6 Important Stages In Mobile App Development Process

It is proved in many surveys that over a fourth of internet traffic is from mobile applications. Smartphone users rely a lot on mobile apps rather than other browser versions for their day to day requirements and mobile activities. Be it communication, entertainment, shopping and any others. So today, in this fast-growing digital era, every business enterprise needs to take their business more closely into the market via app development strategies. For this, they need to cultivate an outstanding and flawless mobile app development strategy and this is possible only by adopting a proper mobile app development process and following it thoroughly.

Here, we let you know in detail about the key stages in the mobile app development process.

1. Strategy

Not every idea can be cultivated into an app and not every app becomes successful though. It is important to have a proven strategy and follow it to yield your idea into an app that attracts users.  

A well-structured strategy involves a few questions to ask yourself. They include:

What is the app for?

Who are your target users?

Who are your competitors in the market? 

What is the best suitable mobile platform for your app?

With these in mind, you have the clear strategy of your budding app in mind and so, you could easily jump into the next level of the mobile application development process.

2. Analysis and Planning

This is where your app takes its original and final route map to turn out into a finished product. For this, you need to design a roadmap that constitutes the functional requirements for your app, the necessary use cases. When you have assessed and grouped the requirements for your app’s development including the target time, estimated cost of development and other resources, you have made it into the launch. 

The analysis includes which platforms your app is targeted onto. iOS, Android and Windows. If so, you need to deploy different app developers for different platforms to make sure your app is flawless. 

Planning here starts from your app’s name in the app store. Ensure that your app name is unique yet catchy, easily memorable by the users. Also, it should not contain any replicas or duplicate names in the app store. For doing so, you need to perform an app store research for making sure your app’s name is not already included.

3. UI and UX designing

This stage includes users’ adoption policies. For any app to sustain and succeed, it has to have a well-equipped and designed user interface. Seamless navigation, attractive user interface design can lure users to adopt the app. Whereas, UX- user experience design should be in such a way that it engages the users for a long time. A well-structured interface lets the users interact with the app and its features. And a flawless menu, error-free page experience decides whether your UX design has succeeded or failed. So, the more furnished and intuitive your app’s UI and UX designing are, the more is the success rate for it.

And workflows, wireframes, style guides and mockups. Let us see through these four designing elements. 

Workflow construction uses diagrams depicting the data outflow and inflow within the app. The workflow diagrams show how users interact with the app, what data does it collects and reflects. Overall, these represent the user interaction process and navigation within the app. 

Wireframes are nothing but the digital forms of app design sketches that the designers work with. How the app’s functionality would look like and the user experience is more concentrated in these work frames. 

Styleguide includes the type of font you zero in for your app. The colour palette, the size of the logo of your brand etc. Further, the type of style guide you adopt for your app should be device-specific – different for different mobile platforms. 

Mockups are another important part of your app’s development process. The style guide you have finalized for your app is applied to the wireframes designed prior. 

4. App Development This stage of app development is nothing but programming the app. It involves analyzing the technology, technical architecture, requirements and functionalities. The app programming typically includes three phases and they are explained in brief below.

a) Backend programming: Backend technology is nothing but server or database to support the functions of your app. To achieve the planned mobile functionalities you require the right database or in case there is an existing database it requires any modifications further. 

b) APIs: The communication system built between backend technology and the actual app. 

c) Front-end programming: To develop the front-end, the actual app it is, you need to finalise on a programming language which is different for different mobile platforms. iOS apps and android apps run using their respective technology stacks. Whereas a backend can be programmed using any web programming language and database as a choice. All that you need is the aptest choice made for your mobile app’s usage. 

5. Testing 

This stage in the mobile development process is crucial as much as designing and programming since it results in security, reliability and loyalty that your app gains. Quality assurance testing involves the usage of test cases by the testing team. To get the right mark without any flaws, your app needs to undergo the below testing methods.

a) User Experience Testing: The visual impression, interaction with the users, and the flow of navigation everything comes under the user experience. The final impression that a user has on the app is what relates to this testing. Right from the font styles to colour schemes and icons and their placements, the in-app functionalities should match the initial designs and mockups of your app. 

b) Functional Testing: An app’s functionalities are tested based on the scenarios of how an end-user is going to use the app. What bugs he may experience, what outputs are going to be mismatched and other functional features are tested basing mock users’ experiences. 

c) Performance Testing: Completely different from functional testing. It measures the speed of your app, its consumption of user’s phone memory, battery draining, internet connection and speed requirements. This may vary with the increase of decrease in the number of users. So, you need to test the app’s performance with as many users as possible. Finally, the app’s performance capability should be maximum.

d) Security testing: To ensure user data safety and security, the app’s development team needs to deploy a separate security assistance team. The login session timeout length, user credentials, data storage both in front-end and server should be monitored and secured to ensure there are not data leakages and vulnerability to hacks. 

e) Platform testing: Testing your final app on different mobile platforms and different mobile devices is as much important since we do see a new mobile device popping up from mobile giants every few months. Also, our mobile operating systems keep on updating frequently. So, to check whether the app can adapt to the new devices and updated mobile OS, it is needed to perform mobile device testing. 

