6 Essential Steps When Creating Your First App
There are many reasons that people aim to create an app today. Certain businesses might choose to do this to enhance their online presence and provide customers with a better platform to interact with them, whereas some individuals or businesses aim to make a living by developing apps for others or selling to customers directly via mobile app stores.
Creating an app certainly isn’t easy, and there are many different things to consider. This includes things such as planning, design, market research, coding, and the marketing of your app, to name a few things. To help you with this, we’ve created this handy guide for you to make use of.
Develop A Good Idea
You might have already come up with an idea for your app, but if you’ve not put a lot of thought into whether it could actually be successful or not, there might be a chance that you have allowed yourself to become biased towards your idea. Of course, it’s hard to avoid this with your own ideas, no matter how logical you believe yourself to be.
This is why it’s important to try to take a step back and properly assess your idea so that you can be certain it’s a good one. As well as this, you’ll want to create a good plan for the development of your app to ensure it remains feasible to create with the resources you have and also figure out how easy your app will be to market and sell.
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Conduct Your Research
Spending time doing the research before and during app development is also very important. There are a number of different things you’ll want to research during this time. You’ll want to conduct plenty of market research to determine your target audience’s desires and whether or not anyone will want to use your app.
You should also conduct research on your possible competitors within the industry to figure out what has helped them find success and what you can strive to do differently to improve on their ideas and not be overshadowed by them.Â
Hire The Right Team
There are many independent solo developers out there who have the expertise to create an aesthetically pleasing and functioning app. There are some huge benefits to developing an app this way, and the primary reason is that you’ll have very few overheads and will be able to put all of your profits into paying yourself and funding your business.
This, however, means that there will be a lot more work for you to do which could easily delay the release of your app. In that case, depending on the size of the project, you may need to hire more team members to work with. If you have to bring on more people, however, you should ensure that you take your time choosing the right people for the job.
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Focus On Security
During the development, process security should be a priority, as releasing an app that hasn’t been properly tested for security weaknesses can end up costing you greatly.
This is because you are increasing your risk of a data breach and hacking attempts. You should consider the DevSecOps method, which essentially involves you implementing security measures throughout the development lifecycle. This increases security substantially compared to adding security measures at the end of the development process.
Suppose you were to experience a data breach. In that case, the loss of sensitive customer data, such as payment details and addresses, could significantly harm your relationship with them. It may even dissuade them from using any future apps you might develop.Â
Conduct Testing Phases
As well as ramping up your app’s security as you develop the software, you should also look at conducting testing throughout this process. Apps that haven’t been tested properly are much more likely to be plagued by bugs on release, and this can really look bad on you as a developer.
Software with lots of bugs on release looks very unprofessional, and this will also lead to you getting a lot of negative reviews on app stores. These negative reviews will then lead to fewer people downloading your app overall.
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Plan Your Launch
The process of a successful app launch can be another unexpectedly complex stage in a project like this and so planning this out is very important. Marketing your app is critical if you want to create buzz around it and get people to buy or download it on day one.
A poorly planned launch could result in a number of problems, including nobody knowing that it’s been released, so you should strive to build up a strong audience before releasing your app. That way, you’ll have users supporting you as soon as you release your app, and you’ll also be able to use this audience to help you test iterations of your app in beta tests and bounce ideas off of them, too.