From small business apps to a brand’s personal platform or e-commerce apps, internal employee communication apps, fitness apps, religious apps,...
From small business apps to a brand’s personal platform or e-commerce apps, internal employee communication apps, fitness apps, religious apps, and more—there is an app for anything you can imagine.
Apps can either be developed as an extension of your existing business or they can be used to create any new business or brand from scratch.
Whether you want to develop an app for your business or build the next Zomato or Uber, this guide is for anyone who wants to create a great mobile app.
How to make an app: a step-by-step guide
Mobile app development can definitely be segmented into two categories – development and post-launch.
This guide will help you from start to finish. Meanwhile, you must feel free to click around to the sections that are quite relevant to your needs. Some of you might like to start from scratch, while others might like to edify their knowledge in the process.
The Best Digital Marketing Company in California will help you get thorough with the process.
Given below are 9 easy steps to create a mobile app:
While it is amazing to start building the app right away, there are many steps you need to take before the core process of development begins. These steps are quite critical to the success of your own mobile app, so let us not skip over them.
Step #0 — Starting from an idea for the mobile app
Whatever your idea might be, you must first ensure that your app is really solving a problem of common people. Then you need to make sure that anyone else is not already doing what you have been wanting, in order to avoid copyright issues. If they are, you should have some differentiators that can separate your idea from the upcoming or existing competition.
Step #1 — Define your aims and perspectives
The app development process must always start with clearly defined aims and perspectives.
What are you thinking to set out to achieve? What problems are you preferably trying to solve?
Your goals should ultimately establish every single and your entire mobile app development process. If these are not clearly defined from the beginning to the end, it is easy to get puzzled all the way long.
Step #2 — Conducting required market research
Creating a mobile app without market research can result in a waste of your time, money, and even many important resources.
- Create all the possible surveys
- Conduct more and more interviews
- Run a main focus group that might help
- Research all about your competition
- Figure out how to create a mobile app that further improves the customer experience
Step #3 — Deciding features that your mobile app must include
Think about your app’s core purpose and functionality. This is where the features should always be focused.
Lots of people are generally tempted to add some extra and unnecessary features to an app. This makes it irrelevant and some of the features can even take away relevancy from your app’s primary purpose. Each feature should normally be added.
Examples of such popular mobile app features include:
- Push notifications
- Questionnaires and surveys
- Video, image, and audio hubs
- Community walls
- GPS capabilities
- Booking or buying capabilities
Step #4 — Research on existing solutions
The final step that you need to take in the pre-development or development process is researching all the existing solutions. Before you waste your valuable time and resources on figuring out how to build an app and other components from scratch, it is always a great idea to check and see if that solution is already available in the market, and if yes, then in what form.
Step #5 — Working on technical specifications
Take the wireframes that you have already created during the pre-development or development process and use each of them to create a “tech spec.”
These are some of the inner workings behind the scenes of your own mobile app that nobody normally sees. Sometimes, it makes sense to logistically change things around as it will definitely save lots and lots of time and money.
Step #6 — Set overall measurable milestones
Setting up all the measurable milestones will help you keep you and your team on track during the mobile app-making process.
The idea here is to mainly separate your massive development project into all the smaller chunks possible. This will make it easier for you to work on it rather than just observing a large project and worrying about it.
Step #7 — Creating possible minimum viable product (MVP)
As you start building the mobile app, you should always be developing an MVP—minimum viable product. The app idea behind an MVP is that it definitely forces you to think about your app’s most valuable and essential features.
Step #8 — Ensure the quality of your mobile app
Once your MVP is finished, and you have a perfectly working app in your hand now, you need to test it before any sort of deployment procedure.
Your mobile app must be tested on many real-time and actual mobile platforms.
Step #9 — It’s time to deploy
It’s time to let your mobile app reach real-time customers and get live.
Your primary focus right now should be visibility and uptime. Make sure that your mobile application is fully functional and apt for the end user. You definitely don’t want your servers to crash or something more like that.
Post-launch
So, you have now learned how to build an app; that sounds great! However, the mobile app development process is not over yet. Once the app has been deployed, there’s still plenty of work remaining to be done after you have launched.
Make sure that you are ready with all your plans and are working accordingly for the post-launch steps.
- Marketing your own mobile app
Your app is quite a business; treat and work on it accordingly. Would you like to launch a new business or brand without any promotion? Obviously not.
You might have the best app on the planet, but your efforts won’t matter at all if nobody or say your own audience doesn’t know about it. Your app must be marketed appropriately to get enough and even great revenue figures.
- Do not forget to track KPIs
Is your mobile app successful? The only way to answer this question and more related to it is by establishing and tracking KPIs i.e., key performance indicators.
Your app analytics and the available KPIs need to go beyond your mobile app performance metrics, like speed, visibility, and uptime or more
- Try to continuously improve your mobile app
No app is surely perfect. Even the most successful apps in the universe have bugs and are constantly coming up with updates and changes.
The new version releases of your app or the updating aura should now be based on the user’s feedback.
Conclusion
Building mobile apps is surely not easy. Whether it is your first app or you have built multiple mobile apps, there is always room for updates and improvement.
It is a great way to first think, build an idea, and educate yourself about the process, instead of blindly picking a mobile app development company or procedure and just hoping for the best to happen. Digital Kangaroos, a stellar Web Development Company in California provides top-notch services in mobile app development.