6. Deployment

Once you are done with the testing methods and yielded good results, the next and final stage of a mobile app development process is to submit the app to the app stores – Apple app store and Google play store. But for this, you need to keep hold of some details regarding your app like – app title, description, purpose, keywords and icon. 

Once done with the data collection and submission, Google play store directly approves your app to be available on the app store regardless of the review process. Whereas your app to be available on the Apple app store, it needs to undergo a review process which may take from days to weeks. 

Once your app is available on the app store of the mobile platforms, you have to keep track of the user reviews, feedbacks, reported issues, etc., to improve any quality or functional related issues and bugs. This proves to increase the users’ loyalty and engage them with the app’s updates. However, an update of the app also needs to go through the same submission, review and acceptance process from the app store. So, keep updating your app with respect to the technological advancements and latest mobile devices.

All the best for your mobile app development.

Also read: 7 Top Reasons Why Mobile App Marketing Is Crucial

7 Top Reasons Why Mobile App Marketing Is Crucial

You are a shopping freak and image, hanging out with your friends around the city. And you suddenly bumped into a notification reading the best discount offers from a top online fashion store app. ‘Wow,’ you say and starts checking out their store to grab the offer. This is what the best mobile app marketing strategy means. In this case, the app designers have used your location permissions to promote their app. Today, almost every business has shifted from physical location to online stores accessible to the customers at their fingertips. 

To put it simply, mobile app developers have been cashing on the increased rate of app usage by the mobile users and yes, they have to in this digital era. Since the usage of mobile phones and tablets are ballooning day by day in recent times, thanks to the lockdown! There have been plenty of new mobile applications budding day by day in the app store. But of all, only some make space into the users’ mobile phones or tabs and of them, only a few sustain. This is what happens in the marketing strategy of mobile applications.

Not that a good and useful mobile app garners huge response all alone. A well-planned marketing strategy is a key factor that lures users and increases the app’s usage. Most of the mobile users would like to browse through the apps for their requirements rather than using mobile browsers for many reasons. This is the reason why mobile app developers concentrate and plan their app marketing strategies in the very first place – during the app development stage. 

So here, let us look into some key points ‘why mobile app marketing is much needed for your mobile app?’ 

1) Reaches users quickly in more than one way

App owners have the advantage of promoting their app through video ads, text messages, emails, location-enabled notifications and social media. This way they can reach out to uncountable smartphone users and grab their attention. 

2) Startups gain a lot

If you are a newbie to the business world and want to progress in the race of marketing your business, you have to make way for mobile app marketing as well besides concentrating on the digital marketing alone. It helps to widen your business. 

3) Increase mobile interface usage

Since smartphone users nowadays are more keen and interested towards accessing their favourite stores or doing their purchases from apps, the bounce rate of websites is ballooning for some whereas the installation number is going up for apps. This is why app marketing has its advantages. 

4) Texts or emails 

How often do you open your Gmail? Once a day or twice? How often do you find your notifications on the smartphone messaging app? Every hour, right? There you are! App marketing trend has chosen text push notifications to attract customer with exciting offers now and then. 

5) Less web navigation

As time is a crucial constraint in everyone’s lives, a decreased navigation time, increased browsing speed is the key factor for grabbing users. No matter how to speed the internet is, how easy is your web version, an app with great designing and quick navigation menu attracts the users to spend more time discovering your menu and offers. This is why you have to mention your app navigation speed as your plus point while marketing it. 

6) The best installation offers

Users get attracted to the welcome offers that many new apps in the store offer. This is one best marketing strategy to gain more users in the first step. To make them hold to your app is the next step.

7) Leveraging social media

This marketing strategy, though mentioned last is the top best one. You might have noticed numerable video ads you come across while watching your favourite show or movie online. The ad makers or the media platform allows the users to view at least 5 to 15 seconds of the ad to lure the viewers to know more about the new app or a new update/feature in the existing app. YouTube viewers notice this app marketing strategy a lot.

To give you further analysis of why it is more important to build the best mobile app marketing strategies for an app to sustain the competitive world, here is a survey statistics carried out by a firm. It claims that more than 90 per cent browsing time of the smartphone users is spent on apps. Be it entertainment, knowledge, gaming or communication, the point to be noted here is the target audience’s interested area is app compared to the mobile browser.

