Whether your company is part of providing services, or you are running a retail business, it is always beneficial for the company or business if you offer a mobile application with an easy-to-use interface for your customers to interact quickly and easily with you. Mobile Application is a new way of not just interacting with the customer but also connecting the customer with your brand, building network relationships, and making purchases.
Whatever your Mobile App goals being, you’ll surely want to make sure that all App functions are working properly, meeting the industry standards, and should have an overall great user experience. To develop a mobile app that adheres to the industry you must work with the team of mobile app developers that follows the Mobile App Development Life cycle regularly.
Mobile phone users prefer to use the company’s mobile app instead of using a website. The average mobile phone user spends more time with Apps rather than using the company’s website on the phone. Successful mobile apps development companies always work precisely and try to take advantage of the trend of the mobile development life cycle.
The iOS and android app development process span over the key six phases. In this article, we’ll focus on the key steps of understanding the mobile app development life cycle.
- Strategy
Mobile app development’s first phase is defining the strategy for successful app development. Evolving ideas and making strategies to make sure that the App produces the required results as per customer requirements. As each App’s objective will be different from each other, there is still the impact of the same strategy of development of the mobile app.
In this phase:
• Identify who your users are
• Select the target market and analyze competitors
• Establish App main objectives
• Select platform for App
2. Plan and analyze
In the second phase, your idea will start taking actual project shape. The analysis begins with the capturing of functional requirements and uses case definition.
After the identification of requirements, it is important to prioritize app requirements and make delivery milestones for each requirement.
Resources are the main concern, for example, iOS app development requires different development technology stacks. For example, if your goal is to build both IOS and Android Apps, your development team should include IOS and android developers.
3. UI/UX design
App designing’s basic purpose is to deliver an easy to use interface for the users. The easy-to-use interface is one of the key mobile app development services. The goal for UI/UX design is to create an excellent user experience making the app interactive and user-friendly.
The first step for mobile app designing is to determine what data your app will show to the user, which data it will collect, and user interaction within the app.
One way of sketching the design of the mobile app is the wireframes. Wireframes are mockups and they will give visual structure to the functional requirements of your app.
With wireframes, the priority is to be what the user thinks, which means focus on the aesthetics and not on color schemes and styles. It is a low-cost approach to designing app development. So, whether your app is IOS based or Android-based, wireframes give a device-specific and intuitive user experience.
After the wireframes, the next step is the style guide. A study guide provides the company’s navigation icons, text schema, color schema, company’s brand image in app design.
Study guides define the front-end layout and with the wireframes, you will be able to plan and analyze how the user will be going to interact and use functionality.
Every top mobile app development company first plans the development process, before the actual development starts. You will also have to define:
• What technical architecture are you going to use
• Which technology stack will be used in the project
• Defining and maintaining project development milestones
Any App development project is made of three integral parts: back-end, front-end, and API(s). The backend is the server database where the actual data will be stored. As you start making functionality, you will have to look at desired functionality and then design the backend platform according to it.
The front end is where the user interacts with your app. The front end must be interactive, and, in most cases, it can use API(S) for managing data. For backend development, any web programming language you can use. You have to choose each mobile OS platform. Android Apps can be built using Java and Kotlin, while the IOS apps can be built with Objective-C and Swift programming language.
There is more than one technology stack and programming language for building apps, the key to pick is the best that suits your app. The technology stack and the framework are chosen after the identification of what are you going to do, for example in continual improvement apps, you can use agile methodology. As each milestone completes, the module is passed through to testing.
5. Testing
Testing makes the apps stable, interactive, and secure. Quality assurance will make sure that the mobile app developer follows standards. The best phase of involving the QA team is in the design and analysis stage. Different tests at this stage will assess the functional requirements and make sure that the app fulfills user requirements.
Conclusion
Mobile development is a continual process that will be receiving user feedback after its launch. This article focuses on the app development life cycle for making sure that whatever the app functionality is, you must follow the standard defined procedure for mobile development. Following this mobile app development life cycle, you will be able to successfully launch your app as well.