Last Updated: May 25, 2023
app development process
Published On: March 03, 2023

The Google Play Store accounts for 2.87 million apps whereas the Apple App Store accounts for 1.96 million apps and the numbers are ever-increasing.

That says it all!

People are using mobile apps like never before and businesses are using them for creating digital autonomy and establishing a brand presence online. Mobile apps are like dopamine; when integrated with the right features and functionality, your potential customers get obsessed.

The critical question is: How do you build a world-class mobile app? The results will naturally come when the application is capable of engaging customers and providing a phenomenal user experience.

It all boils down to the mobile app development process. The success of your mobile app development depends on the strategies and methods you use to build a standout application. In 2023, there’s very little margin for error.

You want to be crystal clear about how you’ll head through the mobile app development process and the steps you’ll take to ensure it achieves results and exceeds the expectations of your potential customers.

By the end of this article, you’ll have figured out everything you need to know concerning strategies and steps to foster an effective mobile app development process.

Fundamentals of Mobile App Development

‘One brick at a time’ – The famous quote by Will Smith says it all. When you’re building something unique and masterful, you need to build it step by step.

There are some core fundamentals you need to address before even thinking of building a mobile application that can help you get the results you want. You need to communicate certain pointers to your mobile app developers and empower them with a strong message that gives them the fuel they need to build a powerful mobile app.

Here’s what you need to stress the most and it’s…

‘Creating an interactive user experience’

The first impression matters the most. You’ve got 5 seconds to get a positive response from your potential customer. That’s all, if the UI is messed up and doesn’t resonate with your customers, you’re out for nothing.

Other factors are core to the integral process of app development. Here are the important ones:

Considering these pointers will help you effectively carry out your mobile application development process. What’s going to help you achieve it is your mobile app development strategy.

Nailing the Strategy!

Every winning team has a winning strategy. You don’t go racing through obstacles and roadblocks without a well-defined strategy. Most importantly, you don’t want to get lost in the process.

That is why it’s key to define your mobile app development strategy. It’s got to do a lot with planning both long-term and short-term, considering the whole mobile app development lifecycle.

The first core component of defining your strategy is identifying your goal and writing down your objective.

It should be a broad goal, a mission statement that enforces you to push beyond the line and achieve significant results. Be as specific as you can when you define your business objective.

It should go something like this…

“I want my mobile application to receive 10,000 downloads in a span of 3 years, acquiring sales of () million dollars, and seeing a growth rate of ()%.”

When you have something like that written out and passed on to your team leaders, you let them know your expectations and keep them on the right track.

Once you nail the mission statement, the next step is to define weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. You need to set KPIs or key performance parameters that actually analyze how well your team members are performing to achieve individual milestones.

Market research is key to understanding the uniqueness of your business model and how you fare with respect to your competitors. It’s all about standing apart from the competition and you need to find loopholes in your competitor’s mobile applications to address that particular issues through your mobile app.

What follows up will determine the entire success of your mobile app development process strategy. It’s analyzing customer journeys and behavioral patterns.

You and your team might love your app’s functionality and UI, but if the customer doesn’t, then it’s not worth it. Customer trends and behavior keeps changing rapidly in accordance with technological advancements. In order to create a sustainable impact, you need to evolve consistently.

You need to have meeting agendas that cover topics along these lines. Team members need to stay updated with technological trends and have a forward-heading mindset. That’s why backing your native mobile apps and web apps with data-driven AI and machine learning intelligence is important.

With data-driven feedback from customer behavior patterns and algorithms, you can incorporate the needed changes and tech integration and stay ahead of the competition.

That brings us to the major concern being budget and resource allocation. To successfully carry out the different mobile app development stages and scale consistently, you need to have a budget-allotment plan. There must be a great distinction between active spending requirement, passive, and reserve.

Mobile App Development Process: A Step-By-Step Guide

It’s time we take the long road and undertake the journey to building a legacy mobile application by dissecting the entire mobile application development process.

Having understood the fundamentals of mobile app development and the strategies needed to enforce top-notch app development, you’re all set to get into the nitty-gritty details. Follow this step-by-step guide and you’re good to go!

1. Discussing Project Requirements

The first step is to get a solid understanding of your business mobile app project requirement and jolt down the pointers that are key to the successful implementation of these features. You need to gather authentic data concerning your app development model and see what your competitors are doing.

