There are already around 2.1 million apps available in the App Store.
If you want to add one more app to the total, make sure that it has the appeal and delivers the value that will compel iPhone users to download it.
Building an iOS app is a costly business, and no mobile app owner would want to develop an app that nobody wants to download. Hopefully, if users download the app, chances are they will quickly uninstall it, either because they didn’t like it, or it is consuming too much space.
According to a report, instant failure rate of iOS apps is 65%.
There could be plenty of problems that result in failure, which you need to address during the iOS app development process. To address the challenges, you must find an iOS or say, iPhone app development company that works with partner mindset—the one which takes your success or failure as their own.
But before that you must keep yourselves aware of development process thoroughly. If you are a beginner, this guide to successful iOS app development will help you to list out common problems that you will be facing during the app development process.
Guide to Successful iOS App Development
Before we begin with the tips and tricks for successful iOS app development, it is essential that you know how tough the competition will be, once you get into app development process.
The success rate of an app is just 0.01%, which means only 1 in 10,000 apps meets the expectations.
So, when the competition is tough, below are a few tips and tricks to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks.
1. Build a Strong Foundation for Your iOS App
It is important to ensure that you are on the right track at the very beginning of the mobile app development process, which starts from ideation.
Your mobile app idea has to be unique and should solve a problem or deliver something of value to the users.
Once you have decided what you want to give to your users, follow the next step, which is “competition analysis.” Through this analysis, determine the edges that you want to carve in your application to create a difference in the market.
The analysis will also help you to understand your target audience. Knowing the target audience is extremely essential for the development of a successful app. It will provide you with an understanding of their preferences and behaviour pattern, based on which you can build your app monetization model.
After you are done with these things, you can work on designing MVP 1.0 with testable features to check how users react to your product.
2. UX Design—Creating Meaningful and Relevant User Experience
Make a note of this: Users have many options. They will simply uninstall your app if they will face even slightest complexity while using it.
So, when you begin with creating the UX design for your app, keep all your presumptions and personal preferences at one side, and start working from another.
During designing, focus on two things: App being intuitive and highly usable.
Keep the information architecture of the app simple and accessible, that makes user journey extremely smooth. Create a wireframe of your app, so that your iOS app users can easily understand the design concepts and you become able to deliver final product based on it.
You can also create a clickable prototype of your product using iOS designer toolbox. It will help you to go through the user journey and find out the obvious flaws.
3. Designing UI (Interface)
Both UI and UX overlap in many aspects, but there is a greater difference. Where UX is about user journey through the product, UI deals with the look of the app, including visual behaviour.
Use a style guide from which you can pick the elements, fonts, colors and icons for building the UI. Take help from your iOS app development company on designing UI that enhance the appeal of the app, without complexity.
Create a rendered screen and then develop a rendered click-through design to test out your clickable prototype.
4. From Designing to Development Hand Off
At this stage, you will be dealing with a technical team, so you have to ensure that they understand your business requirements and design elements. For this, share your goals with the iOS app developers and give a clear picture of what they need to develop.
You can also read out common iOS app development challenges that companies face, which will give you an overview of what is coming ahead.
iPhone app development challenges compounded by the poor understanding of the software requirement could create major problems, so go slowly but statically from this point.
Three things you need to do at this stage are:
- Keep your design files organized
- Share business goals with iOS app developers
- Work on the basic knowledge of HTML & CSS and structure your app design
While doing so, maintain a healthy communication between iOS developers and designers to ensure the making of usable and intuitive iPad or iPhone application.
5. Front-end Development
Now that you have basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, you will be able to communicate with iOS developers properly, in fact, when you interact with them on technical parameters, they will better understand the functions and features in context with your business requirements.
Front-end is associated with the presentation layer. At this point, you must understand terms like Client-side code which runs on the client.
Let’s say, for example, your iOS application is meant to read data from the sensors on the devices and then transmit that data to the users. This part is front end development. How your application processes the data and stores it is part of the backend development.
Since front-end is handled by mobile app users, business owners have to ensure that the outcome is simple, unique, and interactive.
In future, it might happen that you wish to provide support to Android. So here, make sure you associate with a reliable mobile app development company that helps you understand the app development from different dynamics as well.
6. Backend Development of the iOS App
Backend development involves critical knowledge of the tools and technologies. At this stage, if you don’t have a technical background, then you have to completely rely on your iPad or iPhone app development company.
Rather than burying yourself under the Python or Java books, better spend your time finding a reliable software application development company. Make sure that the company has professional developers with experience in designing, deploying, and scaling APIs.
Choosing a programming language, creating databases, and data structures are integral to backend development.
Common programming languages for iOS apps are C#, Java, .Net, and Python. Widely used databases are MongoDB, MySQL, Cassandra, and PostgreSQL.
With backend developers, you will be discussing a lot of features such as custom objects, file storage, access control & security, and push notifications.
Backend service market is a whole new ballgame.
You have to pick one of the backend service providers to maintain your digital assets. Plan out with your app development firm to support reasonable terms.
7. Getting Involved in Development to Testing, and Launch to Maintenance
To begin with, critically discuss the Application development and deployment best practices with your software development company.
Planning is key to the successful iOS app development. And to plan effectively, you must have knowledge about the next step in application development.
For example, when you are at development process, make sure you have a QA team ready for application testing, and when your QA team is testing the app in real-world scenarios, you have test cases prepared for the following:
- Functional testing
- Performance testing
- Edge-case testing
- Device-specific testing
- Usability testing
- User acceptance testing
The next step is deployment and things you need work on here are defining release cycle plans, minimizing downtime, updating developer certificates, automating configuration and provision, and defining hosting environment.
Final Thoughts
iOS app development needs time and attention, along with a lot of understanding from business and technical perspectives. Being a business owner, mastering the development structure is not your key job, instead, you must focus on planning and organizing each step to make it to a smooth release.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.