Mobile App Development Process: How to Make an App

Introduction 

The way we conduct business is continually changing, thanks to smartphones and applications. From booking a flight to getting online health advice to ordering food and paying bills, mobile applications enable us to complete various tasks effortlessly and quickly. 

With an over 21% CAGR growth between 2021 and 2025, the global market for mobile applications will increase to $653.91 billion.  

But the best things didn't just happen. It requires a comprehensive mobile app development process, best practices, and leveraging the latest trends to ensure the desired results.

Many firms lack awareness of the precise mobile app development process to transform their app into a fully market-ready product. 

To assist in establishing a unique presence and crafting a high-quality application that resonates with your clients, our mobile app development company divided the entire mobile application development lifecycle into 10 essential steps.

Let’s dig in!

What is mobile app development?

The mobile app development process to generate a software program that can be installed or accessed on a mobile device is sometimes called mobile app development. The app can serve any function, like becoming a game, social media platform, photo editor, digital journal keeper, running distance tracker, food delivery aggregator, etc. 

There are presently more than five million applications on the mobile market, and the number keeps expanding daily. App development is a comprehensive process that involves more than just writing and debugging code as part of programming.

It comprises all stages of development, from developing an app concept to conducting market research and offering the idea a more defined shape to working on interface design and launching the app.

To know more about the mobile app development steps to creating an amazing mobile app, keep reading!

Mobile App Development Steps: An in-Depth Guide

Choosing the Best Business Idea

Every app starts with a single concept or a few ideas together. If you want to create a successful mobile app but don't yet have an appealing concept, start addressing the common problems and their solutions. 

If you can envision an app addressing a problem and enticing users to use it, you're onto a potentially profitable business idea. After all, most apps are created to resolve user problems. Because as we are aware, the majority of applications are designed to solve a user's problem. 

Uber is among the best examples of addressing the pain points of the general audience and converting them into successful and profitable business ideas.

To come up with great and profitable mobile app development ideas, ask yourself the following three questions:

• What problems will the app solve for users? (App’s objective)
• What are its key features? (App’s unique selling point)
• How can you tempt users to give it a try?
• How do you plan to put it in front of your target audience?

When you get convincing answers to the above questions, then you should plan on rolling out the idea. Also, test your idea with users first, and then you can expand after getting favorable results.

Market Research & Competitor Analysis

Extensive market investigation and competitor analysis are measures you shouldn't ever overlook. Whether you have a broad app idea or already have an example blueprint of what you want, a thorough investigation can help you organize everything. 

• Understanding market patterns and possibilities. With market analysis, you can understand your target demographic's tastes and trends more effectively. You can use it to spot market shortcomings and alternatives that set your app apart from rivals.
• Understanding how users behave. Market research can help you gain a better understanding of user behavior. Create a useful mobile app that considers app usage, purchasing trends, and the evolution of their preferences.
• Assessing competitors. Understanding competitors' strengths and shortcomings is among the crucial things that you should understand. You can learn how to make a more effective app by examining its major features and user comments.
• Creating a better user experience. Understanding user demands and behavior allows you to establish clear business objectives, design concepts, and technological specifications.

This research aids app developers in picking the proper path for the mobile app development process and producing a truly unique, practical app that can hold a stronger place in the competitive mobile app environment.

Strategy Development 

After finalizing the idea and conducting comprehensive research, it’s now time to put everything in writing and plan a successful strategy around it. Strategy planning serves as the blueprint for your mobile app development project. It provides direction, clarity, and a structured approach to ensure that your app aligns with your goals, meets user needs, and is set up for success in the competitive mobile app market.

Here are some crucials for strategy development of your mobile app development project! 

• Goal Definition: Strategy planning helps you lay precise and attainable objectives for your mobile app. Whether looking for enhanced user engagement, boosting revenue streams, enhancing brand awareness, or pursuing other ambitions, having meticulously defined goals is more important.
• Feature Prioritization: Identifying that not all features have equal importance in your mobile app. Having a structured strategy empowers you to rank features based on their significance, guaranteeing that you allocate resources properly accordingly.
• Timeline and Milestones: During strategy planning, you'll create a development timeline with specific milestones and deadlines. It helps you track progress and ensures that the project remains on schedule.
• Monetization Strategy: Choosing the right monetization strategy becomes imperative if you have an ultimate revenue generation goal. Will it be achieved through in-app purchases, advertisements, subscriptions, or a combination? This planning and strategy help you move forward accordingly.
• Technology Stack: The deliberation and selection of the technology stack, encompassing programming languages, frameworks, and platforms, represent an integral facet of the strategic planning trajectory. This choice holds sway over the app's performance, scalability, and developmental chronology.
• Marketing and Promotion: Planning and strategizing the concept also helps you plan your marketing campaigns effectively. It includes how you will connect with your intended audience. What channels will you use for the same? Having everything planned and in writing helps you stay in the right direction.
• Budget and Resource Allocation: Strategy development also helps you with proper budget and resources regarding finances, commitments, and teams. Strategic planning is the bedrock for allocating these resources efficiently, ensuring the best results.
• Risk Management: Having a proper plan and strategy in place from the very start helps you manage risks properly throughout the mobile app development and design process in the present and future. With this, you can plan your mitigation strategies accordingly and get through it.