When you’re outsourcing a mobile app development company to build Android apps or iOS apps, you need to have figured out what exactly you require from the project and establish the parameters you want to cover.

It’s ideal you have a reference concept of the mobile application you want to develop, as it solves intricate complexities in understanding your actual requirements.

You need to label out the requirements with specifics retained. Say, for instance,

  • Build an iOS/Android app
  • Integrate a data-driven AI model that analyses user behavior
  • Minimalistic or bold design
  • Want to build cross-platform mobile apps
  • A specific portal for user interaction

Be as specific as you can get and chart out as many pointers to clarify yourself as well as the app development companies about the requirements. When you do the necessary homework, you’ll be the anchor rather than the company that will build your app. It’s your ideas that need to be reflected and that takes a great deal of market research.

Once you’ve finalized the requirements, you’ll have to book an initial consultation with the mobile app development company you’re going to choose.

We provide a 45-minute free consultation call where we discuss your mobile app’s requirements such as the type of app, target audience, and other deliverables.

The initial call is just to get a brief understanding of what you want from your business mobile application. Henceforth, we proceed wit ha detailed discussion.

2. Getting Into the Details

An internal brainstorming session is conducted after the initial call. Here’s where the mobile app development team comes together to chart out specific objectives and assemble the right team to take on the project.

At our company, we do heavy research to gather relevant data and come up with suggestions that we share with the client in the succeeding meetings. What we’ve seen from our experience is that clients generally take in our suggestions as they’ve never seen things from the other side of the coin.

Having been in the mobile app development industry for years together, we know what it takes to build a world-class app. But it’s necessary to put your app idea to the test to see if it’s possible to build what you have in mind.

With the assistance of our expert QA professionals, we’ll write test cases that evaluate the practicality of executing your app idea. Once we are affirmed that we can proceed with the app idea, we put together mobile app testing plans to be conducted post-development.

Based on the app idea, critical features, and parameters, we do a budget tally to give you a rough approximation of the total budget cost that will be incurred while building the mobile app.

Now that everything that’s needed to be discussed is done and the app idea and budget estimate are finalized, it’s time to move into the formal procedures and have a clear mutual understanding between both parties to negate any kind of undignified experiences.

3. Signing Confidentiality Documents

The essential part of the mobile app development process is the signing of documents. Vocal statements hold proof of nothing unless everything’s recorded.

There needs to be a clear understanding between the parties and that’s signing a PDA or project development agreement document is very integral to the smooth development and completion of your project.

Our software company has a full-fledged routine of providing our clients with all the data they need to be assured that the projects are delivered with the utmost quality and within the allocated budget and time. The PDA will have pointers that include the most essential project details like, for instance,…

After we get your approval of the project development agreement, you’ll have to sign the NDA or non-disclosure agreement wherein we promise not to share or use your project idea for any other app development.

Signing an NDA ensures that the sole ownership of your project’s app idea belongs to you and nobody else.

4. Wireframes and Mockups

Back in those days, wireframes were done using pen and paper but today various digital tools help to curate effective wireframes. A wireframe is something like the blueprint of a house layout that an architect would come up with.

In our case, the blueprint is the digital layout of your mobile app. Wireframes and mockups are an integral part of the mobile app design process and let UI designers understand what exactly is in the mind of their clients.

We create wireframes with the latest tools in the market and provide our clients with the overall page structure, layout, app logic, and user flow when we submit the wireframes to them for approval. It helps you to visualize how the user interface of your mobile app will look and how the app logic is conveyed.

You’re able to test your product concept and how much they align with your business goals with wireframes. It solves discrepancies that may arise during the later stages of your mobile app development.

Not only do wireframes help you see how your application looks and how the system flow works, but it also helps us understand the time it will take to develop such an application. It keeps the roadmap clear for both parties and facilitates the smooth functioning of the mobile app development process.

  • The wireframe also helps you see how you might stand out from your competitors in terms of design layout and user flow. It helps you to make a comparative study and see the efficiency of various user flows. You want to render a seamless experience to your users and give them enough reasons to choose your app over the others and wireframes to help you achieve that.

We use the latest wireframe and mockup tools and templates to facilitate a streamlined mobile app development process and provide you with all the insights you need before was actually start developing or designing your mobile app.

5. UI and Design

Here’s where the mobile app developers start working on creating the design layout. Also known as front-end development, this part of the app development process is undertaken once the wireframe is finalized by you.

