Developing a mobile app for Business Product

Is a mobile first strategy right for your product?

When you design for mobile first, you simplify your product’s core features and provide value to customers wherever they go. To succeed with a mobile first strategy, you must interview potential customers and define user personas to confirm that a mobile first design solves the core pain points your customers experience daily. Once you determine that a mobile first strategy is right for your product, focus on one core use case and table everything else for version two. Focus is key to the success of your mobile app.

For every mobile first success story like Uber, Whatsapp and Instagram there are thousands of mobile first product failures. Are you building a consumer app or a business app? Mobile first consumer apps and games are the most common success stories you read about in the news, but they’re hard to monetize if your users don’t return every day. Freemium and SaaS subscription models are proven monetization methods for mobile first business apps, but these products often require companion web applications for office workers to generate reports and assign tasks to users in the field.

How to hire a mobile app developer

Are you overwhelmed by the thousands of app developers on the market? Are you looking for a development partner who can design and develop an awesome app within your time and budgetary constraints? The most successful mobile apps are built by teams that work closely together, so find a mobile development company with the capabilities to design and develop your app from start to finish. In addition to helping you launch your app, an excellent full-service app development agency should help you define the core product features you customers need and guide you towards a product/market fit. Below are a few things you should consider when you evaluate mobile app developers.

Are you building a native or hybrid app?

Native Mobile App Development

We always recommend developing native iOS apps written in Swift and native Android apps written in Java because native mobile apps provide the best user experience.  

Advantages - Native apps are fast and can be optimized to work in areas with poor network connectivity. Gain access to all platform-level device, gesture and user interface (UI) features when you build native iOS and Android apps.

 Disadvantages - Because native apps need to be rewritten for each platform, you need to budget more for design and development. It’s common to stagger the development of your native iOS and Android apps, so the overall timeline for both platforms will be much longer than building a single hybrid app. 

Hybrid Mobile App Development 

When you need to launch your mobile product on multiple platforms and you don’t have the budget for native apps, we recommend building hybrid apps with PhoneGap or Ionic.

 Advantages - Save on development costs and get your product to market sooner when you build a hybrid mobile app. Hybrid app frameworks also reduce the number of codebases your development team needs to maintain, which saves you more money. 

Disadvantages - Hybrid apps are often much slower when compared to native mobile apps, which can cause your customers to use your competitor's products. When hybrid apps are optimized for performance and given offline capabilities, the amount of development time required to build your product increases significantly.

When you select a native or hybrid approach to your app’s development, you can eliminate a number of firms from your list. Some mobile development firms specialize in hybrid app development, others specialize in native app development and few are great at both. Focus on companies with expertise in the development approach you’ve selected. The rest of your decision making criteria should come down to tools, skills and processes.

Design Driven Development - Since native mobile app development takes longer than web development, you want your iOS and Android engineers to understand what they’re building before they write a single line of code. When you start with design, you clarify unknown and ambiguous requirements, so your developers don’t waste time building the wrong thing. Your designer should give your development team wireframes for every screen within your app, which acts as a visual spec, leaving little for your engineering team to interpret. Tools like InVision help your designer create clickable prototypes that clarify user flows and allow developers to ask questions about features.

Integrated Design and Development Team - To keep your mobile project on schedule, your app designer must work closely with your mobile developers. When they review design assets early and often, your developers advise your mobile designer how to implement the standard animations and UI design languages for each mobile platform. Experienced mobile developers expect design assets to be delivered in specific screen sizes and resolutions, so your designer may need to redraw assets if expectations aren’t set early. These are just a few reasons why communication between your mobile designers and developers is crucial to your project’s success.

Platform Independent Designs - Regardless of whether you’re launching on iOS, Android or both, you should follow Google’s Material Design Guidelines for Android and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS. When experienced Android users encounter an app ported from iOS to Android without adopting the correct design language, those users get annoyed and often delete the app. Apple’s App Store has its own strict requirements for store submissions and your app may be rejected for distribution if it doesn’t follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. The additional cost to create independent design assets for each platform pays off multiple times over in the form of user retention and growth.