If you want to shape your digital presence, having a branded mobile app will likely be the first step you can think of. Since the mobile apps in terms of popularity and customer reach have already surpassed the mobile web, as a brand, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of mobile apps.

But building mobile apps is one thing, and shaping your brand’s success on the popularity of a mobile app is another thing. If you want to develop a robust, powerful, and successful app, you need to follow successful apps’ footsteps. Learning from leading apps’ experience, we will offer some practical tips for shaping your mobile app’s success.

Know your audience and competition

The first and foremost thing that your mobile app project should concentrate on before the development is knowing your audience and the competition. Every mobile app comes as a solution to one or a few specific problems. Now, who is facing these problems, and why would they prefer your app as a solution? That’s precisely what you should find out.

It would be best if you also found competitor apps with similar value propositions. You need to find out their drawbacks and pain points and accordingly should figure out features. User experience attributes that can be introduced for a better app. Know your competitor apps’ user audience and figure out the possible value propositions that can lure them to your new app.

Audience and competitor research will give you a very well-grounded idea about your target users’ key preferences and the competitive market where you will launch your app. In many emerging app markets, startups give a lot of attention to audience research. These days, audience and competitor research is the priority of a mobile app development company to understand potential prospects’ behavior to attract them and make them premium customers.

Develop your mobile app for iOS first

Every app project needs to take a call on choosing the target OS platform for the app. You can either start with the iOS or Android platform if you want to build a native app. You can also opt for a cross-platform app targeting both iOS and Android at one go. Well, creating a cross-platform app with native user experience is not complex with robust technologies like Flutter or React Native that offers native UI layers for each platform.

But still, native and platform-optimized apps enjoy a clear edge over the cross-platform apps, irrespective of their native layers on top of the reusable codebase. But building two separate native apps can be expensive and time-consuming. This is why it is advisable to go for one platform at a time. While Android is too much segregated as a platform with many devices, it involves more considerable development costs and challenges than a much more consolidated iOS platform. This is why it would be wise to develop your mobile app for iOS first and then go for Android.

Build an MVP app

These days, app business is getting complicated thanks to demanding new features, state-of-the-art technology options, and increasing demand for personalization. This is one reason for mobile app projects to make their steps and decisions more carefully than ever before. Instead of making a course correction, an app project will be more intelligent by validating every development decision and building the final product over time. Well, this is what the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach is all about.

You can build a fundamental app based on the core app idea and offer the key features and functionalities central to the app objective. Once this app is up and running, you can take user feedback, get a closer look at app analytics, understand the user pain points and find out the areas that require value additions. In the subsequent app update, you develop these value additions and changes based upon user feedback and your internal finding. Like this, through several updates, your app continues to get better, introduces more features and better user experience attributes.

The most significant advantage of this MVP approach is that you can keep the initial development cost lower while keeping options open for value additions through subsequent updates. On the other hand, through this approach, every development decision remains thoroughly validated, leaving no room for drastic course correction and consequent drainage of resources.

Choose your technology stack wisely

If you want to develop a successful app product that, in terms of performance and user experience, lives up to the latest industry standard, you need to choose your technology stack quite wisely. Your technology stack choice depends upon the type of app, key features and functionalities, size of the project, target platform, and development budget. Despite these variable factors, there are confident winning technology choices that enjoy a competitive edge.

If you have an existing mobile website based on Angular, you can build your new mobile app using Angular. Angular framework for mobile app development is widely popular because of its robust performance, the capability to create powerful features such as real-time streaming, and ease of development. React Native is also a powerful and robust technology to help you develop cross-platform apps with native user experience. Flutter has also risen as a leading cross-platform native development framework and offers both code reusability across platforms and native widgets for platform optimized development.

Conclusion

All the advice and tips we provided so far explain why developing a mobile app involves meticulous considerations of several aspects. Even after spending a fortune on your app project, you can completely go wrong if you do not take these considerations seriously. Since every app project is after the agile methodology and state-of-the-art tools, you need to go deeper into your choices for each and every aspect.

Also Read: 10 Best Mobile App Building Platforms