Based on the type of app you want to develop, the designing process aligns to style guides that are suitable for the particular app. If it’s an iOS app, minimalistic designs complement the whole tonality of the OS and the user interface of Apple devices.

In comparison, Android apps require bold and pushy colors with striking typography and font styles, app icons, and navigation toolbars. We’ll curate a set of design samples and pass them on to you. You can use the minimum viable product to see the response you get from your potential customers by getting them to use it for testing purposes.

After you accept the MVP, we represent those design ideas in the real app UI. Unlike the wireframe or mockup, the actual UI design will render the slightest of creative expressions that make the user experience phenomenal.

Branding is the core concept that UI designers address when they set out to design mobile applications. The whole essence of the brand needs to be conveyed through the UI, the color palette, graphics, and transitions.

We breathe life into your app by integrating design elements that instantly connect with your target audience. Depending on the solution or product you’re offering, we’ll include custom design elements and graphics that compliment the whole tonality of your brand’s identity.

Navigation and user flows are most important while designing a mobile application. For a cross-platform app, the design pattern has to be checked across multiple platforms and mobile devices to see the responsivity.

Consistency is Key

Design and content must go hand in hand to effectively garner the interest of your target audience. As a part of your app design process, we ensure that there’s consistency in the design patterns across the whole interface of the app.

Developing Android apps for the Google Play Store or iOS apps for the Apple App Store requires mobile app designers to follow strict UI guidelines and design consistency is a crucial aspect. It’s important to render the native feel when you’re designing an app particular to a given operating system.

At our company, our UI designers are updated with the latest design and style guides to effectively portray trendy design variations and patterns to accommodate the app’s functionality. We ensure that your app users feel as though they are using an app with the latest technology stack integrated.

6. Mobile App Development

Here’s where we actually begin the mobile app development process. A team of mobile app developers is assigned the task of incorporating the relevant functionality and features into your mobile application and bringing it to life.

There are two core aspects that mobile app developers have to deal with while building native mobile applications.

  • Front-end Development: All that the user sees and interacts with can be referred to as the front end. While a front-end developer’s main responsibility is to create an interactive user interface with custom layouts and design patterns, they also deal with the functionality of the icons and CTAs. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are some of the popular languages used for front-end development.
  • Back-end Development: The back-end has got to do with the API development or the application program interface development. All server-side software and database entry are facilitated now. The core functionalities are incorporated during this development phase.

According to your mobile app development requirements, we’ll integrate the necessary features. If you want blockchain, metaverse, IoT, AR, VR or any other advanced technology blended into the application’s infrastructure, we’ll have a special team of developers assigned for that.

Custom API integration of these advanced technologies requires diligent expertise and we have that. Our smooth and agile mobile app development process helps us to do the impossible. Our project managers and team leads are experts at coordinating the workflow and managing task dependencies.

The app development strategies and methods we use while building native, hybrid, and progressive web applications are different.

  • Native app: For native applications, we stick to the app development basics. Having extensive knowledge of building great native mobile apps as a top software development company, we blend in UI tonality and functionality that reflects the mobile OS. We deploy all the latest mobile app trends and practices while building a native app.
  • Cross-platform app: Building mobile apps that run on multiple platforms requires various software development kits, tools, and programming languages. The principles that go into cross-platform app development are different as developers have to test for responsiveness and various other parameters. We ensure that all these protocols are met.
  • Progressive web app: To build an app that runs on the web browser requires a separate set of skills from developers. They need to work offline and be easy to synchronize. We use the latest PWA frameworks such as Ionic, AngularJS, and Polymer to build smoothly functioning apps.

A very important factor for impactful mobile app development is the use of the latest technology stack. Our mobile app developer assigned to your projects uses the most convenient and latest technologies to facilitate smooth app development.

Your innovative app idea will come to life when our mobile app developers use the tech stack that’s most suitable for facilitating the development of your online projects.

Here’s a brief of the tech stack we use when creating mobile apps for different mobile operating systems.

7. QA and Testing

In order for your mobile apps to perform to the best of their potential and not succumb to code errors, malware, or degraded performance, it’s mandatory to conduct full-proof testing procedures.

Mobile app testing ensures that your applications run smoothly across all mobile devices and do not compromise on load speeds or functionality when there’s a server overload.

We use both manual testing and automated testing procedures to do a thorough evaluation of your mobile apps and detect all possible errors or bugs embedded within the app code. We create test cases based on your app type, model, and API integration.

