Mobile App Development Process: A Step-by-Step Guide

Jul 18, 2024 Kiran Beladiya

Smartphones have changed the way businesses used to function before. The latest technologies and smart devices have revolutionized every industry and made things easier for them.

Be it buying online or booking a travel ticket, ordering food, or paying bills, mobile applications help users do tasks more efficiently and conveniently. However, the popularity of mobile apps is increasing at a swift pace.

Every day there are thousands of mobile apps published on both Google Play and Apple App Stores from various industries. If these apps were built under professional guidance and expert suggestions, they might have followed a similar mobile app development process.

However, in this competitive environment, mobile apps have become a necessity for businesses. It helps in increasing brand awareness, improving customer engagement, promoting revenue growth, and many more.

In a nutshell, mobile app development may open the door to opportunities for better business growth. However, many developers or mobile app development companies don’t consider the mobile app development process as serious. It requires a thoughtful and step-by-step approach to make a successful mobile app.

As an experienced mobile app development company, we have developed and launched hundreds of mobile apps. While developing these apps, we have also followed the same process which includes idea, strategy, design, development, launch, maintenance & support phases.

If you are planning to build a mobile app, here is a complete guide that may help you understand the process. We are curating key steps here.

Let’s walk through it.

App Development Process Steps

We have a streamlined process at Estatic Infotech. Our expert developers don’t just start developing an app hearing the requirements. They strictly adhere to the guidelines to create a successful app.

Step-1 Project Requirements

Once you approach our Android app development company, our experts will reach you via call or email. We will have a conversation regarding your requirements and will figure out an execution plan.

We listen to your idea and understand it completely. Our team will assist you in taking this project to the next level.

Step-2 Business Insight & Estimation

Once we understand your requirements and are done with your consulting session, we plan to have a kick-off meeting with internal experts, including developers, designers, QA engineers, and project managers. Based on your project requirements, we create a project proposal including all the features and functionalities the client wants and share a budget estimation for the same.

Step-3 Signing NDA

Now you have a cost estimation. So, if you are planning to proceed further with our mobile app development services, we make it official by signing the NDA agreement. This agreement makes sure that your project details will remain secure with us.

Why does a mobile app development company require an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)?

To protect the intellectual property (any idea, concept, and information that benefits a competitor or third party) of a client. NDA is a legal agreement between the software company and the client.

What is a project development agreement and what are things to consider while preparing it?

The project development agreement includes terms and conditions where the client and service provider are mutually agreed on. Below points are included in the agreement: -

Deliverables
Milestones
Legal Clauses
References

Once the agreement is signed, we assign the team, create strategies, schedule scrum meetings, and set goals to deliver the project on time.

Step-4 Creating a Wireframe

The next step after understanding requirements and selecting the communication methods is designing an app. The app design is the most important phase of the mobile app development process.

Hence, our designers are ready to create a wireframe for your app. Now the question comes, what’s the wireframe?

Wireframe

The wireframe is a type of design that shows the app's functionality. Our designers create a wireframe on the digital board and integrate all the essential elements and functionalities. It helps to understand the flow of the system and gives a rough idea of how the system would function.

By developing a wireframe, you can understand the precise estimation of development time. Designers can get a gist of the system flow and aid them in creating flawless and accurate designs.

What is a wireframe, and why is it crucial in app development?

A wireframe is like the skeleton of a digital project; it is a simplified, visual blueprint that outlines the layout and structure of a web page or app without the distracting details, colors, or graphics.

It is essential in app development as it provides a visual roadmap for the app's design and functionality. By integrating all the features into wireframes, both the development team and stakeholders can gain a clear understanding of the app's appearance and operation. This early-stage clarity allows for quick and cost-effective adjustments if needed, leading to time and budget savings.

Step-5 UI/UX Design

Before proceeding further with the app design area, we will ask you some questions that help us know your preferences.

Our questions would be:

Is there any particular app color that you would want to incorporate?
Your specific preferences for fonts
Is there any competitor for your app?

Well, these questions will help us know your preferences.

What do our designers do during this phase?

As an experienced web design company, our UI/UX designers design an app that contains login forms, the home page, and buttons.

Once we design a sample, we will share it with you and wait for your feedback. If there are any changes according to your preferences, then will do it in the existing sample and move further for the final approval of the design.