Also, you won’t believe us if we say there are more than 2 million apps in the google play store, apple app store individually besides the windows store and blackberry world. So, it is clear that developing an app and releasing it on the app store is not a challenge these days. But letting your app sustain the competitors, making way into the smartphones of users and staying long is crucial. And to achieve this your need the best marketing strategy considering the budget, your app’s purpose and users’ interest in your app’s features. 

To conclude, if you own a brand, a great logo for it, the best equipment and staff working for it are just not enough. Zeroing in on the right mobile app marketing strategy is highly required and implementing it on the target users is the smart move you have to make to bring success to your business. 

Ibase solutions For Creating Your Brand And Business

iBase Solutions is one of the country’s well-known news and media distribution platforms which takes pride in its team of experts in content development besides maintaining the distribution of formal corporate press releases, financial agreements in the business and trade sector, multimedia content to media and social networking platforms. Our key feature is that we maintain an end-to-end service provision in news distribution and multimedia content distribution along country-wide and around the globe on-demand as well. iBase Solutions is the best place for creating your Brand and Business.

ibase solutions India offers reliable and credible news distribution platform to help PR agencies, business owners and entrepreneurs, corporate and digital marketing professionals enable their content to reach the world at a cost-effective process. Simultaneously, we do collaborate with social media, digital media, and journalists and provide them with the most demanding, readable, and reliable news content.

ibase solutions mostly aim at connecting small business solutions like entrepreneurs to corporate professionals and vice versa with its news and content distribution services. We manage to distribute the news that can reach out to millions and can bring about a considerable change in stock markets, investors and customers as well. We connect PR professionals to digital marketing through our news distribution. No matter how small or big your business is, we make sure to take it to the top in the digital marketing space.

Why opt for ibase solutions for your article writing requirements?

We make sure to follow international standards in creating and distributing high-quality content without any compromise in its value and reach to our clients.

We own a professional team of content writing and generation that solely concentrates to deliver quality output. Our team excels in writing content to serve a wide range of industries and businesses according to their requirements.

Our writers and content developers can deliver reliable and quality content at a given time on any subject given.

Last but not the least, we make sure our content generation service does not cost you an arm and a leg. Our pricing plan is acceptable to almost by every range of clients for brand and Business.

How to make sense of branding and graphic designing?

While most of us especially the neophytes ones to the business world take branding and graphic designing as same, it is not that in real sense. They both have their importance and impact on the business era. The ones who understand this slight difference carefully and implement the idea right are not only smart business people but also the successful ones. The thing is to make note of the clear and sheer difference between graphic designing and branding.

Here we help you out..

Graphic designing, in simple, is the process of creating a visual impact of your brand on the consumers and competitors. It simply reflects the creation of logos, using the proper colour palette, the right typography and other visual material that represent your brand online or offline. Graphic designers play the key role here and it is in their hands to bring up an outstanding design format to make your brand visible, recognizable and relatable with the buyers. Graphic designing is always a part of your branding.

Coming to branding, it is the process of utilizing the graphic designs smartly and right, making sure that your staff or customer support are always at help and service towards the buyers, using company logos for vehicles and business cards, good maintenance of your company website and the likes. Simply put, branding is the key step to balloon your business’ reputation and garner consumers’ interest and trust for your brand.

Of course, both graphic designing and branding are key components of marketing your brand. But both are interlinked and forms a chain – a good graphic designing helps your process of branding to better, whereas, a great branding strategy helps to boost up your business reputation leaving a good impact on the target buyers.

Creating a good design with great colour combinations doesn’t grow your business alone. Rather using it the right way at the right places increases your brand’s recognition with consumers and gains new customers. If your designs and logos are not clearly visible or not properly conveyed as yours or related to your brand, it leads to confusion in customers letting them mistake it as something, not their choice!

So, to wind up with a simple conclusion, a good graphic designer with great working skills and experience can come with consumer-drawing designs for your brand. And branding is everything you do for your company’s growth.  At ibase solutions, we have the best graphic designers who can make your brand visibly stand out in the market.

Related  articles:

Five Impactful Stages In Brand Designing 

How To Create The Best Brand Identity?

Five Impactful Stages In Brand Designing  

When it comes to product purchasing, people always prefer to go for a familiar brand. And in this scenario, it is not that a marketing strategy works best always but there is another side to the coin – brand designing. Yes, the graphic designers play the part here. Every particular product, be it a clothing brand or another one, needs to withstand its competitors and should be easily perceived by the consumers besides attracting new eyes. To achieve so, a company needs to hire a skilled and best graphic designer.

How designing of a brand plays the key role?

Design is a key part of the term brand. It includes signs, logo, symbols, colour combinations, etc. The design of the brand must be like that the people or buyers should become used to choose it, relate to it and be accustomed to go for it. Branding and brand designing should involve graphic designers to study the market, observe the target customers’ taste and choice, following the company’s goals and motto.

