A Guide to iOS and Android App Development Lifecycle

The mobile app ecosystem is growing at a rapid rate generating high revenues and predicted to reach $80.6 billion by 2020. With 2.2 million apps in the iOS App Store and 2.8 million apps in the Play Store, creating high-quality apps coupled with solid marketing strategies is the only guarantee for success.

But, as the competition is touching sky high limit, the chances that you will be able to deliver a winner are extremely low unless you follow a documented app development process. The five steps of this process are as follows.

1. Idea

The core idea of app building isn’t enough to build an app which makes money or get an audience. The app development is done for large enough market yet is also specific enough to resonate with particular users. At the ideation stage, the following points are discovered.

Discovery and Market Research

To spend time on extensive research is more valuable than elaborating and extending design phase. Doing this at the very beginning can set you on firm footing and give you, your organization, and your investors’ confidence that your efforts are not going to be in vain.

Some guidelines for market research at this stage include:

• Choosing the niche: From the beginning, the app should target its audience.

• Target specific user types: To stack the deck in your favor, you could target one aspect of a micro niche.

• Solve a problem you encounter: If there is a problem, there’s an app for it. The key here is to approach the solution in a way that others haven’t so you can differentiate yourself from the competition.

• Use the app store for market intelligence: Google Play and iOS App Store are a market research goldmine.

• Search online: Check out the top funded projects. Go on Quora and look at the most followed questions. Trawl through Angel List and Product Hunt.

• Check Crunch base: Crunch base shows details about funding patterns of apps and startups.

• Use keywords: Google Trends for a particular keyword can give you insights on popular topics.

Establish app goals and objectives

Once you have validated your idea and understood your market, you can move on to establishing the goals and objectives of your app. Based on the data collected from the first phase, you should determine the unique selling points of your app that will differentiate it from other competitive apps. At this stage, it’s also useful to drill down and determine what results your users will get and the features your app will include. 

 

2. Design

Depending on your app budget and project scope, the design phase can be completed in a single afternoon or can take a team thousands of hours. Some of the steps in this phase include:

Wireframes and storyboarding

Start by describing how users will interact with your app in terms of different functions and screens. Also create user journeys, where you map out, in great detail, the user journeys across your app. Several questions are framed which will provide an insight while developing the app.

3. Development

As the development progresses, the app will go through a number of phases.

• In the alpha phase, the core functionality is present but not tested. The app is still extremely buggy, and noncore functionality doesn’t exist.

• In the beta phase, most of the proposed functionality is incorporated. At this stage, the app can be released to a select group of external users for more testing.

• After the bugs in the beta phase are fixed, the app will move to the release candidate phase where it’s ready for release.

During this stage, it’s imperative that you consider multiple factors like multitasking, form factor, device, and OS fragmentation. It’s pointless to incorporate features and functions into your app if they aren’t compatible with the vast majority of smartphones.

Developers must keep in mind the resource limitations on mobile and write code so that the app doesn’t put too much burden on the processor or memory.

We use Agile development methodologies during this process of the app development lifecycle.

4. Testing

iOS app development and android app development are sensitive and it’s a good idea to test as early and often. Doing this will keep final costs low. The farther in you go into the development cycle the costlier it becomes to fix bugs. The apps should be tested in every version. The UI/UX featured apps do well and are considered as the good apps.

5. Launch

The launch phase of the app development life cycle is critical to the success of your app. This phase should include:

• App Store Optimization: With 65% of users relying on app stores to search for new apps, improving the ranking of your app in the app store is critical. This post has a list of 24 tips you should follow to improve your app’s position in the iOS App Store. Follow this post for ranking higher in the Play Store.

• SEO: You will also need to rank for the keywords which describe your app. Optimizing your website is an important part of the launch process.

• Website or Landing Page: Even if you have a website, it’s important to create a website or a landing page specific to your app.

• Mailing list: Many apps have built anticipation before their launch and gotten high initial downloads by building a pre-launch email list. You should start off by building a beta list where you can invite users to be beta testers before the app is formally released.

• Paid ads: You may consider using Google, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to run ads.

• Public relations: PR and influencer marketing is also going to drive app downloads during the launch phase. A strong relationship with media and influencers must be established even before you start coding or designing your app. 

 

Conclusion

App development doesn’t really end at launch. As your app gets in the hands of users, feedback will pour in and you will need to incorporate that feedback in future versions of the app.