Does it take any explanation that mobile apps practically rule our everyday life? No, apps have already become the most frequently accessed tools for everything we plan and do in our daily lives. Most of the futuristic innovations are now accommodated within the mobile app space and will continue to do so.
The number of app releases is increasing exponentially across all major platforms. Apps shaped an economy shimmering with growth. According to Statista, despite the disastrous Covid pandemic effect in the last couple of years, the app market revenue is expected to reach $437.80bn US Dollars at the end of this year. According to the same study, there will be a 6.58% yearly growth resulting in the projection of $565.00bn app revenue by 2026.
Despite this overwhelming growth story and awesome business prospects for app business, only a handful of apps make the most profits from this overwhelming growth of app revenues. A large number of them make enough or struggle to survive as a business. This is probably the reason why shaping app success may seem to be mysterious to you. But wait, here we will unveil this mystery and provide some time-tested tips to develop a successful app. Let’s start.
Evaluate and turn the idea into a burning problem
Like every new business willing to make their foray into the app business, you are also likely to have an app idea. Like most app ideas, you also hold the idea as a unique brainchild. It’s excellent. But if you want your idea to be the first stepping stone for your success, let’s learn to doubt our convictions and evaluate our ideas.
Every mobile app is built to resolve one or more than one problems.. The more burning or widely recognized the problem that your app addresses, the more it has the chance of getting immediate traction in the market. So, you need to evaluate the problem and the market demand of its respective app solution first. Does your app provide a unique solution to one user problem? This is something you need to evaluate first.
Know the competition & target audience
When you have evaluated and perfected the idea, it is essential to have a comprehensive idea about the user audience who are likely to find your app useful. Define the typical user characteristics along with their demographics, background, etc. Create a user persona that showcases the ideal personality attributes for the app user.
The next thing is to do extensive research on all the competitor apps addressing the same or similar user problems. Download the best competitor apps, find their respective strengths and weaknesses, and analyze how you can deliver a better solution than your competition.
Prepare a detailed Project Requirement Document
Now you have an in-depth idea of how the app will help users, who are going to find your app useful, and in what ways or with what app features you can outshine the competition. Now you need to write it down in a detailed document and get down to the requirements to build the app piece by piece.
A detailed project requirement document should start with the following things.
- The app idea and its key features
- How the app is going to work and become useful
- Who is going to be your target app users?
- The features and UX attributes that your app needs to edge out the competition
Based upon the observations mentioned above, the project requirement document should mention the following things in detail.
- Whether you are building a hybrid or cross-platform or native app
- What are the platforms you are targeting?
- Based upon the type of app and target platforms, the technology stack required for your app project.
- Based upon the target platform, feature set, technology stack, infrastructure requirements, the developer resources, and budget you need for the app project
- How do you plan to monetize the app, and reasons behind it?
- The deadline for the app development and intended release date
Find the right resources
Now, suppose you are from a non-technical background and lack in-house developer resources and infrastructure. In that case, you need to hire top app developers in-house and build fresh infrastructure. Normally, for a business with a little technical background, it is always feasible to outsource the development instead of hiring and maintaining a development team from scratch.
It is advisable to go slow and have a meticulous approach in hiring the right developer team with the right domain knowledge, technical expertise, project experience, and commitment to excel. When shortlisting leading developers worldwide, consider pricing only as of the last consideration when you have compared all other parameters.
Ensure balancing design between convention and trends
Now when it comes to UI/UX design, you need to learn from the world’s most successful apps. While many of these leading apps never failed to follow the latest design trends, they always resisted being pompous and useless.
How your app design will help users engage with the app more effortlessly remains the most important consideration. To ensure this, it is always advisable to balance the time-tested conventions and the emerging trends. Instead of reinventing the entire design wheel, you can just make useful value additions in the right context. For every design element, it is advisable to do A/B testing to reduce the risks of design errors.
Build an MVP app
Now, if you want to watch your steps towards successful app development and don’t want to take unnecessary risks, it is always advisable to embrace an incremental development approach. You can always build a simple app with elementary features that best define your app’s value proposition and, later on, can make further changes or feature additions through subsequent updates. This approach is popularly called Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Thanks to the MVP development approach, you can not only keep the initial development cost under control, but you can easily test the murky waters of a competitive market and, based upon user feedback, can come with necessary value additions through app updates.
Don’t back out from rigorous testing
Lastly, we must repeat the most common but most inevitable advice of subjecting the app to rigorous and multilayered testing processes. Finding coding errors and bugs is just the very basic aspect of app testing. You need to employ user testing both through emulators as well as real devices when possible and carry out rigorous performance testing covering stress resistance, compatibility issues, etc.
Summing It Up
So, the mystery of app development success that for long has intrigued you and threatened your ambitions can be dealt with just by following the footsteps of the successful apps. Here, we just tried to explain the elementary aspects that many app projects do not attend to, hence compromising their success potential.
