Custom Mobile App Development: Everything to Know [2021]

Related: Seven Strategies on How to Get an App Made

9 Steps to Creating a Custom Mobile App

1. Marketing Matters

• How will my app be distributed to customers?
• What is my app's average client acquisition cost?
• What kind of marketing budget do I need to get started?

Companies frequently keep these questions unanswered during development. We encourage you to begin your app journey by answering them. Your app will fall to the bottom of the app stores if it doesn't have enough users.

That is why you must first determine what budget will provide you with early adopters. From a technological standpoint, starting with marketing makes sense. The integrations you'll need to support will be determined by how you promote your app.
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2. Get to Know Your Clients

After you've started your app marketing plan, you'll need to imagine your ideal user.

• Who are they?
• How often are they going to use the app?
• Is the USP of my app compelling enough?

These, as well as various other inquiries about your target market, will leave you with a lot of assumptions. It's therefore up to you to dispute all of these assumptions by asking people who fit your desired user profile.
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3. Create a Rapid Prototype

Now is the time to put your assumptions about how the app will benefit your target audience to the test. An interactive prototype, which customers can navigate through in a browser or on their mobile devices, is one of the initial steps toward custom mobile app development. A prototype for an app can be low-fidelity or high-fidelity.

Its goal is to ensure that you're continually providing an engaging experience for your users. There are several tools available to create a prototype and test it with your users. The idea behind these tools is that they allow you to keep your development budget while experimenting with UX.

It enables you to iterate based on feedback and get to market faster. It may also be used to persuade investors to pay attention.
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4. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

You're ready to move on from a prototype to constructing an MVP once you've validated the UX. Just enough features will be included in the MVP to warrant releasing the app into the open. The feedback you receive will help you improve your app even more.

The most common misunderstanding among new entrepreneurs is that they will achieve their business objectives because they have a brilliant idea. The truth is that becoming a successful app entrepreneur or provider of app solutions is less about having a fantastic idea and more about having a winning strategy and consistently executing on user feedback. This has long been a truism in the startup world.

What is our recommendation? Rather than overbuilding, get to market quickly with as few features as possible, test them with real users, and make modifications quickly depending on customer input. The most difficult phase is the uncertainty that follows when each entrepreneur must find out how to stay true to their idea while listening to people and changing the MVP into something they enjoy.

5. Make Your App Stand Out

Regardless of how many versions you go through, there will always be some basic characteristics that distinguish your app from others. There are several techniques to ensure that your software contains them. Successful apps always take advantage of the most recent iOS and Android features.

Supporting new features improves the user experience when users switch between system apps and your app. You can, for example, add a seek bar to an audio notification in Android 10 to control playback. The dark mode and access to system settings from within the app are also useful features.
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6. Decide on a Distribution Model

A different distribution approach will be used depending on whether you're making an app for the general public, internal use, or even just building a chatbot. You can either post an app to an app store or make it available as a download from your server after you've finished developing it.

When it comes to making your app available on an app store, one thing to keep in mind is ASO. The topic of app store optimization is vast. Let's just say that your app's visibility in the app stores is influenced by a number of factors, including screenshots and videos, as well as the app's description and keywords, icon, and name.

Related: Submitting Your App To the App Store

7. Pay Attention to Your Users

You must be prepared to manage reviews after the app is released and people begin to use it. It certainly helps if you integrated a user feedback SDK into the app during development.

These platforms assist you in responding to your consumers' complaints before they express them in app reviews. Setting up a knowledge base with one of these solutions can also give your users a better understanding of the app.

8. Understand Custom Mobile App Development Costs

The cost of app development, like the cost of ASO, is a worrisome topic. Let's look at what most people overlook when planning an app budget:

• Omission of a web admin app from the budget
• Maintenance costs that were underestimated on a yearly basis
• Quality assurance has been disregarded

Read more: Understanding App Development Costs

9. Follow Your Users

Have you observed anything in particular regarding popular apps? How do they get onto smartwatches, iPads, smart TVs, and other devices? This trend has become everyone's expectation these days: my app should follow me across all of my devices.

Consider the Apple ecosystem's Continuity feature: you can start a paper on an iPhone and finish it on a Mac or iPad.

Ready to Start Building Your Custom App?

What you've just read is a blueprint for avoiding the most common problems in mobile app development. When you start your app project, what should you expect? There are numerous nuances.

• Should we enable voice control to divert the user's focus away from the screen?
• For video calls, which SDK should we use?
• Should we make the user interface more senior-friendly?

Questions like these start to pile up quickly. Let's start answering them together right now.