Our software development company has a test-driven mobile app development model to ensure that the QA experts don’t have to spend too much time sorting out the inefficiencies in the app code. During phases of the app development period, our testers cross-check the code to enhance development efficiency.

There are various types of testing methods that we use to carry out effective app testing.

User Experience Testing

Your Google Play Store or Apple App Store downloads will see a great rise in popularity when the user experience entails the best of consumer interests. If you take a look at the app review of many mobile apps, you will find out that many users complain of poor user experience. That’s why user experience testing is very important. You need to ensure the following things while testing for user experience.

Functional Testing

This part of the mobile application testing is where our QA checks whether the necessary functionality is implemented in the business processes of the particular app model. The app logic is put to the test and seen whether specific functions perform as they should be doing.

Functional testing is best carried out when prototypes of the app under beta mode are available for the users to see if the app performs well. By collecting feedback from your potential users, you can evaluate the performance of your app’s functionality.

In fact, feedback testing is a crucial aspect of functional testing. As multiple users try out various functions in your app, you’ll derive strategic conclusions. For instance, the responsivity while pressing a button, downloading messages, and navigation bar ease can all be checked by doing so.

Field testing is very important as it allows you to check whether your sign-up forms, CTAs, and other fields that receive user data are aligned with your business app requirements.

It’s necessary to conduct test-driven development for an M-commerce mobile app. While testing the functionality of a mobile app that features products or services for sale, our developers check for efficiency in buying, order placement, and other business processes.

We also need to verify whether the payment process happens smoothly through various payment methods. Only after comprehensive testing, we update you on the progress.

Performance Testing

The app’s performance is put to the test using this method. It is done to check how the app performs under various situations. There are some parameters that top app development companies use while implementing a performance test.

  • Load testing: The speed with which a given mobile page loads upon specific user requests are checked to ensure that there’s optimal app performance.
  • Stress testing: It’s crucial to check stress testing to see how the load speeds are affected during high traffic times and whether the server is responding accordingly.
  • Stability testing: Here we evaluate how your app performs under consistent usage and check whether the speeds are affected under normal load conditions.

After comprehensive performance testing, we move on to other types of testing such as compatibility, security, and cross-platform device testing.

8. Launching Your Application

Once we finish developing your application and testing it, we’ll launch your mobile app on the App Store. We ensure that the app is compliant with the store’s requirements and guidelines.

For uploading your app, we’ll need certain information from you that’s mandatory to fill in. You need to provide the details for the app title, description, category, etc…

Publishing an android app is relatively easier than an iOS app as it becomes live within a few hours of submission. For an iOS app, it usually takes weeks before the team approves the app’s quality and design appropriateness.

Our IT company is well-versed in releasing and launching powerful native, hybrid, and progressive web apps and getting the best results out of them. We are updated with the latest guidelines and policies of app stores and enable a smooth launch.

9. Post-Launch Support

After the official launch of your mobile application, we offer consistent technical support and assistance to scale your app to meet the continuous demands of your potential customers. As technology advances, it becomes necessary to integrate essential features and enhance user experience.

We also ensure that your app performs seamlessly without ever breaking down due to traffic issues or attacks from malicious third parties. Based on user feedback, we’ll rectify the ongoing issues and help you to scale efficiently. You can choose the kind of support model you require.

Final Words!

That’s the entire mobile app development process described in length. If you want to develop a world-class mobile app that reaps huge dividends, just pitch out to Moon Technolabs. Having been in mobile and web development for years, we have the skill and experience to build a powerful app that exceeds your expectations.

FAQs

The six phases are research and ideation, wireframe and mockups, UI/UX design, development, QA and testing, and the last of it being publishing and launching the app.

The time it takes to develop a fully-functional app after QA and testing procedures vary according to app requirements and complexity. It also depends on how synchronized the app development flow is.

The basic structure of an app is composed of the user interface, the functionality of the app, its basic features, and third-party integrations.

Business apps, Utility apps, Travel apps, educational apps, and lifestyle apps can be generally classified as the five main types of apps. However, that’s a subjective topic. Overall, they make a good list.

The three main types of apps are native, web, and hybrid apps. Native apps are built specifically for their particular mobile OS whereas web apps are mobile applications that are accessed from the browser. Hybrid apps have the combined utility of both native and web apps.
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Jayanti Katariya

Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.

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