With the increasing use of mobile phones, many companies are trying to take advantage of mobile apps. However, with limited information, many companies do not know how to create an app for their business. To realize success, it is important to build your mobile application using a process that has been tested and refined over many years. When you search for the mobile app development process, you will find multiple sources with differing numbers of steps but here we chose to focus on six actionable steps in the mobile app development process.

1. Development strategy
2. Analysis and planning
3. App development
4. Design Phase
5. App testing
6. App deployment

Step 1: Development Strategy

This is the first step in the mobile app development process. It determines how your business can become better using a mobile app. It highlights how your customers will benefit. If you visit Google Play Store or AppStore, it is easy to identify how each application differs from the rest. A well-defined app development strategy must help you address your initiatives’ reasons.

This phase should help you define the purpose of your app, identify your audience, research who your competitors are, and establish your goals and objectives.

Step 2: Analysis and Planning

After coming up with the right strategy, your idea now starts taking shape and this is where it turns into an actual project. This step begins with clearly defining use cases and capturing detailed functional requirements.

To put it quite simply, functional requirements are the necessary functions your app will have or the key services your app will offer. App development can be a long and tedious process. However, to simplify the process, prepare a roadmap to prioritize your requirements and group them into deliverable milestones. This is where you define your minimum viable product (MVP).

Defining a technology stack is one of the most crucial phases in developing a successful mobile app. iOS and Android mobile platforms use very different development stacks. If you plan on building for both iOS and Android, then you should consider having developers with both sets of skills but alternatively, you can consider developing your application using cross-platform stacks. These cross-platform stacks include react native and flutter. Researching each app store to ensure your app’s name isn’t in use is crucial here. An app name is like a domain name that is unique for each application.

Step 3: Design Phase

The purpose of the design phase is to come up with a design that delivers seamless and effortless user experiences. Having a consistent user interface for your application will keep users engaged and constantly bring out what your brand is about.

The success of your app will depend on how well users adopt and benefit from its features. The most important goal of an interface design is the create excellent user experiences. A seamless UI design should be interactive, intuitive, and user-friendly. This will help in your app’s early adoption and keep your users engaged.

Architecture and Workflows

As part of the design process, you need to determine what your users will see i.e.; the data displayed to them, the data you collect, and how users will interact with your app. Incorporating user roles and permission is important if you’re developing an enterprise application.

Wireframes

Wireframes represent the skeletal framework of a mobile app to get started. A prototype subjected to further improvements. The next phase involves getting into the source files, fonts, images, SVGs, and some notes.

Wireframes deliver a straightforward and sometimes precise outline for the development process. It is a page structure, layout, information architecture, and the best approach to comprehending the user flow. A wireframe represents the initial product concept.

Mockups

An app mockup is a designer’s milestone. This is essentially a stage in the development process between a wireframe and a working prototype. In an app design, you should be able to simulate your design logic before starting your actual development.

A mockup is used for demonstration, evaluation, promotion, and other purposes to acquire feedback from potential users, stakeholders, and team members to see if the overall design strategy meets the desired goals.

Step 4: App Development

Mobile app development is considered the active phase of the development life cycle. This phase utilizes waterfall methodology to implement agile for development and ensure that the functionalities are well incorporated.

Here, developers break down the project into small deliverable milestones to make it more manageable. Some developers call it the soul of the mobile app development process. Nonetheless, the app’s conception must be clear to the development team.

Step 5: App Testing

This is a crucial part of app development. Once the app is created; it is necessary to test the app for its performance. This sounds like it’s a complex and complicated process but rest assured, our quality assurance engineers are highly focused individuals when testing an app’s functionalities. We do this by organizing various test scenarios to find out if there are any errors in the application.

The testing process majorly focuses on user experience, functional and performance testing, security testing, and device and platform testing. All errors found are resolved to ensure the app meets the desired quality.

Step 6: App Deployment

As discussed earlier, your app is deployed on Google PlayStore or Apple’s AppStore. Once the app is uploaded to the AppStore, it undergoes a review that may take some time to finish. The review relies on how closely your app fits the iOS app guidelines as Android does not have a review procedure.

Maintenance is a repetitive process that includes the app’s technical performance, some benchmarking against goals, and target design tweaks for your next update release.

Conclusion

After launching your mobile app, it doesn’t end there as you may be required to make some changes to your application based on changing needs or user feedback, or the desire to have some more functionalities. This is where maintenance and support become crucial to your app. These procedures ensure the continuous and bug-free working of any live mobile app.

Sometimes these processes can be overwhelming. You may have a brilliant idea but are not sure where to start. Contact us using our details and let us know how this guide helped you in developing a mobile application.