How to build an MVP for Your Consumer-Focused Mobile App in 3 Steps

As smartphones become increasingly powerful the consumer-focused mobile apps market continues to grow each year. The expansion of the industry has brought with it an ever-growing amount of options available for building mobile applications quickly and efficiently.

This also means that it’s getting more and more challenging to compete in the market and stay ahead of the game.

To successfully build a minimum viable product (MVP) for your consumer mobile app and stay ahead of the game, you will need the following:

• A reliable mobile app development partner
• A set of properly prepared specifications
• An understanding of what technology approach is best suited for your mobile application

This article will explore the main considerations that come after you’ve decided to launch a consumer-focused mobile app for your startup or enterprise spin-off project.

Three factors to consider before building a mobile app

1. Choose a reliable mobile app development partner

This is the most important decision to make, since you will be entering a long-term partnership with your mobile app development provider. Take your time and evaluate all available options based on the following criteria:

• A domestically based office and project managers
  This will protect you from a legal standpoint, guarantee streamlined communication, and allow for the possibility of meeting in person. Plus — they have the same business ethic as you do.
  Developers, on the other hand, can be based remotely. We live in 2016 and benefit from all sorts of web-based tools for project management and effective communication. You can find elite developers that are fluent in English and can often outperform local developers in quality and at lower rates.
• Experience in your market
  Choose a partner who has proven experience building consumer-focused mobile applications specifically in your market niche. For example, if you want to launch a mobile app for students’ loans, find a partner that has experience building finance-related applications and applications for students.
  Working with a developer who has experience in your market niche will all but guarantee a quicker software development cycle and better product quality.
• Dev teams, not individual freelancers
  You may be thinking about hiring an individual freelancer because it’s cheaper than working with a full team. However, working with an individual freelancer can be extremely risky from a legal perspective and can jeopardize your product’s completion. Individual developers can get another job, take an unexpected vacation, simply stop responding to your emails, or put your project on the back burner and allow other work to take precedence. At the end of the day, there is a significant risk of getting stuck. Even if you manage to pursue them legally for causing you issues you’ll still be out a significant amount of time and money.
  Working with an established team of developers allows you to avoid these challenges. It may cost a bit more, but you won’t have to worry about the legal risk, they will prioritize your brand and reputation and they will allocate developers to work full time on your project.
• Tech stack expertise
  Some dev teams will specialize in one particular tech stack and will sell you on it, not because it is the best for you but because it is the most convenient for them. Back in 2010, it was only possible to develop high-quality mobile applications using native iOS and Android platforms. These days, there are a lot of solutions for different types of mobile apps. You can read more about these solutions below.

If you don’t know where to look for a reliable provider, you can always submit your mobile project for a free quote at DevTeam.Space whose dev teams have built over 200 consumer-focused mobile applications across a variety of industries — you will get a professional specifications review, help with your MVP definition, and a free quote. All of it being legally protected with a standard mutual NDA.

2. Do your homework and prepare a solid specification

9 out of 10 startups fail and that’s only counting the ones that even make it out of the gate in the first place. The #1 reason for this? Entrepreneurs don’t know enough about their product. Very few have the knowledge to turn an idea into a successful minimum viable product (MVP) that people want to use. Even the greatest developers in the world will not be able to build an entire business for you.

To avoid this pitfall and continue along the path of success you need to do your homework and prepare detailed specs for your MVP.

You would be surprised to see how many people fail to accomplish this step. If you can’t thoroughly plan what you want to build then you can’t be serious about being an entrepreneur.

Here’s how you can get started:

• Prepare the project description
  A clear and concise explanation of what you are building.
• Create a list of the screens/pages and features you want
  A simple text list that describes your mobile app page by page.
• A user path / user flow
  A flowchart of how your users navigate through your mobile app, how you engage them, what kind of notifications you send them so they come back to your app to use it again.
  Make different lists for specific types of users. For example, if your mobile app has two type of users — parents and children, you would need to create two user paths.
• Design Mockups
  Design mockups can be created by drawing them on a paper with a pen and scanning it afterwards, so you can send it to developers. It’s easier than you think — you can first draw it on a paper or on your iPad and then use tools (often available as a free trial) to outline the final design mockup versions in to a more beautiful and useful way.
• Tech Stack
  Do the research and decide on the tech stack you want to use for your mobile app and outline it in a document.

If you need a little bit of guidance, you can download a free specifications template for your mobile app here, so you can simply fill it out following the example.

3. Choose the technology that best suits your mobile app

Back in 2010 it was hard to imagine you could build a solid mobile application using hybrid technologies. At the time there were no solid solutions available. Early hybrid technologies simply weren’t ready to compete with native mobile app development options in quality and speed. In fact, they were slow and ugly. Over the last two years this situation has changed.

Sure, if you are building a social app with a lot of interactions, photo and video content a native mobile technology stack is still the best. In this example you would choose to build an app for iOS using Swift or Objective C, and an app for Android using Java.

However, if your app isn’t user-interaction heavy and your goal is build an MVP to test the waters — you can build a fast, great looking mobile product using the following hybrid technologies:

• Xamarin
  Xamarin is a well-established technology (Not to mention the recent Microsoft acquisition can only mean great things). It is included with every Visual Studio version and allows to develop multi-platform mobile applications using C#. The best part about Xamarin is that it generates native code for both iOS and Android.
• React Native
  It’s a relatively young, emerging, open source framework from Facebook that promises a “learn once, write everywhere” experience driven by JavaScript.
• Ionic
  Ionic is a typical hybrid development framework. It uses web technologies to write and render the application and requires PhoneGap/Cordova bridges to access native features. Then it will try to reproduce native behaviors to provide the best user experience.

Some companies use Xamarin as a long-term solution but if you decide to go with React Native or Ionic, you better plan to build native mobile applications for Android and iOS once you validate the market and raise funding/start generating revenue.

Having basic knowledge about these technologies will help you to be more informed and feel more confident when you will interview your software development partners.

Additionally, I highly recommend you find an experienced tech advisor, so you could ask all necessary questions and learn from his/her experience.

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