Mobile App Development for Android & iPhone

August 10, 2021

The process for creating successful mobile apps spans a number of key phrases. We’ll provide a detailed breakdown of each concept in this article.

Following this development process will ensure your mobile app project is a success regardless of the scale and scope of your enterprise.

  • Strategy

The strategy for evolving your idea into a successful app is the first phase of the mobile app development process. This can be integrated into your enterprise mobility strategy as a more significant component. There are numerous individual app objectives, and each one has an impact on the mobility strategy that needs to be considered while the app is being developed.

These include:

  • Research your target market and analyze who your app users
  • Find out what your competition is doing
  • Align the app’s objectives with its goals
  • Choose a mobile app platform

The average cost of developing a mobile app is approximately $200,000, with the development time ranging from four to six months. Your strategy helps concentrate your ideas about your app into a clear picture. Having made this connection, you are now ready to delve deeper into the mobile application development process’s next phase.

  • Detailed analysis and thoughtful planning

Once your app idea takes shape, it starts to become a real project. Before use cases are defined and functional requirements are captured, analysis and planning begin. Develop a product roadmap after you have found out what features your app needs. These considerations include putting mobile app requirements into an order of priority and classifying them into delivery milestones. To ensure time, money, or resources aren’t issues, plan out your MVP(Minimum viable product) features and implement it during the initial launch.

One part of the overall project planning phase is to determine what skills are required for app development. A common example is the development platforms used for iOS and Android mobile devices. Your mobile app development team should include iOS developers and Android developers if your goal is to build a mobile app for both iOS and Android mobile platforms.

Are you ready to give your app a name? Unlike traditional domain names, app store names must be unique across each app. Check each app store to make sure your app’s name isn’t taken by another application.

  • User interface design or user experience design

A strong app design aims to provide simple, streamlined interactions with a stylish appearance. App adoption and utility are both crucial for the success of a mobile app. When designing mobile app user interfaces, you should focus on creating great user experiences by designing your app to be interactive, intuitive, and easy to use. While slick user interfaces can help get users started, your app needs intuitive usability in order to hold customers’ attention.

The principles of information architecture and workflows

The first step in your mobile app design process is to identify what information you want your app to display to your users, what information you want it to collect, how the app’s finished product will be used, and how it will take users through various user journeys.

Mobile solutions for companies must follow the roles and privileges of their various users, and it is imperative to include these details in the app’s information architecture. Workflow diagrams help illustrate the workflow of every possible interaction the user has with the app and the app’s navigation hierarchy.

  • Wireframes

App designers often begin their app design process by creating rough sketches on paper. Wireframes are sketches made digital. Wireframes are conceptual layouts or low-fidelity mockups.

In wireframes, design elements, like color schemes and styles, are given less emphasis in favor of focusing on how the digital sketches look and what kind of experience it will provide to the end-user. Quick and budget-friendly approaches like wireframes enable you to design app layouts and go through the process of refinement during the design review. For wireframe creation, you should take into consideration device-specific design. The aim should be to provide intuitive and individualized user experiences.

  • Style guide

Style Guides are digital or printed documentation used to keep manage, track and describe user interface elements and visual aspects of the App. An app’s design standards, including branding rules, navigation icons, and color schemes.

A style guide contains:

  • The font you select for your app’s text will be:
  • The colour scheme that we plan to use?
  • In the app design, how will your company brand be presented?

A style guide serves as part of a design strategy for an app. Ensure that you have a mobile app development style guide in place as part of your process, as this aids your mobile app developers in their productivity. Following a style guide will help maintain the overall look and feel of your app. iOS app design guidelines also apply to your iOS app; while Android app design guidelines also apply to your Android app.

  • Mockups

Mockups, or visual designs with the utmost fidelity, are the last stages of visual design for your app. Your style guide is applied to the app wireframes to create mockups. Finalizing the app design means your app’s information architecture, workflow, and aesthetics will also change. When you need to create high-fidelity mockups, Adobe Photoshop is the most popular tool.

  • Prototype

Mockups display your mobile app’s functionality using static designs. Click-through prototypes, however, use tools like Invision and Figma to turn them into clickable wireframes. Prototypes are crucial for testing how users will interact with the final product. Prototype development can be time-consuming, but the time invested is worth it because it provides a testbed for your app’s design and functionality early on in the development process. When prototypes are used, they allow the team to identify the alterations to the app’s proposed functionality.

Depending on the company, certain organizations prefer prototypes being built during the wireframing process, especially when functional requirements for the app are not well thought out. The app’s proposed functionality should be reviewed with a focus group.

  • Application development

To help you prepare for the upcoming phases of app development, it is important to think ahead and plan ahead.

  • Identify what your goals are
  • Establish the technical framework
  • Select a stack of technologies
  • Define the stages of development

Back-end/server technology, APIs, and mobile app front-end make up the typical mobile app project.

  • Back-end of the mobile app or server-side

This section includes the necessary database and server-side objects to support your mobile app’s functions. Modifications may be required if you are using an existing back-end platform to support the desired mobile functionality.

  • API

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a type of interface used by applications to communicate with a back-end server or database.

  • Front-end of the mobile app

The front-end is the app an end-user will use, which is the native mobile app. An API, which is a tool that connects programs, serves as the interface between an app and a database. When an app needs to support the use of an internet connection when working offline, it may store local data instead.

There are over a dozen backend options, many of which support every major web programming language and database. You need to select a technology stack suited to each mobile OS, whether it’s Mac, Windows, or Android. Apps can be developed using Objective-C or Swift, which are the programming languages of choice for iOS app development. As a general rule, Android apps are created using Java or Kotlin.

There are several programming languages and platforms available for building mobile apps—the important factor is to use the correct platform. With each new version of a mobile platform, mobile technologies advance rapidly. Additionally, newer mobile devices are launched on a bi-annual basis. Agility is crucial when it comes to building mobile apps in a timely and cost-effective manner. Using an agile development approach enables faster time-to-market. With this approach, frequent software releases are supported with functionality that is both completed and complete. Agile development is supported by development milestones defined within the agile development plan.

The passing of each development milestone is then verified by the app testing team.

  • Testing

To make applications stable, usable, and secure, perform QA testing throughout the mobile app development process. First, you should design test cases that cover all facets of application testing.

Test cases drive mobile app testing, similar to how use cases direct the process of app development for mobile applications. A test case is meant to be used for performing the tests, to record the results of the tests, and to identify additional retesting to do. To improve the reliability of your solution, your QA team should be involved with both the Analysis and Design stages. With a thorough understanding of your app’s functional requirements and objectives, your test cases will be more accurate.