What are the common Stages of App Development?

It’s 2022, and if you think you’re late for the mobile application party, you can’t be more wrong. You might think that the market has probably reached its limits after over a decade and over 5 million apps released for iOS and Android. But you might be surprised to know that every day, about 6,140 new apps are added to the Google play store. That is four apps per minute. Let alone Apple’s app store in these stats. So, if you think you have a good idea that can get a decent amount of attention, why not take the shot?

These days launching a new application is not as tough as it used to be; however, its success depends on some key elements, such as knowing your target consumer, setting a strategy, having a nice interface, a solid backbone, and a professional development team.

Today we’ll look at the stages of application development and deployment to the market. It’s a journey that every app should pass to become accessible and usable for people.

1. Idea

This is the reason you’re creating your app. You may encounter a problem in your daily life that you want to solve, or you notice a “need” in your society. It’s the “why.” So, you should ask: “why should this app be developed?”

2. Research

Now that you have an answer for the “why,” you need to dig deeper. This is a key stage because you’ll get to know your target consumers, your competitors, and your market.

In this stage, you should answer questions like:

What does your app achieve?
Who is going to use it?
How are they going to use it?
On which platform(s) is your app going to run?
What language and framework do you want to use?
How much can you invest in it?
How can you advertise and promote your app?

While answering these questions, you’ll have a deeper understanding of your project and its purpose.

You may find similar apps that already exist. In this case, you need to ask yourself what advantages and features my app will have that will set it apart from others.

3. Wireframing

Welcome to the very first step of app development. This step is actually the process of drawing sketches of different app screens and how they are connected to each other. Also, it is one of the most time-consuming phases of app development. But you should know the more detailed this part is, the more helpful it can be in future steps. So, by investing a good amount of time in this stage, you can save more time in the coding and design stages. By drawing sketches, you can discover problems in the usability of your app. It can also be a capable tool for communication and teamwork. Wireframing can help purify your ideas and put everything in its right place. Wireframing also helps the development team to have a better understanding of your app and helps to save a lot of time. When you are wireframing, you should think of it as telling a story. How are the pages linked together? How should the user navigate through different pages?

4. Visual design (UI/UX)

When you reach this stage, you already know what sort of app you want, and with the experience you learned from the prototype version, you also know which parts of the app need more time to improve. This stage involves multiple phases, reviews, and revisions. You’ll inform your designers on how to design the final product and what interactions should look like. This stage’s time consumption is a function of your budget and your vision. It can be completed in several days or take several months to polish and tweak the smallest details to perfection. It is recommended to create various versions of pages. Try changing the position of icons, buttons, and other visual elements.

Having a good team is a must. Design a workflow design and chart and set the goals, duties, and milestones. Having a workflow not only saves time but also optimizes your team’s outcome.

5. Development

Generally, this stage starts early on. From the moment you start working on your app’s wireframe, you’re contributing to your app’s back end. But it is only after completing the visual design that this stage advances to a whole new level of importance. After completing the pre-design and design stages, it’s time to build what holds it all together. It is also the most important stage of app development. Team members have multiple sit-downs depending on the development strategy and approach they are advantaging from. They report their progress strictly to the project manager’s guidelines. Use your wireframe and storyboard as a guideline to create your back-end structure. Depending on your app, you may need several services, such as APIs, database architectures, push notification services, data diagrams, and more.

Moving to the next step, the mobile app development itself, There are instances that you may encounter some technical limitations that force you into changing your wireframe or design. The development is divided into several parts. Each team member writes pieces of code, and they are continuously tested by other team members. After a section is fully coded and without bugs, the team moves on to the next section. After every element is built and coded, the team puts together all the pieces, and you have your mobile app as a whole.

Depending on your development technology, hybrid or native, developers may use various programming languages to create mobile applications. Some of the most popular language developers use are as follows.