Let’s move on to the app development flow to make it a user-centric product by using tools and technologies as per your choice and preference.

Step-6 Mobile App Development

After creating designs of an app, the mobile app developers get down to bring everything into action. It covers the coding of your app.

The project manager assigns tasks to the developers and divides the project into various activities such as establishing the development environment, developing various parts of the code, and primary and real-time testing.

Generally, mobile app development services are made up of three integral parts:

Front-end development
Back-end/server-side development
APIs

Front-end Development

The front end is what your end-users deal with. In most cases, mobile apps consist of feature-rich user experiences that use APIs and back-end tools to manage data.

If you want an app to work without internet access, integrate suitable APIs to download and store data locally.

However, we can choose any web programming language and database for your back-end app development.

We choose the following technologies for Android app development services:

Programming language: Java, Kotlin
IDE: Android Studio
Database: SQLite, Realm
Tools: Android SDK, Android NDK

We choose the following technologies for iPhone app development services:

Language: Swift, Objective C
IDE: XCode
Database: SQLite, Realm, CoreData

Back-end/Server-side Development

Server-side and database objects become necessary for supporting functions of your mobile app. If you are using an existing back-end platform, then configurations and changes could be needed to support the desired mobile app functionality. The developed server-side objects must be configured and tested with the other components of the application.

We use languages such as PHP, RoR, Node js, Angular Js, React Js, and .Net for back-end development.

APIs

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a method of communication between the app and a back-end server/database.

Step-7 App Testing & QA

App testing is an important step in the mobile app development lifecycle. With the testing process, we come to know the quality of an app and get an idea about how good or bad the app is. It gives us a clear understanding of stability, security, and usability.

Before the final launch, our QA team prepares various test cases that address all aspects of app testing. We ensure that an app works flawlessly in every operating system and browser.

Generally, testing is done to find out the errors and bugs in the application. Once we find out the errors, developers work to solve them. We follow the approach to involve our QA team in the analysis and design stages. This helps us to produce accurate test cases.

We perform several types of testing, such as:

1) Functional Testing

The mobile application without having any bugs and errors is important for its success. It’s not easy to predict every end user’s behavior and usage scenario.

Users can operate your app in many different ways. Different users get different outcomes leading to a glitch-free app. For instance, two users are filling out the same form, but with different data leading to discovering a bug.

Here, functional testing comes into the picture. We ensure that users can use your app’s functionality and features without any issues. It can be categorized into system testing and unit testing.

For both iOS and Android apps, our QA team will do a comparison between both versions of the mobile app.

2) Usability Testing

With usability testing, our QA team ensures that the app is user-friendly and intuitive. Unit testing involves asking new users to test the features for ease of use and navigation.

3) Performance Testing

Performance testing comes up with many quantitative criteria to measure the performance of your app.

How well is your app responding to user requests?
What’s the load time of the app screen?
Is your app draining your phone battery?
Does your app leverage network bandwidth effectively?
Is your app large enough?

Your app gets through the basic performance criteria, we test the app, API, and back-end for load by simulating the maximum number of concurrent users. We ensure that your app will be able to handle the load and perform well even when there’s a rush of users.

We use performance testing to measure the response time of the tasks that your app performs.

4) Fit & Finish Testing

Just because we are done with designing tasks, that doesn’t mean that we won’t test the design again. Our designers will review each feature again and ensure that the new version is implemented as described in the design. That’s the major advantage you can get if you hire web designers from Estatic Infotech.

With fit and finish testing, our QA team checks whether the developers followed the design theme they had envisioned.

5) Regression Testing

If we had added one feature from the previous sprint, we don’t assume it still works perfectly.

At Estatic Infotech, our testers will have a list of tests to perform at the end of each sprint, which will include tests from previous sprints.

We repeatedly do testing of every feature in the mobile app development phases.

6) Device & Platform-specific Testing

As we know, with the increasing amount of smartphone devices, it’s mandatory to develop an app that works seamlessly across all devices and operating systems. Our team runs the app on numerous screen sizes and OS versions. We always prefer to test the app on real devices.

7) User Acceptance Testing

User acceptance testing is performed by either you (the app owner) or future app users. The app gets tested by the target audiences and we obtain feedback from them about every feature.

Step-8 Publishing the App

Once we test the app, our development team is ready to publish the iOS app on the Apple App Store and the Android app on the Google Play Store.

