What is Mobile App Development: Step by Step Guide

In 2021, mobile apps are projected to generate $693 billion in revenue through App Store and in-app advertising. In addition, enterprise mobility is projected to be $510.39 billion by 2022.

While many companies are trying to take advantage of this trend, many do not know how to build an app successfully. Success in the competitive landscape of these growth projections can become a reality for your company - but only if it is supported by a precisely tailored mobile app development process.

An effective app development process flow is spread over six major phases. In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at each one.

Regardless of the size and scope of your project, following this development process will make your enterprise mobile app development initiative a success.

1. Strategy

The first step in the mobile app development process is defining the strategy for developing your idea into a successful app. You can incorporate a more substantial part of this into your overall enterprise mobility strategy. Since the objectives of one app may differ from another, there is still an app-specific impact on the mobility strategy to address during the development process.

In this step, you will:

•    Identify app users
•    research the competition
•    Establish the goals and objectives of the app
•    Choose a mobile platform for your app

On average, mobile apps cost $150,000 - $200,000 and can take up to four to six months to develop. Your strategy helps you focus your vision on a clear picture of your app idea. With this in mind, you can delve into the next step in the mobile application development process.

2. Analysis and Planning

At this stage, your app idea starts to take shape and turns into a real project. Analysis and planning begin with defining use cases and capturing detailed functional requirements.

After identifying the requirements for your app, create a product roadmap. This includes prioritizing mobile app requirements and grouping them into delivery milestones. If time, resources, or cost is a concern, define your minimum viable product (MVP) and prioritize it for the initial launch.

Part of the planning phase involves identifying the skills needed for your app development initiative. For example, the iOS and Android mobile platforms use different development technology stacks. If your goal is to build a mobile app for both the iOS and Android mobile platforms, your mobile development team should consist of iOS developers and Android developers.

Have you chosen your app name yet? Mobile app names are like domain names and must be unique in each app store. Research each app store to make sure your app name isn't already in use!

3. UI / UX Design

The design of the app aims to provide a smooth and intuitive user experience with a great look.

The success of a mobile app is determined by how well users are adopting and benefiting from all of its features. Mobile App UI/UX Design aims to create an excellent user experience by making your app interactive, intuitive and user-friendly. While the polished UI design will help with early adoption, your app needs to have a seamless user experience to keep app users engaged.

Information Architecture and Workflow

The first step in your mobile app design process is to determine what data your mobile app will display to users, the data it will collect, user interactions with the finished product, and the user travel within the app.

For companies, enterprise mobile solutions have users with different roles and privileges, and these rules need to be included as part of your app's information structure. Workflow diagrams help to identify every possible interaction of the user with the app and the navigation structure of the app.

wireframe

Mobile app designers often start app design with a sketch on paper. The wireframe is the digital form of a sketch. Wireframes are conceptual layouts, also known as low-fidelity mockups—they provide the visual structure for your app's functional needs.

With wireframes, the focus is more on aesthetics and user experience, not on color schemes and styles. Creating wireframes is a quick and cost-effective way to design app layouts and iterate through them in the design review process. You must consider the equipment-specific design when creating a wireframe. So whether your app is used on iPhone, iPad, or Android phones and tablets; It provides a smooth and device-specific user experience.

style guide

Style guides are "living documents" where an app's design standards, from your company's branding rules to navigation icons, are documented.

Style guides include:

• What font family will your app's text use?
• What will be the color scheme?
• How will your company brand appear in app design?

Style guides contribute to the design strategy of the app. Establishing a style guide early on as part of your mobile app development process improves the productivity of your mobile app developers. Plus, following a style guide will help keep the look and feel of your app the same. As part of your app design, you should consider app design guidelines for iOS apps from Apple and Android apps from Google.

Mock-up

Mockups, or high-fidelity designs, are the ultimate representation of your app's visual design. Mockups are created by applying your style guide to the app wireframe. As your app's design begins to be finalized, expect further modifications to its information architecture, workflow, and aesthetics. Adobe Photoshop is the most popular tool for creating high-fidelity mockups.