Wireframing of the Mobile App

The success of any mobile app design process is largely determined by the user interface (UI) and user experience design (UX). A superb UI concentrates on an app's appearance, whereas UX design discusses several facets of how people engage with the app, such as branding, usability, function, etc. 

• User Journey Map: Your mobile app design team should create this journey map to show how users will go through your mobile application.
• Wireframes: User interface design, which considers aesthetics, layout specifics, and user experience, is referred to as wireframes. It displays the most important UI components and gives users a visual representation of the program with critical information like the size and positioning of the components.
• Style Guide: A style guide offers information on the various app features. It involves uniformity/uniqueness of the software, standardization of UI elements, UI frames, uniformity in applying intuitive UI components, and usability-driven business flow.
• Mockups: They are the visual representation of an application. Here, the wireframes work with style guide design guidelines to establish the relationship between various visual design aspects.

If everything goes well, you can move forward with the UI/UX of your mobile app, and if not - you need to make some changes and then proceed forward.

UI/UX Designing 

After wireframing, you need to focus on UI/UX designing and put everything into action for the mobile app development process.

• UI Design: UI design is primarily concerned with a mobile app's aesthetic and visual components, including designing an alluring and relevant visual identity.
  
  It entails meticulously selecting the right fonts, color palettes, user-friendly layouts, icons, and graphical elements and maintaining a consistent mobile app design language that resonates with the app's brand identity. A skillfully executed UI design elevates the app's visual allure and assures the uniformity of mobile app design elements.
   
• UX Design (User Experience Design): UX design, on the other hand, is all about the holistic user journey within the app. You have already completed the user research and the task of creating user flows, wireframes, and prototypes that outline the app's structure and functionality.
  
  We will look further at how users navigate the app, optimizing layouts for unparalleled user-friendliness, rigorous usability testing to solicit invaluable feedback, and the unwavering commitment to ensuring the app's accessibility and impeccable performance.

Developing Mobile Application

Following the designing stage, it's time to enter one of the most critical stages of the production of your mobile app - development. The frontend and backend make up its two main parts, respectively, in most cases.

Back-end Development

Your user engages with the app's front end. But the magic happens in the back end. You must do this by selecting the appropriate programming languages and beginning the app's development. It also entails selecting the hosting architecture and database engines. 

Back-end development is an application responsible for managing server-side operations, encompassing the reception and processing of user input and the generation of outputs. It even involves the creation of databases and establishing server-side objects while handling the responsibility for every facet of an app's performance.

Front-end Development

Front-end development aims to craft a user-interactive interface that exhibits clarity and responsiveness. In essence, the front end of a mobile application is the tangible and front layer users encounter during installation, launch, and utilization.

When embarking on mobile app development, two approaches prevail. The initial approach involves crafting separate codebases for iOS and Android apps, whereas the alternative approach employs a unified codebase to generate both iOS and Android versions. 

Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, catering to distinct company strategies. Programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript often serve as the building blocks for constructing the front end of mobile apps.

For the best results, you can partner with a leading mobile app development company that can understand your needs and offer solutions accordingly.

Mobile App Testing and QA

The mobile app testing typically involves a multi-stage process to ensure an application's functionality, user-friendliness, and reliability.

• Unit testing is the initial phase, wherein individual program components undergo examination to ascertain their proper functioning.
• Subsequently, functional testing comes into play, focusing on meticulously examining the app's features and functionalities to ensure their alignment with predefined criteria.
• Following this, usability testing evaluates the user experience, ensuring it remains intuitive and user-friendly.
• Performance testing is paramount, assessing the app's adaptability, stability, and performance across diverse scenarios.
• Lastly, security testing is critical to identifying and rectifying vulnerabilities that could compromise user data.

Developers employ a multifaceted testing methodology for a rigorous app assessment, guaranteeing top-notch, dependable, and user-centric mobile applications.

