App Development: From Idea to First Sale
Best Practices and Lessons from the Past 7 Years
Today’s business world revolves around mobile technology. The number of smartphone users only continues to rise, and the growth has proven to be exponential. In this article, I’ll take you through planning, designing, and marketing an app to go from idea to your first sale and discuss some lessons I learned. This article assumes that you are the developer, but if you want to pass it on to developers, this guide also has some tips for you.
👨🏻💻 Why I personally like iOS development
📚 Ease of Learning
Many find iOS a much easier operating system to develop, especially with free or highly affordable resources such as Paul Hudson’s Hacking with Swift, Apple’s tutorials, and kavsoft’s awesome templates. I would recommend learning and utilizing those three in that order if you want to tackle development on your own.
- Paul Hudson provides incredibly easy-to-follow content for all types of coding levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. If you are starting with no background, Paul recommends you start with 100 Days of SwiftUI, then move on to 100 Days of Swift. A close friend of mine with little to no coding experience was able to get through the first 50 days of 100 Days of SwiftUI in about two weeks, and you can do it too. Best of all, they’re both free.
- After that, Apple’s free tutorials will be a breeze, but they are beneficial for learning some of the best design practices and human guidelines. If you come from a coding background, you could start here, and it would be a great place to get a quick advanced overview, but if you want to learn the ins and outs, 100 Days of SwiftUI and 100 Days of Swift are still the way to go.
- Lastly, kavsoft has some of the most innovative user interface templates that amaze me with their concise and clean code. Each template has its own YouTube video, and you can access the code bases by subscribing to their Patreon.
📊 Market Share
iOS is a solid place to start considering the operating system’s market share in its highest-paying countries, Japan, Australia, and the U.S. This chart from Statista, based on data collected from SensorTower, shows how much each person spends on average in the Apple App Store.
Below are stats provided by statcounter that display the iOS market share in these countries (in gray) compared to Android (in orange) and the rest of the operating systems, which are nowhere near adoption.
💡 How do you know if your idea is possible?
If you plan on building a mobile app, it’s a good idea first to consider what technology and reliable data you need to bring your idea to life. For example, let’s say you wanted to make an iOS app to help users track their daily intake of calories via scanned packaging bar codes and provide them with analytics comparing to the number of calories burned, assuming they have a tracking device like the Apple Watch. You would need data for many products, which seems almost impossible to complete. Luckily, after you do a Google search for “Food tracking API,” you find that fatsecretplatformAPI does precisely what you’re looking for. You can send a bar code number, and it sends you back nutritional data on the food. Perfect. (I have not checked the reliability of fatsecretplatformAPI, but at first glance, it is good enough for this example.) Next, we need the calorie data from the watch. After a few Google searches and browsing through Apple’s documentation, we can see that it is indeed possible.
🔎 Researching your Target Audience Market
After ensuring the tools you need exist, it’s time to start identifying your audience demographic, see what they are actively looking for, and research any competitors in the space. Acting on these details will help your app gain organic traction without you having to spend a dime on marketing. Every professional application should have an accompanying website. A handy and accessible tool for finding keyword or phrase search trends worldwide is Google Trends. You can then use the keywords you find to have high traction on your website. I use Wix or Webflow for all my websites because they make the SEO process simple and are easy to update without wasting a ton of time.
The more critical sector of tools for the app store is ASO Keyword trackers. These tools help you research keyword popularity and ranking difficulties on the app store when people search directly for terms related to your app. This is one of the best ways to find out what successful competitors are using to get their organic downloads and start putting together a list of your own that you monitor and improve over time so it’s ready by the time you’re prepared for release.
✨ Design
- What splash screen do you want users to see when they open your app?
- Will you have educational onboarding material?
- Do you need your users to sign in?
- What do you want your users to see immediately after being authenticated?
- What user workflows must be implemented to get yourself a minimum viable product (MVP)?
- What will the main views contain? What views will they link to?
My favorite tool is Figma, which allows you to create a live prototype of a fully functional app. You could also use Lucidchart if you prefer to make a simple wireframe to help outline the specifics of your app and then hand it off to a Figma developer. This sketch will become the blueprint of your application that you can then hand off to developers without worrying about any miscommunications.
🎬 In Conclusion
Thorough research, understanding your target audience, and impeccable design are paramount to ensuring your app’s success. As you embark on this journey, remember to leverage the tools and insights available, always keeping the end-user in mind. The world of iOS app development is vast and full of opportunities; with the right approach, your idea can transform into a successful venture.
Last but not least, your feedback and insights are invaluable. If this article resonated with you or sparked an idea, please share it in the comments below. Every clap, comment, and share supports my work and enriches our community’s dialogue. Let’s continue the conversation and keep “Cracking Swift” together! 👏📱💬
