10 Steps Guide to Build your First Mobile App

Creating an app can be an intimidating experience. You may be discouraged by high potential costs, technical teams, complex project management, months of work, and many costly risks among the way. If that sounds familiar, this guide is for you.

The important part is to get started. This guide will walk you through the essential steps.

Step 1: A great imagination leads to a great app

Want to build an app but don’t have an app idea? What you really need are problems, and they’re everywhere!

When you look around you, every product and service you use were all created to solve a problem.

So look for problems in your daily life and list each one of them. Then start to think on how you can resolve them.

Step 2: Identify the need

Validation will prove that a demand exists for your app.

Seek user interest; look for the number of people seeking out what you’re trying to do.

To create a successful mobile app, you need to be clear about:

• application target users
• mobile platforms and devices to be supported
• revenue model

Step 3: Lay out the flow and features

Detail your product onto a document, or if you want to go the extra mile, use a wireframing tool. Remember to be as detailed as possible. Include the flow the user will navigate the app as well all the features envisioned.

Step 4: Remove non-essential features

Start looking closely at features that you can remove. Do not build features in the first version that are „nice to have” and can always be added later as an update. This will help keep the initial costs of development down and also help you get to market quicker.

Step 5: Put design first

Design is not just about how your app looks, but it’s about how a user will experience the app. Vinod Khosla explains it: Design is a way of making technology useful. Designing your app is yet another significant factor responsible for success of an app in the market. An app developer should concentrate on the UI design, multi-touch gestures for touch-enabled devices and consider platform design standards as well.

Step 6: Hire a designer/developer

Selecting the right approach for developing an app is highly important. Ideally, app development approach must be in accordance with the time and budget constraints of a client.

Seek a development company that has great design talent and a solid development team. Check their portfolio.

You can talk to us. 11Digits knows that successful projects are based on:  researched content, creative, intuitive and friendly user design. high-quality coding and development, and effective marketing strategies.

Step 7: Create developer accounts

You must register for a developer account with the respective app stores to be able to sell your app through their platform. Google’s Android charges $25 a year and Apple charges $99 annually. You have the option of registering as an individual or as a company, if you already have one formed.

Step 8: Integrate analytics

How can we understand the way to improve the level of success of particular app? We definitely need to have some metrics, to gather the numbers and to analyze them. This is actually what analytics is — the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Tracking and analyzing their experience is more important for your business rather than a handful of data that does not pay off. Gathering relevant data will only help encourage better updates and functionality.

Analytics help you track downloads, user engagement and retention for your mobile app. Make sure you use tools such as Flurry, which is available for free, and Localytics, that has a free and paid version.

Step 9: Get feedback and improve

The ninth step of this guide is about feedback. Since your app goes live, the first set of customers usage and behavior will give you insight into how to improve and enhance your app. Enhancements and changes are constant.

Step 10: Introduce great features

You will know through analytics and feedback whether the features are relevant anymore.

Once you’re ready to start, you must also know that building a mobile app is the easiest part. Getting customers is where the challenge lies.