A Guide to Mobile App Development Life-Cycle Phases
According to the research made on the revenue generated from app stores, experts shared their views and mentioned that by 2020, the revenue figure would reach almost $80.5 billion.
Play Store has almost 2.8 million apps and the iOS App Store has almost 2.2 million apps. This huge affluence of apps depicts one thing for sure and it is the ‘competition’ in the market.
To survive successfully in today’s vying market, you need to make sure that you don’t waste any valuable resource along with valuable time. Read on to get an overall idea on the different mobile application development phases to get the most fruitful outcome of this development process.
Pre-Planning
See, it is not like one fine day, a brilliant idea comes into your mind and from the very next moment, you start executing it! In reality, you need to do a lot of research, a lot of market analysis, need to ask yourself a lot of questions before proceeding further with your idea.
You need to understand why you should build this app, what the main aim it, how it can benefit the users, how it is different from its competitors and more importantly, how this app can help you to enhance your business prospects!
Everything mentioned above, are under this pre-planning stage that is equally crucial as building an application.
Mental Prototyping
Even before the technical part kicks in, there is too much mental work! How? Well, jot down everything on pen and paper. At the pre-planning phase, you should have a basic idea of the total development cost. However, at this stage, add every detail that comes to your mind, write it down, keep a note. This documentation will help you to keep a close check on the different overhead expenses.
You may consult with a designer at this stage. The idea will definitely be yours but consulting an expert means you will get more stunning, more flexible, more dynamic and interactive design that will help in your development phase.
Technical Part
You need to understand that the backend functionalities and the design are completely distinct things but they need to work in a synchronised way. Above all, you can’t compromise with the quality. However, making decision on which platform to choose is a bit confusing. Every platform has unique features, their own set of benefits. So, depending on different aspects such as available resources, skills, target audience, features you want to include in the app etc., choose a mobile app development platform.
Prototype Building
A prototype will help you to get an overall idea or a well-defined preview of the application you are developing. Obviously, you cannot get every features and functionality in it but it will help you to optimise the design. You can easily spot the loopholes and make the necessary changes from the beginning that will save a lot of the total development cost.
Designing and Development
It is always advisable to seek guidance of experts in these two phases. Partnering with a well-established mobile app development company will help you to get better insights on the UI/UX that is important for grabbing the users’ attention. The designing phase gives the visual directions along with the blueprints that help to give shape to the final product.
Next, the development phase should follow agile method. Make your application unique, flexible and functional at this stage using cutting-edge technologies.
Testing
This phase comes just after the development stage. It helps you to check the app functionality, environment, features, navigation, debugging and whatnot. Both UAT testing and Beta testing are important for providing your users with an impressive user experience.
App Launching
Once you are over with all the above-mentioned stages, you are all set to launch your application. You need to give it to the app stores and wait for their approval. However, once your app gets the approval and goes live, your work does not end! You need to work on the regular updates along with addition of new features.
So, this is a basic outline of the different stages of building a mobile app.