Launching Beta Version of Mobile App

After testing and before deployment, it is more crucial than ever to launch a beta version of your app to a limited number of users. This launching gives you a basic idea of how customers like your app, whether there is anything you can do to improve it, get and analyze their feedback, and even get and access the feedback in your favor.

Here are some benefits of launching a beta version of your mobile app: 

• Final Testing and Bug Identification: Even though extensive testing happens during the mobile app development process, it's nearly impossible to catch every potential issue or bug. Beta testing allows you to put the app in the hands of real users who may encounter problems not identified during the initial testing phases. It helps in finding and fixing any remaining bugs or glitches.
• Diverse User Feedback: Beta testing involves a diverse group of users who may have different devices, operating systems, and usage patterns. This diversity provides valuable feedback from a broader range of perspectives, helping you uncover usability issues, performance variations, and compatibility challenges that might not have been apparent in a controlled testing environment.
• User feedback: With beta testing, the users can provide feedback on the app's user interface, user experience, and overall mobile app development and design. You can leverage their feedback to make improvements when it comes to app layout, navigation, and features.
• Market Feedback and Validation: Beta testing provides an opportunity to gauge user interest and gather insights into how your target audience perceives and interacts with the app. This information can help you make informed decisions about the app's market fit and potential success.
• Building a User Community: Beta testers often become early advocates for your app. They can help generate buzz, provide testimonials, and build a user community that can be leveraged for marketing and promotion when the app is officially launched.
• App Store Optimization: You can launch a more polished and higher-quality product by addressing issues and refining the app based on beta tester feedback. Positive initial reviews and ratings on app stores can lead to better visibility and increased downloads upon the app's official release.

Launching Your Application in the App Store 

When you're finally ready to publish your app, you'll have to go through several distribution strategies depending on the mobile app development platform for which you developed it. Before releasing the mobile app, you must have a developer account in the App Store and Google Play Store.

The items listed below must be present for the app to be released in the app store: 

• The name of your application
• Summary
• Category Keywords
• Icon of the mobile app
• screenshots of your mobile app

After you submit an iOS app to the Apple App Store, it undergoes an evaluation procedure that can take a few days or weeks. The time relies on your app's quality and how closely it adheres to Apple's iOS app development standards.

Android, meanwhile, doesn't have a review procedure. After a few hours of submission on the Google Play Store, the app will be available to download for the general audience.

Post Launch Support

Apps should never be created and then neglected. You must monitor them, determine which features may be enhanced, and release updates regularly. You can monitor how frequently popular apps publish new updates by monitoring them. Also, security upgrades and privacy prevention are crucial for effectively maintaining the application. 

You can track key performance metrics (KPIs), including load speed, Time to First Byte (TTFB), CPU consumption, and crashes of apps as part of application performance monitoring (APM).

There are methods to track user behavior, your marketing activities' effectiveness, and application performance. You can adjust and update per shifting trends and client demands based on analytics of performance, customer behavior, and marketing efforts.

How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Mobile App?

Creating a mobile app can be costly, yet accurately estimating expenses proves challenging due to various factors affecting the total costs. It includes app complexity, design, functionality, development team expertise, and location, considerably affecting the total mobile app development costs.

However, one thing is certain: Spending money on quality doesn't come cheap. The costs will increase if you need more sophisticated functions. It's vital to remember that costs for back-end facilities, third-party integrations, and post-release support can impact the cost of developing an app.

According to the estimates, average app development standards are as follows:

• Simple app creation or MVP development: starting at $25,000
• Development of medium-complexity apps starts at $50,000
• Development of complex apps starts at $80,000

It's crucial to remember that these are merely ballpark figures, and the actual cost of creating a mobile app may vary depending on its particular specifications and features. You can request a project quote or estimate from a reliable mobile app development company to better understand the cost.

Final Thoughts

Phew! Quite lengthy, we know. This mobile app development guide is indeed comprehensive but includes crucial steps. While it may be lengthy and demanding, it is surely worth it. 

From initial research and strategic planning to design, development, deployment, and ongoing support, every phase holds significance in crafting a relevant, profitable, and feature-rich mobile app.

We hope that this useful guide has offered assistance in various ways. Gaining insight into app design, architecture, and the entire mobile app development process will empower you to navigate the mobile market effectively.

Here’s a quick tip: Always be adaptable to market trends, technologies, and customer preferences to stand out and make a difference. 

Also, we are at your rescue if you are looking for professional assistance from the top mobile app development company with an expert team of designers and developers.

Netclues is a leading mobile app development company with over 15 years of industry-rich expertise and a team of amazingly talented people. Need assistance? We are just one email away. Reach out to us at sales@netclues.com.