Five Tips for Outsourcing Your Mobile Application Development
With the widespread adoption of Smartphones, tables and other high-connectivity mobile devices, offering your services through a mobile application is no longer considered something that’s nice to have, but rather something that is expected by most customers. The rich user experience expected from such applications made media and advertising agencies quickly integrate iPhone apps development in their portfolio of services, but this is now too important a component of your services delivery platform to treat it like an afterthought. So you shouldn’t outsource it to anyone who claims they can do mobile application development!
Here are five great tips to ensure the development of your iPhone or Android app is in good hands:
- Check Previously Developed Applications
The quality and complexity of other applications in the App-store are a good indication of the skills of an iPhone apps development team. Download the app and play with it a little — don’t trust reviews, as a few ratings can be easily bought. If the application feels slow for what it should do, crashes unexpectedly or have an inconsistent design, you might want to consider another partner.
- Ask About Version Control and Issue Tracking
Never work with a company or consultant that does not use version control and issue tracking. Version control is a technology used by developers to track and integrate changes to their code. Not using it lets a lot of mistakes slip in and makes collaboration difficult and slow. Issue trackers are essentially backlogs of problems and potential improvements; this is a web portal to which you can even ask for read-only, per-project access.
- Think Early About the Platforms You Want to Deploy On
Mobile devices like Smartphones and tablets and computing devices such as laptops and desktops have very different software development requirements and procedures. Web-based applications can cut some corners, but they come with various trade-offs. Indicate what platforms you want to target so that you can get an idea about them from your contractor. iPhone apps development takes a very different course once you factor in other platforms.
- Consider Long Term Support
Both Apple and Google, the major players in the mobile devices market, publish updates to their operating systems fairly often. Applications will typically need to be updated, too, in order to account for these updates: sometimes just because an update allows developers to make the application do certain things faster or more reliably, but sometimes because, unless updated, the application will not look as expected or simply not run at all. Consider this matter when drafting contracts.
- Commit to Important Decisions
iPhone apps development is typically done in an agile fashion, but changing requirements often means the application itself will be designed so as to accommodate frequent changes rather than stable, steady improvement. Ask for mock-ups and sketches, but try to commit to design decisions that your contractor flags as being important; changing your mind about it later is likely to be costly for your users, because hastily-patched applications show their patchiness.
