5 Phases of Mobile App Development Process You Should be aware

Every business is building its own mobile app to win the competitive race of the digital world. The mobile app development industry is at its boom, especially after the pandemic. But developing an application is not kid’s play. It takes lots of time and effort apart from having abundant development knowledge. So, if you need to develop a unique and profitable app for your business, you should know the 5 key phases involved in this process. Let’s have a look to know!

Phases of Mobile App Development Process

Breaking the mobile app development process into phases makes it easier for anyone to understand and execute this critical process very quickly and easily. Also, one can make timeframes to complete particular tasks and that can result in no more delays. The basic phases of the development process are discussed below:

Analyze and Plan

The very first step of building anything is the analysis phase and the strategy to make it possible. After understanding all the requirements of the business and the app owner, the development team will make a good strategy. This step seems to be easy but it is one of the foundational steps that define the success of your business.

Obviously, any business begins with an idea. And to convert this idea into reality you need a good execution of the plan. Before you start the planning process, you need to have a clear answer to these questions:

• Do you have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish?
• What are the needs of your application and how it will work?
• Have you collected all the necessary details of the application for the developer to understand the working of the project?
• Is your app idea solve the problem of the audience?
• How many competitors of your application are already in the market?
• Which type of app (native or hybrid app development) you are going to make and through which framework?

Once you will collect all the necessary answers and information regarding your app, choose the framework as per your budget and the end-users satisfaction.

UI/UX Design

The design of the app is one of the most important factors that will decide the liking factor of the application by the customers. This phase will decide how the user interface will look and how it will be designed. The user interface of any application should be user-friendly and offer a hassle-free user experience. This is the basic requirement of a digital user these days. They just want the application to run smoothly. The designing part of the application can be divided into these steps:

You should have a detailed workflow of the application that will help the development team to know about the user interactions with the app.

Create conceptual layouts called Wireframes to give you a visual look at the functional requirements of the application. Wireframes basically establish the flow of the app as they give interconnections between the elements of the visual design.

Make prototypes to offer you an earlier stage of testing the functionality of the app. You can replicate the workflow of the application via prototypes.

Once you have followed all these steps, it's time to do the development part of the project.

Development Part

It is considered to be the most active phase of the app project development cycle and the actual coding is done at this stage. The development phase follows an iterative approach where you can break this process down into small steps to achieve this effectively:

• Planning: Under this development sub-stage, all the objectives of the tasks and requirements are clearly defined. This depends purely on the developer to decide where new code has to be done or to re-use the existing code. It is good practice to have an idea of the time frame of this step, so as to take further decisions.

• Developing: This is one of the most important stages of the whole development process. This involves the development of the front-end, back-end, and APIs. The front-end is the interface for the users to operate the app and the operations of the app are done at the back-end which includes the server-side and the database. API (Application Programming Interface) enables the application to communicate with other applications. API is basically like a code that gives access to the server.

It is always advisable to understand the features and the basic goals of the application before starting to develop the application. Each sub-stage of this part should be sent for review and testing. That’s why the next phase comes into play.

Test and Debug

Testing the application is a very important phase as it will decide the correct working of the app. If the platform will have bugs and they are not clearly identified, then it will surely affect the app’s working. Detailed quality assurance should be performed to check the reliability and usefulness of the application. Any software after the development phase should go through different kinds of testing, given as:

• Functional Testing
• Security Testing
• Performance Testing
• User-Experience Testing

After performing thorough testing of the application, bugs and errors should be fixed. This will definitely help to reduce the further problems that a customer may face. Skipping this phase can be a big failure for your app.

Deploy and Maintain

After developing and testing the application thoroughly, it’s time to market your app. But you should do a proper review session before making the app public. You can deploy your app in two ways basically:

• You can deploy your tested APIs in the production environment.
• You can deploy your app in the Play Store or Apple Store directly for the users. But make sure to check the proper configuration and information of the application before making it public. You have to submit some basic information like the name of the app, its description, keywords, privacy policy, etc.

After deploying the app, you should check it regularly and collect the user’s feedback to make further improvements. If there is any error or bug-related issue, you should fix it as soon as possible. And don’t forget to regularly update the app.

Final Words: Enjoy the Launch of your Mobile App

You may find developing a mobile app a bit tricky, but with the correct steps and development partner, you can easily turn your idea into reality. You should make a good decision while selecting the development model to be followed. If you will properly follow the phases in the proper manner, your app can be a big success in the market.

And remember, an app launch in the market is not the end of the development process. You should work on the customer’s feedback and regularly launch new versions.