Mobile apps continue to play a definitive role in every walk of life. There are mobile apps for all kinds of purposes and user contexts, from mere entertainment to carrying out mission-critical tasks to value additions with useful tools.
As per Statista, the number of smartphone users worldwide now stands at 2.7 billion, and smartphone users spend a considerable portion of their time using mobile apps. Among the millions of apps, only a handful of apps are frequently and regularly used.
So, it is clear that most apps fail to become coveted and loved ones. Since there is too much competition and too many apps compete with one another in every niche, you need to ensure developing apps keep users in mind.
Regarding app development in India, no shortage of promising startups incorporated the best development practices to build winning app products. Many small businesses utilize mobile apps to outshine the competition, and a sophisticated user experience helps them achieve this success.
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Let us provide here some effective tips for building successful mobile apps.
Know Your Audience
The first and foremost principle is to know who is going to use your app. Only when you know your audience can you have a clear strategy to communicate your audience involving both content and strategic channels for communication.
To know your target audience better, go deeper into stats and insights, check out the present trends, communicate on the relevant forums, carry out surveys or polls, collect a lot of demographic data and data on user behavior.
Create a Value Proposition
Every app is a solution to one or several problems. Even a game app is to offer the kind of entertainment that its target audience is looking for. Identifying the takers and what you can give them are vital considerations.
Now, if the value offered by your app resembles the value provided by other apps, the app lacks a selling point. This is why your app either needs to offer better content or more advanced features or better user experience or ease of use, or it needs to offer a unique attribute that delights your users.
Use the Right Technology Stack
Now any app stands basically on the merit of its underlying technologies. The entire user experience, ease of use and sophistication depends heavily upon the chosen platform, backend and frontend frameworks, databases and other tools such as APIs.
You need to choose the type of technology stack depending upon the type of app, such as native, cross-platform, and hybrid.
Native apps are more stable and allow offering a more platform-specific user experience. But since native iOS and native Android apps need to be built separately, they involve a bigger budget and development time as well.
Cross-platform apps allow using the same code on multiple platforms and consequently involve less development time and cost. Some modern frameworks that allow bridging the gap with native UI help building cross-platform apps with native performance and user experience. Both Flutter and React Native is now popular for cross-platform development with native user experience.
Hybrid apps refer to websites packaged in native containers to allow users to access multiple device platforms. These apps are cheaper in development cost, but they lag behind the other two types in terms of performance, user experience, security vulnerabilities, etc.
Consider the Right Platforms, Devices, and Systems
A key consideration is to decide on the devices and operating system versions the app is likely to support. For this, you need to pick the OS version and the flagship devices based on their market share and popularity.
In case your app is going to support several versions of the OS system, it would result in more development efforts and corresponding time and cost. Naturally, the decision also impacts the budget.
Choose The Right Strategy for Monetization
At the end of the day, every app is a business, or it needs to work as a business entity and generate revenue. This is why monetization is something that you need to decide upon early in the planning stage. Many app projects rely on raising investment from the market even before the app enters into development.
To make your app earn revenue and to run your app like a successful business, you need to consider monetization avenues right at the planning stage. Some of the effective monetization strategies you can use include in-app ads, in-app purchases, fixed pricing for app download, subscription programs, etc.
Develop an MVP First
Instead of building a fully-fledged product, it is advisable to create a basic app with the most relevant features and UI attributes that define your app. This approach is widely known as Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Thanks to this approach, you can always keep your initial development cost low while remaining open to changes and value additions through subsequent updates.
When you roll out an MVP app equipped with basic features and functionalities, you can take feedback from the target audience and accordingly plan changes and value additions that can improve the user experience.
Give Importance to Testing
Finally, you need to ensure that everything worked fine and your app came out with the expected result. To ensure that the app performs without any glitches or works just fine on multiple devices or it offers the user experience as expected in different contexts, you need to make it pass through rigorous testing.
You can use both simulators and physical devices for carrying out testing. Simulators will save a lot of time when detecting the bugs. User testing is also important, and for this, it is better to rely on the actual user audience sampled by the QA team.
Conclusion
All the expert tips and tested and tried practices we mentioned so far in this most helped hundreds of apps to shape their app aspirations. It is important to orient every decision regarding your app’s design, development, and marketing with the user needs and have a thoroughly customer-centric strategy for your app project.
By Jamie Waltz
