5 Things to Consider Before Building a Mobile App

1. Market Research

Most app entrepreneurs believe they have the next million dollar app idea that will disrupt their industry but in reality most of the new apps fail shortly after launch and lose money for their developers.

There are a couple of things to take info consideration to build a successful app.

• Are you solving a real problem?
• Are you making your users live easier?

To be able to answer these questions you need to make sure you did your research and identified some opportunity to tap into.

Although we have seen some apps hitting top charts by luck If you want a successful app, almost always you need to know your market and industry inside out. You need to know all your competition and know who your audience is.

Only with this research you can position yourself in your niche and determine how you can differentiate your app.

For example: Lets say you decided to build a messenger app, a quick research will point you towards Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. In this case your app needs to be incredibly well crafted or to have a revolutionary feature to be able to convince billions of Facebook Messenger users to switch to your app. Without research you could easily find yourself working on a project that is set for failure.

In-depth market research is the first important step to a successful app. You should invest time and money into research before writing any code.

2. Plan your app right

Did you planned out your app yet? Great ideas are not enough to build a successful app, you will need to have a solid plan in place.

• What are you trying to achieve with this app?
• What features and functionality do you want in your app?
• How do you want your app to look and feel?
• What about the user flow?
• Is it technically possible to build those features?

App planning is the second stage after market research on your app development journey. Before beginning any development work you need to have everything clear. You need to know your app flow and map everything out.

Good news is most mobile app development agencies can help you with the scooping stage. If you are not technical and if you never worked on an app project before this stage can be overwhelming. That’s why we advice you to work on planning stage with an expert.

Founder at Nown

“Before signing a contract, try to understand the fluidity that exists between designers and developers. There is no point in spending money on UI and UX if features in the SOW (scope of work) are not possible. It’s best if the designers work closely with the developers and understand any API limitations before they spend the time, energy, and resources designing something that, ultimately, can’t happen. If a company says they don’t do design and will outsource this part of the app development process, in my opinion this is a big ‘No No’.”

After all, getting your blueprints right will set you up for a smooth and successful app development process.

3. Freelancer vs Agencies

Working with a freelancer, especially if you are on a tight budget sounds tempting but software projects are always complex and a lot can go wrong if you are not experienced.

Anyone who hired a freelance software developer before knows finding a dependable, hardworking and competent freelancer is not an easy job and the market is full of unskilled developers.

We constantly receive calls from entrepreneurs who started their app projects with freelancers who couldn’t handle the project and messed up the code before disappearing.

Yes, Freelance developers charge less upfront, but you run the risk of receiving an optimal quality app or even worse nothing at all.

Working with established agencies, on the other hand, is a different story.

Agencies have a reputation to protect and they work hard to maintain happy clients.

Agencies charge higher up front costs but you hire a whole team in return (Graphic designers, web developers, app developers, backend developers, testers, project managers etc).

You sign contracts with agencies so there are guaranteed deliverables as per the initial terms and contracts.

Unlike freelancers agencies work continuously on your project, they don’t take vacations, get sick or loose interest in your project once a bigger project is contracted. You always get a dedicated team of professionals that you can contact directly and follow up with.

You also get a dedicated project manager and a tester to do the heavy lifting for you. You don’t need to manage all aspects of the project and test it continuously for bugs. Most of the time bugs are already taken care of before you test your build.

Agencies also have a lot of experience and worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs like you before so they can guide you on best practices and help you build your business from ground up.

If your budget doesn’t cover hiring an agency then you either should look for funding so you can build an app you can rely on and scale or take the risk and hire a freelancer for the job.

In our experience though hiring a freelancer always costs more then hiring an agency since almost always you will end up with a code that needs to be fixed or worse re-written from scratch.

4. iOS vs. Android

If you have a limited budget and you want to enter the market ASAP to see if your app idea is valid most app entrepreneurs try to make a decision between starting with iOS vs Android.

If you are one of them and If it’s still not clear which platform you want to build your app with, you should definitely do more research.

Never assume what your customer base might be using. If you are building an app for internal company use go out there and see what percentage of your employees are using iOS vs Android.

Don’t build an app assuming everyone owns an iOS device only to realize your user base is mostly Android users.

Let’s say your app is targeting College students, then you should start focusing your research on mobile usage amongst college students.

Or let’s say you are targeting a specific country with your app, you can do a similar study to go over some data to see what platform is more popular in that region.

You can also use Google Analytics data to help you out with your decision. Let’s say you already have a website or a web app and you already have a user-base, simply go over to Google Analytics and run a report to see what platform is more popular amongst your visitors.

if your app is targeting your clients then you could also survey your existing clientele to get an accurate picture of smart phone preference.

5. Budget

Budget is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to app development.

All appreneurs wants to have the best and most robust app possible but most don’t have the budget to build an exceptional app.

Building and maintaining complex apps are costly so without a proper budget entrepreneurs struggle to launch their product.

If you are having difficulty raising money to build a fully functional product you can always work on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) instead to test the market.

If you are low on budget but want to proceed with your project you can choose between two options;

– Building a web app instead of native mobile apps (iOS + Android)
 — Building a lean (simple, stripped down) version of your app with minimal features.

P.S: If you want to learn more about an MVP and how to test and validate your app idea you should read this article.

Building a Web App:

Web apps are the cheapest way to go. Instead of building two native apps (IOS and Android) you build one web based app with the exact same features and functionality. Web apps are browser based and work on all devices so there are no limitations on the hardware side.

Web apps are also a great option for those entrepreneurs who wants to validate and test their app idea before investing a big chunk of their money into an app users might not like.

Simply build your web app and start promoting. See if your users really like your idea and gather some early user feedback. If your idea really picks up and you start generating a lot of users then you can always look for funding by showing the existing user data or put your own money into building a mobile application.

Building a Lean Mobile App:

Wikipedia describes MVP as “A minimum viable product has just those core features that allow the product to be deployed and no more.”

“It is the sweet spot between products without the required features that fail immediately when shipped and products with more features which increase costs and risk in the case where the product fails, for example due to incorrect assumptions.”

So building a lean and simple version of your mobile app not only saves you money and reduces your risks but also allows you to test the market and get early user feedback before investing in a full product.