To make it simpler we have framed some key stages for designers to adopt to come up with flawless and successful branding and brand designing. Here we go..

1. Study the brand’s principles and goals

The first thing a company needs to do after hiring a designer is to let them know their company’s manifesto. In short, the designers must be aware of what goals the company has set, on what principles the staff are working on so that they create an impact with their designing part.

Designing is an impressive visual representation of a brand that catches the customers’ eyes. But more importantly, the design part of a brand equally portrays the brand’s identity within its visual representation by including the brand’s goals and vision.

So, it is the designer’s responsibility to go ask for the exact requirement of their clients/brand to make an impact on their brand. And if the company has not set the final goals or principles yet or is in the process of amending some, no worries, they may do it in future.

2. Perform thorough research 

Analysing the market and users’ perception towards a new brand or a new product from an existing and established brand is utmost important. Catching the pulse of potential buyers, examining their reliability is a designer’s job once he is done with estimating the goals and assets of a brand.

The next step is to comprehend the peers and competitors of the brand in the market. This is crucial in deciding the success rate and reliability chances of the brand or its product.

3. Making an impactful logo

It is not that every logo is recognizable by the consumers and they believe what they see as new. Moreover, a logo is different from a brand although it is a crucial part of creating a brand identity.

A typical logo is the one that catches the attention, occupies the buyer’s mind, seeks trust and stays there for long. For instance, Apple, Addidas, etc.

Once the users get accustomed to the logo of a brand and notice its products are of great quality and durable, they stick on to that brand. So, make sure your logo is a visual representation of your brand provided it also reflects your brand’s goals and principles in brief.

Logo designing is a crucial creative process that is worth investing more time in it. Firstly, the designers need to analyze the market and the logos of competitors to put any similarities at bay. Then, they have to listen to the requirements of their clients including colour palette selection, font style, size and other aspects.

Note that logo designing plays a key role in branding. So, make sure you test the finalized logo on different surfaces (walls, posters, business cards) and in different sizes. This is to ensure your logo is creating an impact.

4. Creating Other Visually Catchy Elements

You would not believe us if we say other visual representations can let a brand reach close to more buyers other than a logo. Yes, a brand logo of course is the main visual remembrance when it comes to consumers’ recognition and reach. But there are mascots  (specially designed characters) that work wonders being the representation element of a brand other than a brand’s logo or within it.

Remember our favourite KFC and McDonald’s? Come on, not about the finger-licking taste of it. What comes next to your mind reading or hearing these brands? Yes, the popular old man – the owner of KFC – Colonel Harland David Sanders. The brief red and white sketch of the man beside with an apron and a bow is what a mascot is for KFC. Similarly, when it comes to McDonald’s, it is that friendly smiling clown we observe almost at McDonald’s store welcoming us. Thus, we have to agree that we unknowingly connect visually and memorably to a brand and its visual elements like mascots.

Other important visual representation includes typography. Brand designers can ask their clients for their interest in a particular brand or choose and finalise on one by self. A brand’s identity can be stamped in the minds of buyers with its typography to if it can be designed in an easily readable yet attractive style. Remember the famous red cursive font of coca cola? It is as simple as that. Companies can use a mix of font styles too for creating an impact.

5. Incorporate the corporate look and feel

Once the brand is done with its logo, mascots, if any, colour palette, typography and other visual attributes, it is the designer’s responsibility to work on integrating all these elements into a well-furnished corporate styled design. To ace that corporate look, there are some must-haves that companies should possess. Business cards, letterheads, billboards, banners, vehicle branding all these falls into this category.

For instance, if a company focuses on enhancing its brand identity, it should not overlook even minute key details like leaving its brand vehicles without having their brand identity elements painted on them. This is a good way of outdoor or mobile branding and marketing besides it also creates a good recognition within the consumers leaving an impact.

Other corporate style elements include company T-shirts or hats. Not that every company or brand can get their employees to wear uniforms representing the brand or its logo. Employees of some companies may have logos or brand identity elements printed on their T-shirts or hats. Even here, the designers have to show their skill set by getting the right size and clear font inked.

Besides acing all the above-addressed stages, the graphic designers hired by a brand also need to provide a style guide or a guide of instructions to their clients to assist them in utilizing the brand identity elements and colour palette in the right way. In simple, designers should assist a written document on what are the dos and don’ts of using the graphics or designs created for the brand. Anything done wrong or any kind of mishandling without this style guide can leave a flaw on the visual representation of your brand and the brand identity.

Keep browsing this tab for more helpful articles to boost your brand identity.

Related article:

How To Create The Best Brand Identity?