What You Should and Shouldn’t Do Before Developing Your Mobile iOS App
Posted by Davzo Inc
Posted in Business
Drawing on our solid experience in developing mobile apps, we can say that the choices that our customers make before the actual development stage of their app can have a major impact on the final product. App development has become somewhat of a deep sea dive for many small and medium-sized businesses, an adventure fraught with dangers. We believe that building a competitive app should be a wonderful journey of self-discovery for every company, not a chore. For this reason, we would like to use our insight into the app development process to guide you through it. Here is a set of practices that can empower you to build a better mobile app.
Things You Should Do
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Figure out exactly what your app does. Ask yourself “What is the app I want to develop supposed to do?” If you can’t sum up your app in 100 words or less, you may not yet have a clear enough direction for its development.
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Focus on solving a specific problem for a specific audience. There are millions of apps out there, but relatively few of them manage to solve a problem than any number of mobile users are facing. If there is a secret to developing a successful app, then it is this – make sure it helps other do something they have to do faster and better. Don’t think that just because you’re being specific you’re narrowing down your audience. Your app needs that kind of focus to survive in today’s highly competitive mobile environment.
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Discuss your app with relevant people. Keeping your app hush-hush before development actually begins won’t benefit anyone, and much less yourself. Talk about your app to people who are facing the problem that your app is trying to solve and see what they make of it. Also, speak about it to your mobile-friendly friends. You certainly don’t want to speak about your app only to web developers or technical people. User feedback during the concept/development stages helps you create a more powerful and more engaging app.
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Market your app online. You can blog about it, create a landing page or separate website on your business domain especially for it, and share the news about it on social media. Not only is this cheaper than other mobile app marketing, but it spares you the hassle of working with a marketing agency.
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Learn more about your competitors. Try out their apps and see what they are made of. Think how you could improve the concept they have been built on. Your competitors may inspire you to create a more streamlined and at the same time more powerful application. More than that, they can form a market and a demand around the kind of app you’re building, which is a fine thing to have.
Things You Shouldn’t Do
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Don’t hire a marketing agency. Marketing agencies don’t usually have the in-house staff necessary to build a good-quality app for you, so they outsource the project. The result is usually a low-quality, out of focus app that sounds promising only until your customers download it and start using it.
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Don’t hire a graphic design services provider. For an app, and especially at the beginning, the user experience is far more important than the design itself. At this stage, the user experience captures the user interaction with the app in a way that graphic design alone cannot.
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Don’t invest more than 1% of your app development budget into the app logo. A logo is, at the end of the day, just a logo, and the app with the better functionality and user experience will always beat the one with only fancy graphics.
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Don’t be keen on giving your app a very custom look. While your app should be flavored with your company’s vision, in the beginning at least this is best done discreetly, with an unobtrusive logo. Leave a major app branding update to 2 years after app development; in this way, you don’t have to rework your app design after every update.
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Don’t build for all platforms. If you have a limited mobile app development budget, it’s better to build a great app on one platform than two or more so-and-so apps on multiple operating systems. Use analytics and geotagging to find out what platform most of your audience is using and build your app on that. Essentially, your choice boils down to Android or iOS. Think things through, and remember that later on, after your app is out there, you can branch out to new platforms naturally.
We Can Help You Develop Your Mobile App
Building an app is a challenge for any company, whether the audience is 100 or 10,000. The quality of the execution will be reflected in the final product. We fully understand this, which is why are resolved to crafting mobile apps that are as striking as unique hand-made products. We breathe life into your app. Contact us to learn more.
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