Prototype

While mockups demonstrate the functionality of your mobile app using static designs, these can be turned into click-through prototyping with tools like InVision and Figma. Prototypes are highly useful for simulating the user experience and workflow of an app as expected from the finished product. While prototype development can be time-consuming, the efforts are well worth it, as they offer early-stage testing of your app's design and functionality. Often, prototypes help identify modifications to the proposed functionality of the app.

Some companies prefer to prototype even at the wireframing stage, especially when the functional requirements of an app are not well thought out. Or, there is a need to review the proposed functionality of the app with a focus group.

4. App Development

Planning is an integral part of this stage in the mobile app development process. Before the actual development/programming effort begins, you must:

• Define technical architecture,
• choose a technology stack, and
• Define development milestones.

A typical mobile app project is made up of three integral parts: the back-end/server technology, the API(s) and the mobile app front-end.

Back-End/Server Technology

This part contains the database and server-side objects needed for the helper functions of your mobile app. If you are using an existing back-end platform, modifications may be required to support the desired mobile functionality.

API

Application Programming Interface (API) is a way of communication between an app and a back-end server/database.

Mobile App Front-End

The front-end is the native mobile app that will be used by the end user. In most cases, mobile apps have interactive user experiences that use APIs and back-ends to manage data. In some cases, when an app needs to allow users to function without internet access, the app may use local data storage.

You can use almost any web programming language and database for the back-end. For native mobile apps, you need to choose the required technology stack for each mobile OS platform. iOS apps can be developed using Objective-C or Swift programming language. Android apps are mainly built using Java or Kotlin.

There is more than one programming language and technology stack to build a mobile app - the key is to choose a technology stack that best suits your mobile app.

Mobile technologies move very fast with new versions of mobile platforms. In addition, new mobile devices are released every few months. Platforms and devices are changing rapidly, agility is essential to build mobile apps within time and budget. If time-to-market is a priority, use an agile development approach. This approach supports frequent software releases with full functionality. Defining development milestones as part of an agile development plan helps you develop your mobile application in an iterative fashion.

As each development milestone is completed, it is passed on to the app testing team for verification.

5. Testing

Performing thorough quality assurance (QA) testing throughout the mobile app development process makes applications stable, usable and secure. To ensure comprehensive QA testing of your app, you must first create test cases that address all aspects of app testing.

Test cases drive mobile app testing in the same way that use cases drive the process of mobile app development. Test cases are for performing the test phase, recording test results for software quality evaluation, and tracking fixes for retesting. A best practice approach is to involve your QA team in the analysis and design phases. Familiarity with the functional requirements and objectives of your app will help in designing accurate test cases.

In order to deliver a quality mobility solution, your app should go through the following testing methods.

user experience test

An important step in mobile app testing is to ensure that the final implementation matches the user experience created by the app design team. Your app's visuals, workflow, and interactivity are what will give your end users the first impression of your app. Make sure your app employs consistent fonts, style treatment, color scheme, padding between data, icon design, and navigation. Ensuring that your app matches the core design guidelines will have a direct impact on user adoption!

functional testing

The accuracy of your mobile app functionality is critical to its success. It is difficult to predict the behavior and usage scenario of each end user.

The functionality of your app should be tested by as many users as possible to cover as many possible test situations as possible. When two different users test the same feature but get different results, you might be surprised to find a bug. For example, both users may fill out the same form, but they may both enter different data—which could reveal a flaw.

The purpose of functional testing is to ensure that users can use the features and functionality of your app without any problems. This can be further broken down into system testing (a fully functioning app), and unit testing (individual functions of the app are working properly).

If you are building an app for the iOS and Android mobile platforms, your functional testing should include a feature comparison between both versions of your mobile app.

user experience test

An important step in mobile app testing is to ensure that the final implementation matches the user experience created by the app design team. Your app's visuals, workflow, and interactivity are what will give your end users the first impression of your app. Make sure your app employs consistent fonts, style treatment, color scheme, padding between data, icon design, and navigation. Ensuring that your app matches the core design guidelines will have a direct impact on user adoption!

functional testing

The accuracy of your mobile app functionality is critical to its success. It is difficult to predict the behavior and usage scenario of each end user.

