Creating Mobile Apps: 7 Steps You Need to Take

If your company has not yet considered adding a mobile app to its offerings, now is the time. In Q1 2024, mobile devices accounted for 58.33% of global website traffic. That's a significant enough statistic to ignore, so your company should really jump on the mobile wave as soon as possible.
When you gather for the first meeting to develop a mobile app strategy, there are some points to consider before diving too deep. Ignoring these points can result in a failed app, which is wasted time and money. When the bottom line suffers, those at the top will look down on it with disdain.
And you don't want that.

How to avoid such a problem? Take into account a few very important ideas and questions that will help make app deployment successful. Let's break down what those are.

1. Create an Elevator Pitch

You may or may not have heard of an 'elevator pitch,' but the gist is this: you have the time it takes an elevator to reach your target floor to present the app. How can you convey the essence of your app in a short enough form to capture your target audience's attention before they step off the elevator?
You might think this is a silly exercise, but it helps you understand the core of your app. If you can create a successful elevator pitch, it means you truly understand what your app is about—you know what it will do and what benefit it will bring to those who use it.
Surprisingly, the elevator pitch is harder than you think because you must fully understand what your company does, what it wants from the app, and why a consumer would want to use it.

2. Define Your Concept

This is directly related to the elevator pitch, but more from a bottom-up perspective. While the elevator pitch can be used to convince company executives of the validity of your idea, the concept is more about helping developers understand exactly what they need to do to make it work.
If the elevator pitch might be, 'Our app is an engaging store dedicated to our products, helping initiate mobile purchases,' the concept might look like, 'A dynamic SPA leveraging big data and a hybrid cloud infrastructure to make it easier for consumers to interact with our website from mobile devices.'

3. Define Your Market

After you've pitched your project, it's time to fully understand your market. Which clients/consumers/customers will access your company's site via a mobile browser or mobile app? Are they primarily Android or iOS users (or mixed)? What is the age range, education level, and economic status of your market? What is the primary location? What is the technical literacy of your market?
These are very important questions you must answer, otherwise you'll be working on your mobile app blindly. This information not only helps developers design and build the app, but also helps marketers promote it. No matter how brilliant the app is, if you can't successfully market it, it will fail.

4. Define Your Goals

Following the market, you need to know what your goals are. Do you want to monetize the mobile app, or is it purely informational? Do you want to develop an app that can scale to meet global demand? Do you plan to integrate the mobile app with your website or other solutions?
If you come to the first developer meeting without knowing your goals, many participants will leave disappointed or confused.

5. Consider UX

UX stands for User Experience, and it's a critical factor. You can develop the best mobile app in the world, but if the user experience is poor, the app will fail. What is UX? It's all about the experience. How easy is it to navigate the app? How intuitive is the interface?
You should not design the user interface in a way that confuses those who use it. That's why you should spend a lot of time on UX so that anyone who installs your app is not forced to read a user manual first. Keep it simple, convenient, and modern.

6. Know Resource Limits

This is an important question to answer, especially as the app's usage grows. If you expect a large number of users, you need to be prepared for the required database capacity, cloud resources, and data processing pipelines. Without proper resource planning, bottlenecks can occur, leading to performance degradation.
If you know your market and know it's global, having an idea of resource limits will help you plan accordingly.

7. Consider Which Type of App Is Best for Your Business

Here you have several options: native mobile app, hybrid mobile app, or web app. Your choice will largely determine the development approach. This choice can also mean the difference between a well-functioning app and one that brings nothing but headaches.
It all comes down to:

• Native apps are installed directly on the mobile device and perform best. However, developing such an app is more expensive because you have to create a separate app for each platform.
• Hybrid apps are installed on devices like native apps but run through a web browser. Hybrid apps are built on HTML5, so they are cheaper to create and offer a slight performance boost over web apps.
• Web apps are not installed on the device, cheaper to develop, scale to any screen, but do not utilize mobile device hardware, so they tend to run the slowest.

Therefore, if you want the most efficient app and don't mind the cost, choose a native app. If you need the cheapest app that will work consistently on any device and performance isn't a concern, choose a web app. If you prefer a middle ground, choose a hybrid app.

Conclusion

Don't dive blindly into mobile app development, or you risk failing and having to start over. If you are only now entering the mobile app arena, you are already behind, and losing time is undesirable. So approach that first meeting with developers having thought through all these questions, and you'll be 2-3 steps ahead.