How do you shop? How do you make appointments for your specific needs? There are so many questions to ask and there is only one answer to them. Apps!
Mobile apps are the faces of today’s digital technologies. If someone wants to promote their business and intends to connect with a wider audience, then mobile applications are helpful friends.
Apps are an efficient way to bolster your sales because interacting with your customers through an application is easier. In their everyday lives, everyone- including you- uses hundreds of applications. This demonstrates that every business requires an app to improve its sales, market its brands, and increase its brand reputation somewhere in its life cycle.
Now the real questions arise- How to develop an app? What will be the app development cost?
With this intent, I am writing down some useful tips and strategies to make it happen in the most meaningful way.
Stepwise Process to Build a Successful Mobile App
1 Get an App Idea
To build an app, an idea is the first step. An idea doesn’t need to be very different, unique, and hi-fi. Let me tell you how it works. There are a million apps available in the market. You just need to look for the apps that you enjoy using, like gaming apps, shopping apps, dating apps, and the list goes on. Then, from different gaming, shopping, dating, etc., apps, pick out the best features and club them together to create a very unique idea.
Another thing you can do is come up with the existing features of an app in a better way. How?
If an app creator is not improving or updating the app for a very long time and according to the customer’s negative feedback about the same features, enhance them. The unique driving force behind the success of an app is probably the improvements to your application based on their feedback.
2 Conduct Thorough Market Research
It is quite obvious that researching and analyzing the conditions of apps before moving on to developing your app is a kind of “trademark” that must be stressed upon.
This study aids you in determining and comprehending the industry’s finer points. On analyzing your research results, you would be able to assess who your competitors are, the strength of your competitors, what mistakes they are making, what strategies they are working on, and what are the gaps and solutions for them.
With all these important points, you will definitely not be leaving any stone unturned to come up with a successful and revenue-generating app.
The extra point you would be gaining with the research part is that you would be having the idea of the app completion time and the app development cost.
3 Requirements Gathering or Feature Deciding Part
In my opinion, this is the most important part because based on this requirement gathering part, you would be able to develop the app, which requires an agreement between you and your investors or stakeholders.
In this part, the main aim is to work on the strategy or goal of making your decided app. You don’t require to get deeply into the UI or functional part right away, instead, you need to work out what the user can do in the application, estimated time delivery, and rough application development cost. Basically, just the basic ideas.
4 Focus on Mock-Ups
Mock-up is not about the look and feel of the app, rather it is focused on the functional aspect of the app.
The main questions that arise about the functionality are:
When you tap any particular button on a page, what happens?
- How do you get to screen Y from screen X?
- What is your application’s navigation movement?
- How does your app interact with the user?
- And other such functional questions.
You may create notes in your mock-up software system, or you can simply create an explanatory text document on how the application works, which is a great option to make your clients understand in a simple and better way.
5 Originate Your App’s Graphic Design
Now that the mockups with basic functional design are displayed to the investors and approved. It is the turn of building great, attractive graphic design that can boldly seek the attention of the user at the first sight.
This part plays an important role in building a great connection with the potential leads and clients because your app’s success largely depends on the customer experience.
Your work in this step will have a huge impact on the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) of the app. So I recommend taking the help of a competitive app development service provider, which can customize the unique designs without heavy work to attract customers for you with no hidden application development cost.
6 Start Premarketing Your App
You might be thinking how can someone market the app even before it is developed. Well, it is a good practice to pre-promote your app so that in the crowd of millions of apps, your app should be able to seek the attention of the users.
Before launching your app, you can develop an app landing website where your users can get the introductory information about the same along with the features in detail. Oh! ensure to include a call to action encouraging users to join a pre-launch email list so they can be notified when the app goes live.
Last but not least in this section is to keep in mind the App Store Optimization (ASO), which means the optimization of your App Store listing’s keywords, titles, and descriptions.
7 Create the App
This step is the basis of this blog where you will be developing your app, which is of course an exciting part!
After you’ve built the basis for your app project, the actual development of the app becomes considerably easier. You’ve made mockups, designed your app, and taken the initial steps toward selling it via a website. Congratulations!
For the front-end part, your focus should mainly be depending upon developing an engaging and immersive UI, which includes all the visuals, animations, layout, data processing, color scheme, app icon, background, etc. You should keep in mind how the user will interact and the experience he will gain while developing the app.
For the back-end part, as most of the apps are using cloud-based database storage, you can also go for it as it is very convenient. The app saves local copies of information and updates them as new information becomes available.
Now that your front-end and back-end parts are ready, it is time to integrate them together.
If you are not a developer, then I would suggest hiring an app development service provider to do this task for you as per your needs. This would take less time and speed up the time-to-market. Also, the app development cost will not be a concern with the cost efficient and reliable services.
8 Test and Test Your App
The development part is complete, now what? Submit to the app store? No!
The most important task is to test your app before releasing it to the world because you don’t want to waste the hard work that you did so far.
Do the end-to-end testing of the app. From a user and developer standpoint, test its usability, navigation, compatibility across devices and resolutions, performance and loading speed, security, etc. Kill every last bug that you encounter to release the quality app. For this purpose, manual and automation testing should go hand-in-hand, which gives the surety of quality apps.
9 Launch the App
Now, you are all set to release your killer app to the app store. What you need to do is:
- Register yourself for an account
- Compose the title and metadata for your app.
- Submit the latest version of your app to the App Store.
- Wait for the review and approval from the app store administrator
- It is now live and installable!
After the above process, your work is not done yet. What comes next is even more crucial for your app’s existence. Before moving onto the next step, you need to set up an analytics tool so that, further, it can be used to monitor purposes.
Post-Release Marketing and Support
Most of the app builders just work up to step 9 and then forget about how well your app is performing or the promotion task that it really requires. With this step, I want to make you aware that this part will definitely make or break your app depending on your reaction, whether you want to give it the importance or just want to leave it on its own.
To help your app perform well, keep an eagle eye by monitoring its performance through the already set-up monitoring tool. Apart from that, you can run a short period free campaign to increase the download counts at an exponential rate, and believe me, it works!
Come up with the unique and best ideas to retain and involve your customers by enhancing the app and updating it with new features. Work on the users’ feedbacks that you receive and relaunch your app in time to keep the returning and loyal customers. This improves the chances of your automatic promotion, which your customers will do if you keep them happy with your work.
What Keeps You Stuck? Get Started!
Now, with these important and powerful tips, no one can beat you in the competitive app market. If the application development cost is your concern, then you should seek the genuine, competent, leading, recognized, and proficient app development service provider, which I would recommend, Apptread.
Wait no more to launch your app and get a free consultation to make your dream a robust reality with a ton of downloads!
Contact us today! https://apptread.com/contact