8 Steps of Building a Mobile App For Your Business: Ultimate Guide

In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses are constantly seeking new and innovative ways to streamline their operations and enhance their customer experience. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by developing a mobile app for your business. A mobile app can help you connect with your customers, increase brand visibility, and improve your overall business efficiency.

But, developing a mobile app can be overwhelming and scary. Especially if you are not familiar with the technical aspects involved.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through the benefits of having a mobile app, and how to build one. And, help avoid the mistakes that most companies make.

There are several factors to consider to make sure your business needs a mobile app or not. Here are the questions you should ask yourself —

A mobile app offers ease and convenience. A website with general information about your company is necessary. If you have one for marketing or eCommerce, it should be mobile-responsive. But even the most mobile-responsive website can be more complex than a mobile app. And, according to current stats, 85% of shoppers prefer a mobile app over a mobile website. And that’s all the reason you need to get a mobile app for your business! Now that you know why you should invest in a mobile app, let’s jump into some of the benefits of having a mobile app for your business.

• Enhanced Customer Experience: With mobile apps, you can provide a personalized experience to your customers with features such as push notifications, in-app messaging, and personalized offers.
• Increased Sales: You can increase sales through your mobile app with personalized offers and push notifications.
• Better Analytics: You can track your customer data and the way they interact with your business better with a mobile app. And you can use this data to make a more informed marketing and product strategy.
• Competitive Advantage: If your competitors don’t have one, then developing a mobile app can give you a significant advantage in the industry.
• Strengthen Customer Relationships and Loyalty: 76% of consumers want to shop on their phones and save time. People don’t want to wait for a website to load. They want fast and easy access to your business. A custom mobile app is an efficient way to provide customers with the goods or services they want. And with features like loyalty programs, you can enhance customer loyalty as well.
• Increased Brand Awareness: Having a mobile you can reach a wider audience. Which will enhance your brand’s visibility.

Before going in for development, there are certain things that you should consider. Let’s delve into the factors to keep in mind —

Before starting the development, clearly define your goal. Think about how you would use the app, what specific features you need, and how you want your customers to interact with your business.

Next, you want to research your customers. Analyze the customer base and how likely they are to use the mobile app. Research shows that young users (13-24 years old) visit apps twice a day, while those over 45 prefer using the browser rather than an app. Most businesses seek users from a wide age range, starting from 25 to 65.

Once done with the above, now you want to define the strategy for the development of your app. You can develop it in two ways: one, you can use an off-the-shelf app builder and other you can hire developers to build your app from scratch.

There are several app builders in the market, which include AppMachine, BuildFire, GoodBarber, Shoutem, etc. These are great for people who have the time to learn and develop their apps with no coding involved. However, you may not find this to be the case. You may not have the time to learn and develop the app for your business, let alone its maintenance. In these cases, you can hire a software development company to build the app for you.

Now that you’ve gone through the factors you need to go through before going in for the development. Let’s jump into —

First of all, you need to define the business need that you’re trying to fulfill through the app.

At this point, you want to hire a reliable app development company. Most app development companies will also offer UX/UI services as well as product consultancy. So, you can hire them from the very start if you wish. The app development company usually includes project managers, UX/UI designers, app developers, and product consultants who will consider your vision and provide valuable suggestions.

At this stage, you want to decide on your app features. It’s crucial to integrate the right features into your app. You want to figure out the features that are necessary for your customers and incorporate UX thinking while choosing the features. Adding popular features may sound great, but unnecessary features may leave the users frustrated.

The first thing the user sees in your app is the way the app looks and how it interacts with them. So having good UX/UI is not a choice, it’s a necessity. The functionality of your app is useless if the user is not able to implement it in real life. Therefore, it’s a good idea to hire UX/UI designers to bring your ideas to a realistic realization.

Building a minimum viable product (MVP) is important to ensure the app meets its target market. MVP is the version of the app that has the earliest features of the app. You want to prioritize the feature that’s most important. At this stage, you want to test your idea through the MVP and attract early adopters.

It is inevitable to test your app. At this stage, you want to test everything from app features to content to user experience. Also, you want to have early adopters who will test and provide feedback on the app. Proper testing also helps to reduce costs as you are testing and pointing out problems and bugs beforehand.

After successfully finishing the beta testing, finally, now you want to launch commercially. At this stage, you want your app released in app stores such as the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, etc. But before launching it, you’re going to have to comply with Google and Apple developer guidelines and align the monetization strategy with their requirements.

The last step of the process is the post-release activity. At this stage, you wanna start the marketing activity. What’s the point of building an app if no one knows about it? To have people download and use your app, you want to spread the information. Market your app across the web through informative and attractive content.

Now that you know how to build your app in step by step process, let’s explore the types of mobile app development

People are by nature impatient. Most businesses want to dive in and start creating immediately without doing proper research and due diligence.

Taking the time to do proper research and finding the best platform and solution for your app development will save you months or even years of frustration because the app creation tool and the way you choose can make or break the success of your app.

User experience is one of the main success points of the success of your app. Sometimes, businesses get lost in development that they forget how the app will actually be used. Poor UI/UX is one of the main reasons behind app uninstalls. So, it’s pretty clear that if you don’t focus and invest enough in the UX/UI, you’ll pay the price in the long run.

Jumping right into the final product without making an MVP is another common mistake that businesses make. You will be able to test the app and evaluate its performance with an MVP. Now, not creating an MVP will cause a lack of adaptation and no user validation. Down the line, you’ll face problems that you could’ve figured out in the MVP stage, which will increase development costs, and your app may also face failure.

These days, apps are limitless. You can do about anything with apps. However, that doesn’t mean your app has to include every app feature and function available. Adding too many features will just set you up for a load of problems down the road. Even from the initial development point of view, it’ll increase development time and cost. Besides, adding more features will impact the size of your app.

Native apps are built for specific platforms such as iOS or Android, using the programming language for these platforms. So, if you want to build a native app and you want to launch it in both iOS and Android, you’d have to build two apps for each platform. Native apps have access to the device’s hardware, and they can provide the best user experience and performance.

People build native apps when they have high-performance requirements, custom UI for each platform, better app store visibility, monetization opportunities, and user loyalty and engagement.

Cross-platform apps are developed using a single-code database that can run on multiple platforms such as Android, iOS, and the web. Frameworks such as React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin make it easier to develop these cross-platform apps and provide a native-like experience.

People build cross-platform apps when they need to reach a broader audience and want consistent user experience, flexibility, and scalability.

In order to function on different platforms, hybrid apps are created utilizing web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that are then wrapped in a native container.

In comparison to native and web apps, hybrid apps are cost-effective. It can also access native device features like a camera, GPS, and contacts.

The progressive web app is a type that is designed to look and feel like native mobile. It is designed to provide a seamless user experience, fast loading time, offline functionality, etc.

It’s the best option when businesses want to eliminate the restrictions of app stores while increasing reach. As it’s a browser-based app it doesn’t comply with the regulations of app stores.