Right now, as you are reading this article, you might be using your smartphone to connect to the internet. Around 75% of the total internet traffic comes from handheld devices, or, in short, smartphones. As a result, more and more companies are inclined towards creating mobile applications that can shorten the distance between the user and their product. But what exactly is app development? And what are the different types of app development tools available today? Does every business right now need an app to run their business online, or is there any other way around it?
Today, we will find the answers to all these questions and explain them to you in detail. Before we start off this article, we would like to say that app development has come a long way, and indeed, it does have a long way to go. If you are a young computer science engineer, then one of the fastest ways to secure a job is to learn app development.
How does App Development work?
By the end of 2022, mobile apps are going to generate a projected revenue of $693 billion from both in-app purchases and in-app advertising. There are tonnes of companies trying their best to get some advantage from it, but they lack the proper flow of app development. Creating an app seems pretty simple at first, and if you are not vigilant, someone can develop a useless app for you and get paid without you even knowing that you have made a mistake.
Creating an app is an effective way to be mapped out in six different phases. Below, we have described each of these phases to help our readers understand how an app development process works in real life.
Make a Strategy
The very first thing you need to do is plan out the strategy for evolving your idea into a successful application. We have tons of thoughts in our minds when we are starting something new. We want to make it the best of the best, but then comes the budget and time constraint, which leads us to rethink all the things we wanted to do in the app in the first place. In this phase, you need to identify people for whom you are going to develop an app.
Also, at the same time, you will be doing research on the competitors. Once the research is done, you need to focus on creating the app’s goals and objectives. Last but not least, you need to skim out the platforms where you are going to release your app.
App development can take up to six months to complete, and you will spend more than $100,000 during that time to create the perfect app for your customers. As a result, it is preferable to plan ahead of time.
Planning & Analysing
So, once you’ve finished strategizing, the next step in the app development cycle is planning and analysing. At this point, the development of the app has already begun, and it is slowly turning into an actual project. You need to work on the analysis of your app by creating use cases and then finding out the detailed functional requirements.
Once you are done searching for the requirements for your app, you need to create a product roadmap. This means you have to include the prioritisation of which of the requirements of your app should be developed in the first place and which can be done later in the stage. You also need to create a delivery milestone, so it helps you keep track of your progress.
One of the essential parts of the planning phase is to find out the skills required to create a fantastic app. In addition to this, you need to hire people who are excellent at the chosen skill set for your app. For example, suppose you are creating an app specifically for Android users. In that case, you need to hire people who have experience working with Android Studio software and other technical knowledge. In this case, you don’t require an IoS developer as you are not going to release your app on IoS devices.
On the other hand, during this stage, you also need to come up with the name of your app. This is because apps are pretty similar to the domain names that you buy for your websites. No two apps can have the same name. Research the app store to ensure your app’s name is unique and doesn’t have a clone that already exists in the app store.
UI/ UX Design
Nobody wants to feel lost when they open up an application. That’s why you pay a good amount of money to UI and UX designers to give you an easy-to-navigate and human-friendly interface. The goal of your application is to create a wholly mobile experience that is both intuitive in nature and, at the same time, pretty simple to understand.
The accomplishment of creating a better UI depends on the users and how easily they utilise the application’s attributes as they use it. During the early stages of your app development, you can try and test out the various UI designs and see which one fits your user group the most. Once the UI is defined, you get the framework for your app, on which you can build other things.
As a result, we recommend you work on the UI as soon as the planning and analysis for your app development are done. There are multiple ways to find the best UI design for your app, but there is no better way to get reviews from the group of users who fall under the user niche of your app.
Creating the Information Architecture
Now that the framework of the UI has been selected, the next thing you need to gauge your interest in is the flow of information. If your app has tonnes of information but doesn’t have the right way to provide it to users, then keeping the customers engaged for a long time becomes an issue. You need to think about how the information will be presented to the users and how they are going to interact with that information in your final product.
Also, make sure you include customer profiles with varied responsibilities and rights before launching the app store application. It is pretty essential to add these regulations to the very instructional component of your application. Use the workflow diagrams, which help aid in identifying moveable engagement with the user and the app, which can affect the user experience in harmful ways.
Mobile App Development
Planning remains an essential part of every stage throughout the app development process. When you are done with creating the architecture of information, UI, and UX, the next step is to incorporate all these things into your app. Meaning, at this phase of the development, you are actually going to start the coding process for the creation of your app. There are three essential parts to any application: The first one is the back-end, or server end. Then comes your API, and last is the mobile app front end. Each of these is briefly defined in this section below:
Back-end Or Server End Technology
In this part of the app, you will find database and server-side objects used to support the functions of your mobile app. If you have already built a back-end platform and want to use that one, then you are free to do it as well, with no significant issues to resolve. Just make a few adjustments here and there, and your work is done in providing support for your desired mobile functionality.
