood by both designers and developers and consistent as well. This stage should also include designing a marketing strategy, which in general, means determining how you tell people about your application.
4. App Development
The development stage is where you start to write code for the app’s final version. Furthermore, this is the step where you use the feedback from wireframes and make some possibly final and big decisions. In the app development stage, methodologies such as agile or waterfall could be implemented.
Agile in general is preferred when it comes to mobile application development. Moreover, integrating an analytics engine into the app during this step is paramount. Consider building events for all possible user interactions to see how the app will be utilized and the general users flow as well. The information you gathered during this stage would be very useful to learn about the users and iterate on the design further once released to the world.
5. Testing
Testing ideally happens in parallel to the development step. Continuous testing is important to minimize post-release costs. UI tests, unit tests, and integrating testing are all important to make sure that you address any major bugs or oversights early on. Furthermore, test instances could increase the time in the development phase, but could significantly lower monetary costs and time of maintenance and support in the long run.
Additionally, testing could pay off later on in the maintenance phase. When doing a minor change, you could run all test instances and determine where changes could have broken other parts of the application without needing someone to walk through every test case manually.
6. Release
The release stage is where you submit the app to the Play Store or the App Store for approval. This process is important since you would be doing this each time you release a new app version. During this stage, you should already have worked out most of the major bugs found during testing and you submit a quality app that passes the guidelines of the store you would be uploading it to.
Releasing the app, however, does not mean the work is done. You essentially go back to prototyping and reviewing feedback from users and possibly add new features and re-release the app again. This stage also means starting your product marketing.
7. Maintenance
This step starts at the same time as the release and should go on in parallel. Furthermore, this is where you keep track of the status of the application, fix any bugs present, and make certain that the app will continue to work as expected. Other parts of the maintenance stage include updating for new OS versions and support of new devices.
The ongoing app maintenance will go on continuously. Until you decide not to continue app support, you would be forever maintaining the app.
Benefits of Mobile App Development
- Improves accessibility
- Develop customer engagement
- Serves customer value
- Develops recognition and awareness of the brand
- Keeps updated on customer expectations
- Boosts business processes
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, businesses could benefit from mobile app development by gaining hundreds of thousands of new customers. There are so many app development companies today that cater to various business requirements. As customer and business requirements continue to evolve, building a mobile application will also continuously enhance and boost the user experience.