However, having vast experience in the mobile app development industry, we will help you get an app approved.

How to publish an app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store?

You don’t need to worry about anything. Our experts will help you upload your application to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store without charging any additional cost.

Can anyone publish the application?

Both the app stores have strong policies to approve the app and make it live. Since we have good expertise in this domain, we help our customers to get it published.

In fact, we have published more than 1500 mobile apps on both platforms to date.

While releasing an app in the app stores, it requires some information like:

Title of an app
Description
Category
Keywords
Launch icon
App Store screenshots

Once the app is submitted to the Apple App Store, their moderators will review the app. This may take several days to weeks, depending on the quality of your app and how closely it adheres to the Apple App Store’s policies and guidelines. If your app requires users to log in, then you will need to provide a test user account to the Apple app store as part of the release process.

However, this review process doesn’t remain the same with Android apps. Your Android app becomes available in the Google Play store within a few hours of submission.

Once your app is launched, our team constantly monitors its usage through mobile analytics platforms and tracks Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your app’s success. We also will check the crash reports or other user-reported issues.

Step-9 Post Deployment Support & Marketing

Once users start trying their hands on the app, issues may pop up, feedback will pour in and for future versions of the app, we will incorporate that as an app update. For this, a good mobile application maintenance services team can be very effective.

Marketing Your App

The effective and right marketing strategy will make your mobile app successful. We follow a robust promotional strategy and plan from the beginning.

We come up with an app marketing strategy and plan to drive app discovery, increase organic traffic, and improve user engagement to reduce cost overheads.

Conclusion

Mobile app development is a never-ending process. Even if you launch an app, it will keep going as you receive user feedback and integrate additional features. Also, you might feel like skipping the step in the app development process, but this guide is built upon years of experience working with app owners who chose not to miss any of the steps. Hence, if you follow the steps in the right direction, your app will rule in the mobile app market.

If you are planning to develop a mobile app, you have come to the right page. Estatic Infotech is a leading custom application development company in India, offering mobile app development services to companies across finance, healthcare, construction, retail, consumer products, logistics, industrial engineering, and entertainment. Our experts follow the same steps for all of the mobile apps that we create.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What stage of the process does the creation of a mobile app begin?

First, determine the goal of the app and who its target user base is. Next, carry out market research.

2. For what reason is market research crucial to the creation of mobile apps?

To make sure the app fulfills user needs and stands out, market research helps to understand the competition, identify target customers, and find market trends.

3. What goes into the preparatory stage?

The planning stage entails specifying the functionality of the app, drafting a roadmap, and establishing a spending limit and schedule.

4. Describe wireframing and explain its significance.

The process of drawing up a schematic of the interface and features of an application is called wireframing. Visualizing the user flow and app structure is helpful.

5. What takes place at the stage of design?

UI/UX designers develop the app's visual components and make sure the user experience is user-friendly during the design stage.

6. How does prototyping fit into the process of developing an app?

Before the app is fully developed, prototyping entails building an interactive model of it to test its functioning and get user input.

7. How does the stage of development operate?

Coding the software, integrating functionality, and making sure it functions properly across various platforms and devices are all part of the development phase.

8. How crucial is testing to the creation of apps?

Testing makes sure there are no issues, the program runs smoothly, and the user experience is positive. It includes a variety of testing techniques, including usability, performance, and functional testing.

9. What goes into the phase of deployment?

Apps are deployed by uploading them to app stores (such as Google Play and the Apple App Store) and enabling consumers to download them.

10. What makes post-launch maintenance and support essential?

To address bugs, update features, and guarantee that the app continues to function on new hardware and operating systems, post-launch support and maintenance are essential.

11. What is the average time frame for creating a mobile application?

Depending on how complicated the app is, the timetable might vary greatly, but it usually takes several months from early planning to launch.

12. What elements affect the price of developing a mobile app?

The complexity of the app, its features, the needs for its design, the length of time it takes to develop, and the selection of platform (iOS, Android, or both).

13. Can I create a mobile application by myself?

Yes, but it calls for technical proficiency in project management, design, and coding. Employing expert developers is preferred by many companies to guarantee a high-quality app.

14. What typical difficulties do developers of mobile apps face?

Sustaining app performance, guaranteeing security, controlling development expenses, and staying current with technical advancements are typical obstacles.

Mobile App Development