How to launch an own mobile app?

19 Oct 2016

4 min read

There are over 4,000,000 apps available on the AppStore and the Google Play right now. Budget allocations for mobile apps for the enterprise are continuing to grow. According to the Business Insider report, 60% of businesses invested in mobile app development over the past 12-18 months and this trend is progressing. The question is: how to develop an own business app and made it successful?

Remember about one thing – the next reason to create a dedicated app is having a mobile presence on smartphones, tablets because they became the most common way to access the Internet and share information. Moreover, according to the study published by Deloitte, Americans check their devices 8 billion times a day, which means that the average person looks at a mobile device 46 times every day!

The first step is to create simple product / service definition while keeping in your mind your customer real needs. Depending on your business, sector, app purpose imagine whether you want to share news and build a relationship with B2B clients or maybe with Millennials? The purpose is one of the main factors which will take a great impact on how your app should look like, how it should work or which solutions need to be integrated into. There is a large variety of apps on the market and let’s be honest – limited memory in your client’s smartphones. Your solution must be truly valuable to download, yet profitable for your business.

Next step ahead is finding your technology partner who is perfectly fitted to your expectations. There are plenty to choose from, but there is a catch. You can hire freelance developers, but remember about their experience or its lack of. Probably they don’t have UX/UI skills nor they can’t create test scenarios for you. Maybe they have never worked on a business solution similar to yours. Sometimes in more complicated projects it is better to choose recommended software house with a separate design, development, QA, UX teams lead by devoted Project Manager – they surely help not to lose your mind. There are many others advantages like experienced team, business support, reusable components, agile project management tools, sprint planning and demo sessions, repeatable production process and finally – those can save a lot of your own money with high-quality app delivered on-time.

Companies find challenging and costly to develop mobile apps. They try to reduce costs by using platforms like PhoneGap, Appcelerator or Sencha which offers to create universal apps for both platforms iOS and Android. But – to be honest – shortcuts not always seem to be the best way. Years of experience showed us that building apps this way is even more expensive and there are definitely more problems, bugs and functional issues than in their built natively rivals. The mobile market is fragmented for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and others platforms with their own specification, guidelines, users habits.

Sprints, versions, releases, testing, how to survive it? It’s simple, just start working with the repeatable production process and MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It’s very important to set up milestones, deadlines, most important features in your app, dates of releases and meetings with a development team. If you try it, you will save your time, reduce doubts. Communication problems will be solved quickly as well. Ask your technology partner about software development process based on SCRUM along with tools like TeamCity or Applause.

The supplementary option is MVP which allows you to improve your solution with help of already built customers community – mobile app users. Learn more about MVP ( article Smart Home product).

Last but as we say even the first important factor for a successful app is work transparency and close cooperation. Creating new product sometimes takes weeks or even months. Take care of relationship with your partner or client, be honest, try to solve problems together. Of course, there might be more or less stressful week before the release but after presenting an app on the market just send feedback to your team and say „thank you, well done”. They’ll appreciate it for sure!