The functionality of your app should be tested by as many users as possible in order to cover as many possible test situations as possible. When two different users test the same feature but get different results, you might be surprised to find a bug. For example, both users may fill out the same form, but they may both enter different data—which could reveal a flaw.

The purpose of functional testing is to ensure that users can use the features and functionality of your app without any problems. This can be further broken down into system testing (a fully functioning app), and unit testing (individual functions of the app are working properly).

If you are building an app for the iOS and Android mobile platforms, your functional testing should include a feature comparison between both versions of your mobile app.

safety test

Security is of utmost concern for enterprise mobile apps. Any potential vulnerability can lead to a hack. Many companies employ external agencies to conduct thorough security testing on their applications. There are a few simple steps your QA and development team can take to make your app secure.

If your app requires logged-in users, these logged in sessions should be tracked across devices and backends. User sessions must be terminated by the system when a user is inactive for a long period of time (typically ten minutes or less on a mobile app). If your app stores the user's credentials on the device to make it convenient for them to login again, you should make sure to use a trusted service. For example, the development platform for iOS apps provides the Keychain feature which can be used to store the user's account details for a specific app.

Data entry forms should be tested within your mobile app to make sure there is no data leakage.

Device and Platform Testing

On average, new mobile devices enter the market every 12 months with new hardware, firmware, and designs. Mobile operating systems are updated every few months.

Many mobile device manufacturers like Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola use the Android platform, but they customize the platform for their mobile devices (since Android is open source). Tools come in various shapes and sizes.

Compare this to Apple, which has a much more controlled environment, as they control both the hardware and the OS. However, there are many iPhone and iPad (Apple iOS) devices in the market.

This is where testing during the mobile app development process differs greatly from web app testing. You can get away with just testing your web app on the Chrome browser in a Windows environment. But your mobile app needs to be tested on multiple mobile devices or device simulators to ensure smooth working of your app for all users.

The complexity of mobile app testing on all mobile devices, ongoing support costs, and mobile device management headaches are the primary reasons why companies build their enterprise mobile apps for a single mobile platform (and often provide mobile devices to their users). does). In our experience, most companies first develop their enterprise mobile app with Apple's iOS mobile platform; Only where needed they make an app for the Android platform.

Testing is essential to the future success of an app; It comprises a large part of our overall mobile app development process. It is essential to have a comprehensive mobile testing strategy to provide a quality mobile app.

During the testing phase, there are several ways to distribute your app development build to testers. The most common way with iOS apps is via email or over the air (OTA) installs to get access to Testflight and the Android app.

6. Deployment and Support

Releasing a native mobile app requires submitting your app to the App Store, the Apple App Store for iOS apps, and Google Play for Android apps. However, you will need a developer account with the Apple App Store and Google Play Store before you can launch your mobile app.

The release of an app to the App Store requires the preparation of metadata, including:

• title of your app
• Description
• category
• keywords
• launch icon
• app store screenshot

Once submitted to the Apple App Store, iOS apps go through a review process that can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on the quality of your app and how closely it meets Apple's iOS development guidelines. follows from. If your app requires users to log in, you will need to provide a test user account to Apple as part of the release process.

There is no review process with Android apps, and they become available in the App Store within hours of submission.

Once your app is available in the App Store, monitor its usage through a mobile analytics platform and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your app's success. Check crash reports, or other user-reported problems, frequently.

Encourage users to provide your company with feedback and suggestions for your app. Prompt support for end users and frequently patching the app with fixes will be the key to keep users engaged. Unlike web apps, where patch releases may be immediately available to app users, mobile app updates must go through the same submission and review process as initial submissions. Also, with native mobile apps, you have to constantly stay on top of technological advancements and regularly update your apps for new mobile devices and OS platforms.

Conclusion

Mobile app development is an ongoing process and will continue after the initial launch as you receive user feedback and build additional functionality. Spring Time Software has been a leading mobile app development company in Canada. Over the years, Spring Time Software has provided mobile app development services to companies in finance, healthcare, construction, retail, consumer products, logistics, industrial engineering, and entertainment. We follow this same process for all the mobile apps we build.