App development has never been so easy as it is now. In this post, we will explain the full creation process of an app and tell you why you should invest the same amount of time in research and analysis as in the development stage.
Step 1: Initiate a market research
Before applying your idea, you should take a few actions:
- Define your audience
- Choose features that will help your app stand out from the others
- Analyze your competitors and their services
- Pick an appropriate monetization strategy
- Come up with unique features
This is your must-have knowledge base that you should work out on your own. It will come in handy in dialogue with developers, and it will help you to understand if your app has a chance to stand out among the other competitors. In case you already know what you want, just follow the next step, but if you hesitate, we’ll explain what to do.
Competitors survey
Don’t be afraid if your idea already exists in some kind of interpretation. You can always create a better solution. But to begin with, find similar apps in Google Play and App Store and take the following notes:
- Features
- Ways of monetization or price
- Who’s the publisher
- Date of the last update which shows you the frequency of maintenance
- Number of downloads (on App Store you can’t see this parameter so you can use a Sensor Tower)
- Customers’ feedbacks and ratings
Reviews are essential due to useful information about missing features in competitors’ apps. Also, you can learn which feature customers are craving for the most.
You can divide features into three categories:
- Must-have features (mandatory functionality)
- Unique features (functionality that highlights the app from the others)
- Missing features (functionality that customers want to see in the app)
Ways of monetization
If you want to benefit from your idea, we advise you to choose one of these monetization strategies:
- App with adds – you cooperate with different brands that pay you for advertisement in your app
- Freemium – your app is free to download, but some of its content is blocked behind the paywall
- Premium – your app costs money, but there are no restrictions on using basic features
- Subscription-based – your app is free, but there is an option for a customer to buy a subscription
Step 2: Define all your app features
Now it’s time to set your stack of features. It would be wise to split them into two categories:
- Main features
- Additional features
Let’s pretend that you’ve decided to create a music app like Spotify. In this case, your main features will be:
- Sign up and profile creation
- Home page with all popular tracks and albums
- List of favorites
- Search system with various filters
- Music player
Meantime your additional features could be:
- Track/album download
- “Share” button
- Special category “Mix for you”
- Similar artists/tracks
- Song analyzer (Like Shazam and others)
You should provide the developers with a full list of features so that they could estimate how much time and money you’re going to spend.
Step 3: Select a platform
You’ve got a wide range of platforms: from familiar iOS and Android to Tizen for Smart TVs. This variety can be a little confusing, so we’ve prepared a few pieces of advice to help you choose the right platform.
- Follow your audience
Just choose the most popular platform among your target audience. It depends on the app’s focus. If you are creating a simple app for mobile devices, you should consider Android or iOS. But if you’re creating something special like a streaming service, your way lies to Apple TV, Android TV, Web OS.
- Take into account the location of your distribution
It’s important to remember where your target audience lives. If it’s Australia, the US or Canada, you should pick iOS. Meantime, Android is a top OS in regions like Eastern Europe and Asia.
- Different pitfalls to consider
Creation of an iOS app is typically faster than Android due to a small variety of screen resolutions, hardware, and OS versions.
As for the audience, 89% of iOS users are updated to the latest OS version while the others use older versions.
With Android, things are a little bit more complicated. Only 8.3% of users have the latest Android 10 version. Meantime other users are split into various groups with older versions.
Also, it can be tricky to develop an Android app due to a massive variety of hardware and different restrictions of manufacturers. It can lead to bad performance on some devices or different bugs. All in all, Android app development is usually more complex and takes more time and resources.
Which platform to choose for an MVP?
Many companies create MVP on iOS, due to the simplicity of development and a small variety of devices. That’s all creating a perfect and cheap solution to develop and polish your idea on one platform, and if it stands out, you can think about porting your app to different platforms.
Step 4: UI and UX design process
You’ve come a long way through the research and analysis. Now it’s time to begin the creation of UI and UX of your app.
It all begins with the wireframes. It’s a schematic look of screen layouts of the app, but it’s not a final version of the design.
The next step is creating all screen conditions so you can see every single function and state as it is going to have a look in the release version of the app. The various states should look proper, whether it’s an incorrect login attempt or the looks of the “Share” function.
Step 5: Developing stage
When all design preparations are set and done, it’s time to develop an app. We’re going to have a quick dive into the development process and sort by shelves different app types.
You may choose between 3 types of apps:
- Native apps – created for a specific platform (iOS, Android) with a specific codebase and functionality for each platform. For example, Waze, Pokemon Go, Instagram. The most used programming languages are Kotlin, Java (Android) and Swift, Objective-C (iOS)
- Hybrid apps – mostly web-based solutions to run in a browser. For example, Gmail, Twitter, iBooks. Usually written on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Cross-platform apps – their primary purpose is to run on any platform (iOS, Android, Linux, Windows). The most known apps: Facebook Ads Manager, Zipcar, Uber. Usually built on Dart using Flutter.
Development workflow
The development process is usually split into sprints. Sprint is a two weeks time period with different sets of goals that must be achieved by the developing team. Usually, each sprint looks like this:
- Developers write code
- UI/UX designers working on the app’s design
- QA engineers testing all built features and design
- PMs preparing reports for a customer rely on the work that’s done
Step 6: Release
There are a few differences between releasing an app in the App Store and Google Play. It’s much easier and quicker to release an app in Google Play due to automated testing (which can lead to different issues after a launch that may be unnoticed). On the other hand, we have a much more complicated testing process in the App Store. Real people are checking your app for issues and tell you what must be fixed. As for the whole process of releasing an app, it’s divided into several steps:
- You need to ensure that your app follows the App Store and Google Play guidelines
- Enter your metadata: title, description, screenshots, and so on.
- Submit the app to review
- Wait for a reply. It usually takes about 2-3 days to receive feedback, and within this period your app will be approved (or rejected if something in your app isn’t right)
And after a long way of creation, you have an app that helps you improve your business.
Author’s bio:
Vitaly Kuprenko is a technical writer at Cleveroad. It is a web and mobile app development company located in Eastern Europe. His mission is to provide people with interesting material about innovations in the world of IT.