Application Programming Interface (API)
This is the bridge of communication between the app’s front end and the back-end of the same application, which is present on the server. This will help an application transfer the information in its front-end user interface when a person clicks on it. Having this layer work ideally needs to be your top priority during the development phase of your app.
The Front-end
Everything that you develop here will be seen and interacted with by users. In most cases, a mobile app comes with an interactive user interface. When there is no internet, and the app still wants to keep on pushing the content to the user, in that case, the app needs to get access to the local storage of the device on which it is installed.
You can take the help of any programming language in order to create the back end of your app. But when it comes to developing a native mobile application, that’s where you have to choose a given set of technologies to work with. For example, Android apps are only developed using Javascript and others. At the same time, IoS applications are developed using Objective-C or Swift.
Testing & Quality Inspection
When you are testing out the product as it is being developed, you can quickly find the issues and correct them in a short time. This will allow the application to be more stable, functional, and, all in all, more secure. In order to ensure the complete QA testing of the app you are developing, you must come up with a number of test cases that address all the different characteristics of the application testing.
There are a total of five different types of testing that you need to do before you can launch the app on the app store. These five testing methods are:
User-experience testing
The final user experience provided by the app must be smooth and free of dead ends that lead nowhere when a user clicks on them. Make sure your app’s final implementation is very similar to the user experience you tried and tested in the early stages of development.
Functional testing
The precision with which your app showcases the information that the user requests sets it apart from other applications. To test this process, you need to use functional testing methods to test every possible error in your application. The main reason for performing functional testing is to make sure that all the features and functions available in your app work fine and as per its requirements.
Performance testing
Performance testing is hard to define because even after passing the basic performance criteria, some issues are left untested. For this, you need to look at how fast your app loads on mobiles and how well it reacts to the requests the users send. In addition to this, do you also need to look at the power and battery consumption of your app? Check if there are any memory leaks? Lastly, find out if the size of your app is more significant than you expected it to be. If so, try different methods to make the size smaller.
Security testing
Security testing is one of the most critical aspects of developing any software or application in today’s world. Any minor flaw that goes unnoticed can lead to a hack.Give your QA team total freedom to test out every single aspect of your application. If your app wants users to log in, then it should be tracking down the sessions and the devices used to log in. On the other hand, when a user is sitting idle for a long time, your application should automatically sign them off from the app.
Device and platform testing
Every six months, a new line of smartphones is introduced to the market. Most companies now release their flagship devices once a year, followed by other editions of the same device that are released throughout the year. As a result, when developing an app, you must consider which devices it will run on and which operating systems it will support. We’d like to give it a shot in order to include as many devices and operating systems as possible in order to increase the number of users. If you want to deliver a high-quality mobile app, you must conduct extensive mobile testing.
What is the future of App Development?
Like we said earlier, mobile app development is one of those cakes that everyone wants to have a piece of. Over the years, it has shown innumerable growth and has provided companies with tonnes of profit. Right now, there are more than 2.1 million apps available on the iOS platform, and 2.8 million applications are present in the app store for you to download. By the end of 2025, around 70% of the total living population of Earth will have a smartphone of their own.
As a result, you can say that billions of mobile phones will be present in our daily lives, and applications will still be in the million count. On average, a person has 30 applications installed on their smartphone. As per the latest reports that we have shared with you, we can positively say that smartphone sales aren’t going down anywhere soon, and the need for applications to keep people entertained will only rise with the demand for smartphones.
There are so many new technologies that are shaping our future right now. There are AR and VR devices. Then we have IoT interconnected devices that enable you to start, stop, set, and reset the electronic devices present in your home while sitting in bed. On the other hand, the 5G data connection will speed up the download speeds, so you can quickly download large files in mere seconds. All the latest smartphones are now 5G enabled. This results in mobile apps being faster in their processing of the data and takes the development of the applications to a whole new level.
Apart from this, we now have more smart wearables than ever before. So it is the best time to create an app for smart wearables and be one of those few companies that have acquired the uncharted territory of wearable applications.
Wrapping Up
As a result, the mobile app development industry will continue to evolve. Mobile development will become more advanced over time and will take much less time than it currently does. A number of emerging technologies, such as blockchain, are working hard to break into the mainstream of mobile application development. Let’s wait and see what the future holds. We hope this article has helped you understand the various stages of app development and why they are important.
When creating your first app, it is best to keep these phrases in the back of your mind and to run your checklist after each step of the development to see if you have missed anything.