Successful founders are likely to cover up their stories with pebbles and strong determination. But if you ask the ones who have failed miserably in their first project, then you will know about the mistakes and the glitches which you need to avoid while developing an app. It is crazy to work for or with the start-up founders who have a brilliant app idea but don’t know where to start from. Kody Technolab is passionate about helping start-ups and founders by guiding them through their app development process and launching their product successfully in the market. Read this blog and find out what things founders often missed during their app development and things that you should focus more during the development.
An app failure is painful. You have invested hundreds of hours behind the development, spent thousands of dollars yet get doomed in the market. The reason? The rookie app development mistakes & ignorance of features. It is the founder’s responsibility to lay the foundation ground and ensure that the brilliant app idea is perfectly executed.
If you are an aspiring start-up founder who endeavors to build an outstanding app that doesn’t fail, then you need to read this blog. In this blog, we have talked about the things which you need to take care of while developing your app. Trust us, we are an experienced & successful mobile app development company, and this is directly coming up from our Founder’s review point. Ready for some app development advice? Here you go…
Top reasons behind the rise and the fall of an app:
You would find multiple blogs that would highlight how you can see a rise in the popularity of your app. But, this blog intends to throw some major light on the things which founders often miss out during the app development. And hence, we have highlighted the ways to rise briefly here. Keep scrolling.
In-depth research:
For any app idea to prosper, you need to perform in-depth analysis, be it of the market, competitors, keywords, marketing strategies, or anything. Before you proceed for any development, you need to have enough knowledge about the above concepts. Grab a proper understanding of how and which problems you are planning to solve with the app.
Define the target audience:
You develop an app with a specific purpose and for a specific segment of users. If you don’t solve their problem, it is of no use. Hence, right at the initial stage, you need to define your audience. This helps further to plan the design and functionality of the app accordingly.
Hiring the development partner:
Often overlooked, but your development partner has a major role to play in your app success. It is the development company who will listen to your idea and implement it in the app. If you are not satisfied with the services, you can not expect your customers will ever be. Hence, before you finalize your development partner, ensure their quality services, their work portfolio, their experience, and more.
A few other relevant and a step by step guide to developing a rising app is shared in this blog. And, for designing a classic app, you can find information on this blog.
Now let us shift to our main focus,
Things that founders often miss out during app development which leads to the fall of the developed app.
Originality:
You know that the app store is oversaturated. If you think that the audience will love your app idea, then you might be wrong. The reason, if your app doesn’t solve the problem accurately or is similar to an app that is already famous, your app might not become popular. You can not win over with the already established competitors.
And hence, if you wish to win your customer’s heart, you need to offer them a Unique Selling Proposition(USP). You can start by drafting a vision to your project idea, which mentions every single thing in detail.
You can also go for an interactive mobile app prototyping, which is another successful way of creating a USP. We, at Kody Technolab, have adopted Prototyping in our app development process and proceed further only after satisfactory prototyping is developed. Prototyping guides you with the direction of moving ahead in the process.
Speed:
An important factor while developing a mobile app that a founder often overlooks is the “Speed” of the app. Mobile app’s speed is a bane for developers. The reason being, multiple features, and factors affect the speed of an app. And above that, people’s patience for operating a mobile app is decreasing.
Users expect every function and feature to be loaded in just micro-moments, and if it doesn’t, they quickly shift to other apps that solve their purpose. Result? App abandonment. Speed performance plays a significant role in retaining and engaging the customer visiting the site. To increase the speed of an app, you can do the following,
1. Cache images:
You can cache all the images of your app, which makes it easy to restore them when the user visits the page. It reduces the traffic on the network, thereby increases the speed of the mobile app. If the images are externally stored, it may take time to restore when the user’s click.
2. Compress and resize the images:
We know that you want to boost the user experience and hence have used high-resolution images. But, high-resolution images consume a lot of memory space resulting in poor speed performance. Hence, to combat this challenge, you should compress the image without degrading the quality.
Additionally, you can resume the data templates, reduce HTTP requests, load only what is needed, add only essential features to increase the speed of an app.
Battery Consumption:
System-hogging apps are a real problem for developers. It does happen quite often that customers abandon the app because it consumes most of their phones’ battery. Hence, before you launch the app into the market, use monitoring tools to analyze the performance of the app. If your app includes some mobile ads, then it can definitely lead to a battery drain problem.
Also, the app should be capable of minimizing the activities running in the background, especially when it is not in use. Even third-party APIs affect the battery life of the phone. And therefore, it is important for a founder to understand the process in which the app will function and calculate the battery it would consume to perform a particular task.
Process Iteration:
It is difficult to build a “perfect” end-product at first go! Do you agree with us? Incorporating the features that you wish isn’t the end of the app development process. Our mobile application development advice is to understand and manage the way the app will actually operate.
Yes, you read it right, product iteration leads to success. It is important to optimize and iterate the key metrics that you have identified during the app development process.
Iteration is the process of polishing the app which you have built. Process iteration comprises the following steps, planning, designing, implementing, testing, and evaluating. You need to repeatedly test and evaluate the application’s functions and features until the final performance goal is achieved.
