How I Made My First App
Note: This is a walk-through of my experience creating my first app. My goal is to show you how you can make an app as well and also show you what I learned during the process of developing the app. The app is called Filter Your News and allows you to have a personal news feed that is based on search terms that you’ve defined. Download it here, it’s free.
It seems like everyone wants to learn how to make an app these days, but few will follow through and do it. After reading this, I hope you are motivated to get off the sidelines and launch something.
How to Make an App
Step 1: The idea
The first thing to do before making an app is to come up with an idea for the app. The most important thing is to think about a problem you have and that others would potentially have, and then determine a way to solve that problem. So in my case, I was reading the news and were scrolling through page after page and realized that so many of the articles were not interesting to me. I searched for an app to solve the problem, but I didn’t find one that was easy to use and had all the features I would like.
The most important thing when choosing an idea is that it should solve a problem that you have because then that will give you the motivation to continue working on the app even when you don’t feel like it. Because even if no-one else would download it, it would still be helpful for you.
Step 2: Building the app
I chose to build the app with Flutter, mostly because I saw Kalle Hallden (my favorite Youtuber) use it. It was a really good choice because it’s easy to learn due to the superb documentation, and also because you can build whatever layouts you want with ease.
And so I started programming it, in the beginning, it was a bit of a struggle because I had never used Flutter before, but after a week or so I started getting the hang of it and became more proficient. After 2–3 months I was finally done after what felt like tens of thousands of errors and endless bugs. I was so happy!
Step 3: Publishing the app
Before I published the app, I let a friend use it and give feedback so the app would be perfect from launch. After doing that I tweaked some things. Now it was time to publish the app. I was going to publish it on the iOS app store and Androids google play store, but unfortunately, it’s a one time fee of 25$ to publish it and also an additional 99$ a year to have an app on the iOS app store, so I settled for the google play store which only has the one time cost of 25$. The process of publishing the app wasn’t that hard, but I put some time aside to perfect the app icon, the app screenshots, and the app description because they must be on point, that’s what people will see when deciding if they’re going to download the app. The description is also super important for ASO (App Store Optimization).
Conclusion
- The app should solve a pain point
- Choose what programming language or framework you’re going to use
- Persistence, it will take time
- Awesome app icon, screenshots, and description
