Mobile App Development – Building Your First App
Building a mobile application can be a challenging experience. You may have a great idea for an application, but you may not know anything about designing and building an app. There are number of things you need to consider before building an app. Here is a step by step guide on building a professional mobile app.
Define the Purpose
You have a great idea for an app but before that you need to define its purpose or what problem area it addresses. Defining the mission and purpose of the app will help in achieving your goal faster.
Design the layout
Once the goal is defined, you can start with the design and layout of the application. For you draw sketches on a paper or make PowerPoint slides to see how each screen will look.
Sketching helps to define the features of the app and if you are hiring a mobile application development team then it is easy for the developers to understand the application and its functionalities.
Research and Feedback
There are so many apps developed every day that there are chances someone has already built the app. However there is no need to get discouraged if similar apps are already there. You can focus on the salient features of your own application and learn and improve on the shortcomings of other applications.
Also once you have the basic idea and the design layout ready it is important to get feedback from experts in that field. It is also a great idea to see the technical feasibility of the application.
While doing all this research you also need to consider how the app is going to generate money. Whether it is going to a free download or whether you will be charging for every download or you will have ads running within your app – these some of the points you need to consider.
Create a Prototype
Once you have figured out your application’s technical details it is time to create a prototype to get a clearer picture. This is just a mockup of the app. It may not have all the functionality in place, just the screens and navigation between the screens. You can use placeholders for graphics and buttons to navigate within the screen layouts.
Define the database
Once the design, layout and basic wireframe of the application is ready it is time to consider the backend of the application. Selecting the database is very important as it will store all the data for your app and you may have to make some modifications to your layout based on any restrictions from the database. You can hire mobile app developers if required to do this research for you.
Before starting coding of the mobile app, it is a good practice to develop the backend first. This becomes the foundation where you will set up the servers and plan your storage.
Developing Code and Testing
Once the backend is ready, you can start with development of the code. You may have to make slight changes to the design if required. It is absolutely alright to make refinements to application.
Test the application and collect all the feedback. You may need to make further changes to the code based on the feedback. There are a number of platforms available to test Android as well as iOS apps.
This is the last step in your app development. You can test it till you are satisfied with the results and finally upload it to the Android and iOS platforms for users to access.