The main purpose behind working incrementally & iteratively is to have more room for changes and to deliver the highest-quality product in the market. We would say, process iteration is the main step that helps in identifying the gaps in the application and fulfilling it with an agile solution.
App Interaction:
Needless to say, personalized interactions are the key to conversion. People loved the traditional way of shopping, the reason being, they could interact with the merchant and have their choice of product.
Remember, how we loved customizing our Subway orders? Mobile interactions are exactly the same. No doubt people have shifted to mobile shopping, but they still expect an element that makes them feel special about their visit.
This is the expectation that many founders often overlook or miss upon while considering the app development. Micro, macro interactions, images, and animations help in humanizing the mobile experience. How the developed app looks and makes the user feel (UI/US) plays a pivotal role in defining your application’s success.
To enhance the app interaction, every designer should strive to produce easy to understand icons, keep the navigation logical, and in a proper sequence. Also, you need to consider smartphones of every size, type, and multiple holds in mind while designing the app interactions.
Few points to consider while developing an interactive mobile app are:
1. Design the keyboard that matches with the input field requirements;
2. Have a gesture recognition feature;
3. Do not hide the password;
4. Have a “Search” field option;
5. Seek customer’s permission for text input;
6. Check the app orientation;
7. Design short and interactive forms;
8. Design intuitive navigation.
The user-friendly and pleasant app experience is exactly what your customers expect. Try and use animations and images that make the app experience unique and interesting.
Sluggish Mobile App experience:
Did it ever happen with you that you tap on a functionality, go out to open the door, come back to the app, but it is still loading!!! As slow as a buggy… When you have invested your valuable time in developing an interactive app and if the app fails when the end-user is interacting, then you are failing at achieving your end goal. Prompt response, consistent flow, and intriguing navigation are what an end-user expects from an app.
You would be surprised to know that for every extra second your app takes to load a page, you are missing out on 7% of conversion opportunities. Well, you are definitely targeting user retention and not app abandonment. There are many reasons behind a sluggish user experience which includes,
Overloaded server,
Much of irrelevant data rendering,
Unoptimized Secure socket layer and Transport security layer, ,
Outdated software versions,
Faulty third-party libraries,
The design of the app,
DNS configuration issue,
Database request poorly is written and executed,
Poor code execution.
It is your duty as a founder to consider these things when developing applications. Find the root cause of the problem, and try to resolve it at the earliest. You can check upon the number of requests sent to the server and identify the delays between the response and the request. Also, you can add a reverse proxy server.
For data rendering, you can compress the images and data without disturbing the quality of graphics and videos. This will dramatically accelerate the speed of the app.
Also, regularly ensure that you are using the latest and updated version of the software versions you are using in the app. Also, have a thorough check on the third-party libraries and SDKs that you are using in the app.
The reasons and the solutions are surely not exhaustive, but definitely give you an idea about the area in which you need to focus more while developing an app. However, before the launch of the app, be sure that you have fixed all the issues that possibly can lead to the sluggish mobile app experience.
Application size:
As a founder, you always wish to develop an app that is compatible with various screen sizes and densities. And in order to do this, you stuff your app with different resolutions of images and videos, which often leads to the crashing of the application.
Having said that, there is no ideal size to define for an application. The size of the application may vary depending on the app categories. Say, for example, a game app, maybe larger in size than any other regular chatting application, because it has to include various SDKs, animations, and game assets.
The average app size for android is 11.5 MB, and for iOS app is 34.3 MB. The sizes mentioned are not the benchmark for developing an app, but a reference so that your app falls within the norms. If your app size is too large, it is likely to turn-off the users, and they may turn around to another similar application.
App Security
An unsecured app is vulnerable to hacker’s attacks. It is the primary concern that needs to be taken into account by the founder before initiating any app development. In the race of getting the top spot in the marketplace, you are likely to ignore the security issues which can destroy the app completely. Remember, how Starbucks faced a fall in the year 2014 because of the security issue?
We are here to save you from this mistake. Some of the primary reasons for data leakage are given below. Have a look…
1. Copying codes directly from the internet which may be written by hackers;
2. Not checking the cache regularly;
3. Inadequate security testing;
4. Weak or no encryption;
5. Inadequate server-side security;
6. Slow upgrades;
7. Using unauthorized API;
8. Using flawed third-party libraries;
9. Improper session management;
In order to develop a fully-secure app, you need to crack and solve all of the above-mentioned challenges. Audiences prefer apps that are secured and claim their private data protection. As a responsible founder, you should focus on this critical security factor of an application and protect it from all malicious attacks.
Conclusion:
A founder’s job goes much beyond just crafting the grounds of application development. If your developed app can solve a problem while taking care of all of the above-mentioned factors, then you are one step closer to success.
n this journey of development, you may need help from a technical co-founder or an app development company. Well, for such assistance, you can always approach us. We have adopted an agile app development process that takes care of all of the above-mentioned concerns. Additionally, you can also hire our valuable mobile app developers to get further help. We hope the blog is helpful to you in many ways. Keep helping; keep developing!
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Manav Patel
Founder
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