For creating iOS apps, developers use:

Objective-C
Python
Swift

And for developing Android Apps, they mostly use:

Java
C++/ C#
Android Native Development Kit (NDK)

On the other hand, if you are using hybrid tech. Developers may use:

React Native
Xamarian
Kotlin

7. Testing (function, performance, security)

This is also a stage that is parallel with the Development stage. It is recommended to test the app as it is getting completed; it goes into various hands so the bugs and errors can be discovered and fixed as early as possible. This not only saves time but also lowers your final costs. Imagine, after completing the app, you encounter an error that could’ve been fixed if it had been discovered when writing the code. Now you have to search all hundreds (or thousands) of lines of code for that single bug that could’ve easily been avoided.

You may have a Quality Assurance team to check for mistakes. There are several phases of Testing:

UI/UX Testing: check the consistency of fonts, colors, style, animations, and navigation. This will have a large impact on the audience.

Functional Testing: make sure your team goes through all of the app’s features, from the core feature to the smallest details. It is hard to anticipate every user’s behavior with the app. Sometimes two different people get different results while using the same feature. This could bring bugs to the surface to be discovered.

Then you need to check for performance and make sure that your app isn’t resource-hungry. Check for every part that can be optimized. Reduce the loading time for pages, and lower the battery consumption. You should simulate for heavy use to make sure that your app works well under pressure.

One of the most vital parts of App development is safety. The security of your app depends on how sensitive the data you are dealing with is. If it contains personal data that can be used against your users, you need to ensure your app is as safe as possible. Especially for mobile enterprise applications that may have sensitive data. Many customers hire third-party companies to put their apps to the test.

In the end, you need to Test your Application on different devices and platforms. New mobile phones enter the market every year with new hardware and software specs. While many companies use Android, they have custom-made versions of the Operating System (because Android is Open source). So, you need to make sure that your app runs well on all of these versions. The other issue is that in the Android world, there is a noticeable fragmentation of different OS versions because many devices don’t support the latest version, or simply the users don’t want to update to the latest release. So, you have a vast variety of different OS versions that your app needs to be compatible with. This is less of a problem in the iOS platform, where the Operating System is more consistent.

If you want to have two versions of your Application for both iOS and Android, you need to check that both versions of your app have similar functionalities and features.

You can give your app to a handful of people of your target audience and ask for their feedback. If the feedbacks were positive, you know that your app works. If not, you know what you should fix.

Scrum

Another approach to app development is to use agile methods. One of the most common agile methods is called Scrum. Under the Scrum framework, developers, designers, and testers try to achieve a certain set of features in a pre-decided recurring time cycle that usually is between 1 week to a month. In these time windows, every member of the project team, also known as the Scrum team, adopts a certain set of tasks that are required to deliver a future.

At the end of this time frame, a feature or a set of features will be delivered and deployed to the market. Using Scrum helps you to constantly develop and deploy to the market and get feedback from users simultaneously. This helps to shape a final product as more market-oriented.

8. Deployment

Now your app is ready to launch. You have to submit your app to the application stores. Different stores have different policies, so make sure that you study their rules. Then you need to provide basic information such as the app’s title, description, category, keywords, icon, and screenshots.

After submitting iOS apps, a review process could take several days to several weeks. If your app has an account option, you are required to provide the store with a test account.

There is no review process for Android apps, and they usually become available to the public after a few hours.

This is also a great opportunity to advertise your app. Send some copies to famous journalists, bloggers and newsletters. Promote via E-Mail and Social Media.

Even after users have downloaded your app, you can promote offers and discounts to invite new users. Also, use the potential of Push notifications to inform your consumers about new updates.

You can also hire a digital marketing team to promote your app on social media and interact with your potential customers. You can set up ad campaigns and also market your app through blog posts. This can be done by setting up your own blog or just paying other bloggers to post promotional content. Be sure that if you want to set up your own blog, you need to get a handful of SEO knowledge down the road.

9. Support

Now that your application is for everyone to use, you need to keep checking for usage stats and analyze crash reports. Encourage your users to send their opinions and feedback. You’ll need to regularly update your application to support new devices. Minor updates usually don’t cause bugs. But every time there is a new OS or a major update, you can expect a few things to go wrong. Developers can have access to an early version of the Operating System, Every time a new update is published to familiarize themselves with the latest changes.