Mobile app development is rapidly growing. From retail, telecommunications, and e-commerce to insurance, healthcare, and government, organizations across industries must meet user expectations for real-time, convenient ways to conduct transactions and access information. Today, mobile devices—and the mobile applications that unlock their value—are the most popular way for people and businesses to connect to the internet. To stay relevant, responsive, and successful, organizations need to develop the mobile applications that their customers, partners, and employees demand. –IBM Cloud Education
Strategy
This is the first phase to determine your strategy to develop your ideas into a well-executed and auspicious app. Determining your strategy before any development process will help you envision your app better. This is the phase where you identify the app users; research the competition; establish the app’s goals and objectives; select a mobile platform for your app. Your strategy would help you focus on your vision and paint a clear picture of your app idea. After having a clear vision of your app, you can move forward to the next phase.
Analysis and Planning
In this second phase, your ideas for your app start developing and forms into a project. It begins with determining use cases and determining detailed functional requirements of your app. After you have determined your app’s requirements, you can now prepare a product roadmap. This includes prioritizing the mobile app requirements and classifying them into delivery milestones. This phase is also when you think about the resources and costs. Think of a version of your product that has the main features that can be tested by early customers who can provide feedback. This will help you with the development of the app. This is also known as minimum-viable-product or MVP. Doing this will help the developers potentially avoid doing lengthy and unnecessary work.
This phase also includes determining the skills needed for your app development initiative. iOS and Android mobile platforms use different development technology stacks. If you plan to build a mobile app for both platforms, your team should include iOS developers and Android developers. Mobile app names are like domain names of websites, they have to be unique. Don’t forget to research and look at other apps to make sure that the name you want has not yet been taken.
User Interface (UI)/ User Experience (UX) Design
The purpose of an app’s design is to present uncomplicated and smooth user experiences with a flawless look. This is basically giving the users the best experience possible with your mobile app. The success of your mobile app will be determined based on how well users are benefiting from the app’s features. The goal of UI/UX design for mobile apps is to create superb user experiences, which will make your app interactive, engaging, and user-friendly. While flawless UI designs will help you attract potential users early, your app must have an intuitive user experience to keep the app engaging for the users.
App Development
Planning remains to be an essential part of this phase. Before actual development or programming efforts start, you will have to define the technical architecture; pick a technology stack; define the development milestones.
Testing
Performing accurate quality assurance (QA) testing during the mobile app development process makes applications stable and functioning. To ensure extensive QA testing of your app, you should prepare test cases that address all angles of app testing. Like how use cases drive the process of mobile app development, test cases also drive mobile app testing. Test cases are for performing test steps, recording testing results for software quality evaluation, and trafficking fixes for retesting. An example of a good practice approach is involving your QA team in the Analysis and Design stages. Their familiarity with your app’s functional requirements and objectives will help them produce valid and factual test cases.
Deployment & Support
Releasing a local mobile app requires you to submit an app to the app stores—Apple App Store for iOS apps and Google Play Store for Android apps. But still, you will have to create a developer account with both app stores before launching your mobile app or depending on which app store you want to submit your app. The app stores will also need your apps’ information like the title, description, category, keywords, launch icon, app store screenshots, etc.
Though they have more or less the same requirements, the Apple App store is far more complicated than the Google Play store. Once you have submitted to the Apple App Store, iOS apps still go through a review process which may take a few days or several weeks depending on your app’s quality and how closely it follows Apple’s iOS development guidelines. If your app requires users to log in, then you will have to provide a test user account as part of Apple’s release process. On the other hand, Android apps don’t have any review process. The apps become available in the app store within a few hours after submission.
After your app becomes available in the app stores, monitor its usage through mobile analytics platforms. You should also track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your app’s success. Often check crash reports and other issues reported by users.
Encourage users to provide your company with feedback and suggestions for your app. This will help both the developers and the users. Frequently updating the app with improvements is important to keep users engaged. Unlike web apps where updated releases can be available to the users instantly, mobile app updates will have to go through the same submission and review process as the initial submission. Also, with local mobile apps, you have to continuously stay on top of technology advancements. You also have to regularly update your app for new mobile devices and OS platforms.
These are the six key phases that are essential and beneficial to the success of your mobile app development.
