Each day thousands of mobile apps are published to the Google Play and Apple App Stores. Some of these mobile apps are games, others are social networks, and many are e-commerce apps. All of these apps, if professionally built, should follow a similar mobile app development process. At ONECALL Business Solutions, we have built over 100 web and mobile apps and in this course, I will outline the strategy, design, and development processes we follow.
Each app is different and our methodologies are always evolving, but this is a fairly standard process when developing mobile apps. This mobile app development process typically includes idea, strategy, design, development, deployment, and post-launch phases.
Learn the Value of a Systematic Design & Development Approach
Learn the Industry Standard Methodologies to Approach App Design and Development
Learn the 10 Key Stages in your App Development Process and The Best Practices to Approach Them
Identify which tools can be used at which stage of the development process and understand its significance
Learn about Idea Validation and Why it is Important
Understanding User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Design Principles
Learn about Development Sprints and Iterative Development Process
Detailed Course Curriculum:
Introduction
The Idea & Strategy Stage
The Marketing and MVP (Road Map) Stage
The User-Experience Design Stage
The User-Interface Design Stage
The Development & Iteration Stage
The Review Stage
The Deployment Stage
Further Iteration and Improvement Stage
Conclusion
Get Access to a Plethora of Resource and Bonuses:
Profitable App Development Blueprint for Startups (Complete Presentation).pdf
The Profitable App Development Blueprint E-Book.pdf
List of Angel Investors and VCs in India.xlsx
Financial Projections Sample – Series A Financials Lean 2M USD final.xlsx
List of Incubators (India).xlsx
Ad Pushup Pitch Deck.pdf
Bliss Pitch Deck.pdf
Buffer Pitch Deck.pdf
Castle Deck Pitch Deck.pdf
MDS Sample Deck.pptx
MixPanel.pdf
Ratan Tata’s Pitch Deck Template.pdf
Square-Deck.pdf
Contact List of USA Venture Capital & Private Equity Firms-VC.csv
Contact List of EU Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms (Over 800 Firms).csv
Contact List_Canada – Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms (Over 100 Firms).csv
Contact List_VC – Middle East.csv
Enroll Now and I look forward to seeing you on the inside. Cheers!
Style guides
Style guides are basically the building blocks of your app’s design. Having a sound style guide will help tremendously with your app’s usability. You don’t want your call to action button on one screen to be at the bottom and blue, but green and in the header on another screen. By having a consistent design language, users are more likely to be comfortable within your app.
There is a lot that goes into determining an app’s style guide. You need to consider who you are and who your customers will be. Is your app going to be used at night? Then maybe a dark theme will work best, as to not blind your users. Will it be used mostly by busy employees? Try to keep clutter to a minimum and get your main point across. An experienced designer or design team has a wide range of output and can deliver an app that is a great fit for you and your customers. The output of this phase is a set of colors, fonts, and widgets (buttons, forms, labels, etc.) that will be drawn from in the design of your app.
Rendered designs
Rendered design is the process of taking your wireframes and replacing the grayscale elements with elements from your style guide. There should be a rendered screen for each wireframe screen. Try to stay true to your style guide in this process, but you don’t have to be dogmatic about it. If you find yourself wanting a new or changed style, feel free to update or amend your style guides. Just make sure your design is consistent when this stage is complete.
Tools we use: Whiteboards, Pencil & paper, and Sketch
Rendered Click-through models
Once you have all your screens rendered, return to your click-through model application and test your app again. This is the step in the mobile app development process where you really want to take your time. Although a considerable amount of effort has already gone into the app, after this point changes can become increasingly costly. Think of this as reviewing a floor plan before your home’s concrete is poured. Fortunately, mobile app development is a bit more adaptive than construction, but thinking of it in these terms can be the most cost-effective.
Tools we use: Invision
After having put in so much effort into the form and function of your app, it is imperative that this vision is properly realized by your development team. It always amazes me how often this step in the mobile app development process goes poorly. Perhaps this is due to many organizations and agencies only providing design or development services or the sometimes combative relationship between designers and developers. Whatever the reason, I highly recommend finding a team that can provide both design and development services and can properly handle this step in the process.
Part of what helps ensure a smooth transition and exact implementation is the proper use of the available tools. We like using an application called Zeplin, which helps developers quickly grab style guides for the design. But, this is not foolproof. Zeppelin is a great tool, but sometimes its guides are not exact or not the best implementation (it can use explicit dimensions, rather than dynamic ones for example). In those situations, it is immensely beneficial if your developers can also use design applications (such as Sketch or Photoshop). The important thing here is that your team does not simply best guess at dimensions, hex values (colors), and positioning. Your design team put in tremendous effort to ensure things were properly aligned and positioned. Your development team’s goal should always be a pixel-perfect implementation.
Tools we use: Zeplin
High-level Technical Design (Tech Stack)
There are numerous approaches, technologies, and programming languages that can be used to build a mobile app. Each with its own strengths and shortcomings. Some might be cheaper to use, but are less performant, whereas others might take longer to implement and be overkill. The worst possibility is building on a dying or unreliable technology stack. If you make this mistake, you might have to rebuild your app or pay a premium for developers moving forward. That is why having a trusted development partner that is seasoned in making these decisions is vital in this process.
Front-end (the mobile app)
For front-end development, there are basically 3 approaches. They are platform-specific native, cross-platform native, and hybrid. Here is a brief overview of each approach and some articles that delve into each with greater details.
Platform-specific Native - Apps built with this approach are written separately for each mobile platform. The code can’t be reused between Android and iOS, but these apps can be fully optimized for each platform. The UI can look entirely native (so it will fit in with the OS) and the app should work fluidly. This is often the most expensive approach but is very tried and tested.
Cross-platform Native - Apps built with this approach have some (or entirely shared) code but still, run natively. Common technologies used for this are React Native, Xamarin, and Native Script. This is a nice middle ground between the various approaches in that it is more cost-effective, but can still be optimized and styled for each platform.
Hybrid - Hybrid apps are built using web technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and are installed via a native wrapper. This can be done using technologies such as Cordova, Phone Gap, and Ionic. This option can be the cheapest, but also presents some very real difficulties.
Back-end (Web API & Server)
The server is responsible for much of your app’s performance and scalability. The technologies used here are similar to those used to power web-based applications. Here are a few things you have to decide before writing code:
Language - There are dozens of languages that can be used to build your API. Common languages used are Java, C#, Go-lang, javascript, PHP, and Python. Most languages also have numerous frameworks that can be utilized.
Database - There are two main types of modern databases. SQL and noSQL. SQL is more traditional and the best choice in almost all cases. Common SQL implementations include MSSQL, MYSQL, and PostgreSQL. In addition to selecting a database engine, you have to design your particular database schema. Having reliable and well-organized data is crucial to your long term success. So, make sure this is well thought out.
Hosting Environment (Infrastructure) - In this step, you need to decide where and how your API and database will be hosted. Decisions made here will help determine the hosting costs, scalability, performance, and reliability of your application. Common hosting providers include Amazon AWS and Rackspace. Beyond picking a provider, you need to plan how your system will scale as your user base grows. Cloud-based solutions allow you to pay for resources as a utility and scale up and down as needed. They also help with database backups, server uptime, and operating system updates.