11 Steps to Understanding the Mobile App Development Lifecycle

As soon as mobile applications were introduced to the market, they emerged as a breakthrough technology. Soon the developers from all over the world start to pour in a variety of apps from different domains. The competition rose to the extent that not only the mobile application industry made massive profits in a short period, but also countless mobile app development companies came into being.With the rise in the competition came the quality of mobile apps. App development companies seek ways to enhance the quality of apps that provide an exceptional user experience. To achieve this, the need to understand the mobile app development lifecycle arose. Without going into lengthy details, we have summed up the entire process into 10 easy steps. These steps enable developers to perform their job in an easy yet efficient and time-saving manner.

1)Discover the marketing potential

Before you develop an app, it is vital to consider the audience that’ll use it. In many scenarios, people start building an app without having thought of their marketing potential. As a result, the apps fail to accomplish the set business goals. Therefore, it is critical to take into consideration the audience of your app as well as its competitions. Furthermore, discovering the setbacks of fellow competitors can also help you avoid mistakes that might lead you to the ditch of failure.
Also, Stakeholders of apps must consider enhanced user engagement and unique functionalities for their apps that are not present in the already-existing apps. Hence, be sure to carry out brainstorming sessions to bring forth distinct ideas for your ap.

2)Devise an action plan

After carefully completing the discovery process, it is the rightmost time to think about your strategies. Stakeholders often skip this critical step and introduce their apps in the market, landing themselves into deep trouble. Therefore, to avoid this, it is essential to format a proper monetization strategy. Besides, a proper plan of developing and advertising the app in the market should be devised, keeping the project budget into consideration. This ensures that stakeholders do not run out of capital at any phase of the app development process.

3)Build a Prototype

One of the enormous mistakes developers make is ignoring the urgency to build prototypes. Prototypes play a significant role in the development phase of apps. They help communicate an app’s design that helps increase the efficiency of development. It provides a visualization of an app before it gets developed. Consequently, stakeholders, as well as developers, get an idea of all the possible setbacks the app could present. As a result, they take those ways into consideration that could help overcome the setbacks during the app development lifecycle
Prototyping is done with the help of several tools. These include various wireframes and designing tools like Sketch, InVision, wireframe.cc and Zeplin, etc.

4)Testing the Prototype

This phase is where the purpose of building a prototype get fulfilled. The prototype is released, open for constructive criticism. The developers pinpoint the improvements that can be made. Besides, they provide useful feedback that helps improve app performance. In this whole process, it is critical to get reviews from professionals who have good experience in the field of app development.

5)Designing

The fourth important step of the application development lifecycle is designing the app. It consists of two parts, UX and UI. UX is an abbreviation for User Experience. It determines the functionality and usability of an app, ensuring that it works fine without any errors. Wireframes assist in the process, making the app user-friendly and smooth running across different platforms.
UI or User Interface majorly deals with the graphics and colors of the app. This step enables developers to decide colors and devise an intriguing style for the app. Some of the favorite tools used by UI designers are Flinto, Adobe XD, and Figma, etc. To sum it up, UX is all about the ease with which an app can be used, and UI is how attractive an app is.

6)Developing the App

This step of the application development lifecycle consists of several steps. It includes the developers selecting databases, storage, APIs, and servers for handling the backend of the app. After this, the programming and coding phase begins where the developer selects efficient project management methods to make the phase time saving and cost-effective. The result of this step is a working mobile app.

7) Test Run

Test-runs constitute an essential part of the mobile app development lifecycle. To ensure the viability of an app, it must be released in the market. As a consequence, developers can get to know the flaws of the app and work towards improving its features. Furthermore, user feedback can also help a great deal in making the app better.

8)Pre-Release essentials

There are certain steps to take before you release an app. These steps are marketing tactics that create hype for a product. To do it effectively, it is mandatory to select a channel for your mobile app’s launch. After this, an essential part of this phase is Search engine optimization. What this means is optimizing the content of the app in such a way that it ranks in the search results of app stores. Often, app development companies tend to miss this essential step, hence landing themselves into the murkiness of early failure. Descriptions and short videos related to the guideline of using apps are also made, allowing users to use the app without any hassle.

9)Launching

Launching is the step every developer desperately waits for in the app development lifecyle. It marks the official release of the app in the app stores, ready to be installed by masses. Some apps might not do well with the number of downloads during the initial phase and might take some time to emerge as a successful one. On the other hand, some apps garner popularity immediately after their launch. This is mainly because of the uniqueness of the app idea or its intriguing UI experience.

9)Maintenance

App maintenance is a crucial phase and consumes significant resources. This step makes use of user feedback to enhance the functionality of the app. An app is never short of bugs; thus, some malfunctions do show up either soon after the launch or take some time. Therefore, this process allows developers to fix the bugs and problems people face. At the same time, the companies research better marketing of the app.

Conclusion

Though mobile application development may sound a difficult task to perform, if the process is divided into proper steps, it becomes easy. It might be challenging to follow the steps at first, but the results put forth after their execution make an effort worth it.