So, you’ve decided to create an effective application to increase your brand online visibility and expand your overall business opportunities. At the beginning of your quest, you might be wondering what steps you should take to ensure the smooth development process and, perhaps, more importantly, how much money you may need to translate your idea into a full-featured solution. Decisions such as weighing up offshore software development team benefits against doing this yourself should be considered as this will heavily influence the time to completion and total cost of a project. To calculate the approximate cost mobile development services may incur, consider using an app price calculator designed specifically to help beginner developers predict how expensive their venture may prove to be. And to figure out what to expect of your business app development journey, go on reading today’s article.
Preparation
The first stage you will find yourself at when working on your app is pre-design. At this phase, developers come up with a viable brief, where they thoroughly describe the app idea, sift through the features and pick those that will help them meet specific business goals, choose platforms, and consider the navigation sequence. What’s more, here, you need to research competition and the market niche you strive to occupy, define technical requirements, create a budget, and set timeframes. It’s important that you define the technologies and development solutions that will help you execute your idea at an optimum cost.
Design
Once you’re finished with the pre-design process, you may proceed to transform your idea into reality. This is where such important components as user interface and user experience are being created. At this stage, developers normally preconceive essential visual and moving elements their app might need to function as intended. When laying out a blueprint for their app through wireframes, developers can predict how all components will interact and measure the level of user satisfaction.
Once the blueprint is finalized, there goes the concept creation stage, where your app’s layout is being figured out. In other words, you need to decide on the aesthetic approach you want to take to execute such things as fonts, colors, the overall look of your interface, etc.
Once the visual design is also finalized, you will want to create a working prototype to make sure every concept of your app is up to the par. Prototyping involves creating a collection of images you have for each screen and tappable hotspots to simulate real-life app usage. You can install your prototype on a real device and try to access it by tapping the corresponding icon. At this point, you can also identify potential issues and come up with effective solutions to address them in a timely manner.
Last, but not least, you need to invest enough time and effort in user testing. This stage comes in when your product is almost live, but still requires finessing. So, it’s necessary that your targeted users try out your prototype to decide whether it meets their needs and comes up to their expectations. Once the testing is through, you can act on the obtained results and capitalize on your users’ feedback by implementing some changes or fixing some bugs, which will help you app win over a wider audience in the long run.
Development
Now you can move on to the development stage. As its very name suggests, here you need to give shape to your ideas and execute them. That being said, you also need to decide on some important things to ensure the development process goes smoothly. Decide on the technical architecture, choose a technology stack that both fits your budget and allows executing your app’s functionality, and identify the development milestones.
First things first, you want to devote enough attention to your database and flesh out service-side objects to ensure every component of your app works as intended. You might also need to implement some improvements and modifications to support some specific functionality. Also, make sure that your app properly communicates with a back-end server or database. For this, pay particular attention to your API.
When it comes to the front-end development, you have plenty of options at your disposal. Thus, if you strive for a superior UX and sophisticated features, you may opt for Objective-C or Swift. These tech stacks are just ideal for developing native solutions for iOS platforms. For Android, though, you may pick good old Java or Kotlin.
Still, if you’re on a tight budget and don’t want to compromise on quality, set your sights on out-of-the box frameworks that allow you to reduce the development costs and time. Among such solutions are UIKit, SwiftUI, Android UI, Flutter, or React Native.
If you want to roll out your app to the market as soon as possible, make use of an agile development approach, which is ideal for supporting frequent software releases with completed functionality.
Testing
All that remains is to perform thorough quality assurance testing to ensure no unexpected bugs or errors will surface after deployment. To ensure comprehensive QA testing, take care to employ different methods, including UX testing, performance, testing, functional testing, security testing, platform testing, etc.
If you’re satisfied with your test result, you are free to proceed to deploy your business app on a chosen platform.
