The mobile application development market is growing at a massive rate. In this ever-evolving digital landscape, investing in a mobile app is a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs and businesses.
As per Statista, in the third quarter of 2021, mobile users downloaded approximately 27.8 billion apps from Google Play. In contrast, there were roughly 8.3 billion downloads from the Apple App Store. These numbers project the unprecedented popularity and growth of the mobile app market.
In this guide, we will dive into each and every aspect related to mobile app development along with the benefits it offers to business owners and entrepreneurs and the various types of mobile app development strategies that one can choose.
So, let’s begin with the article without any further ado!
What is mobile app development?
Mobile app development is a process for creating mobile apps that run on smartphones. These applications can be preinstalled on the device, downloaded from a mobile store, or accessed through a mobile web browser. Typically, a mobile application uses a network connection to work with remote computing resources. Thus, the process of app development involves:
- Building installable software bundles
- Implementing backend services such as data access with an API
- Testing the app on target devices
To develop scalable and robust mobile apps, you also need to consider hardware requirements, screen sizes, and other factors affecting the app development process.
Why build an app?
Mobile apps have become a necessity for every business, be it a startup or an established business. As a business owner, you can’t afford to ignore its benefits. Below are some of the ways mobile app development is benefiting businesses:
Provide more value to customers
In the past few years, the business landscape has changed significantly. Businesses now rely heavily on technology to initiate and complete transactions with consumers.
Mobile apps are an integral element of modern tech that is constantly changing how consumers shop and satisfy their needs. With the increasing pace of technological advancements, consumer expectations are also growing. Mobile apps have become a great channel for meeting those user expectations.
For instance, retail shopping is one of the key business categories that benefit the most from mobile apps. By shifting to mobile apps, you’re sure to make your goods and services more accessible and easy to use.
For instance, at Appinventiv, we built an ERP application for IKEA that gave customers the real-time status of products’ availability and collected their information to use as marketing assets. Our efforts led to the creation of a solution that is today getting adopted at over 7 more IKEA stores. The brand also touts the solution as one of the biggest sources of ROI measurement.
Modern consumer behavior prioritizes personalization and convenience, and apps make that available at the customer’s fingertips.
Build a stronger brand
The more value you offer to your customers, the more interest they develop in your brand. However, it’s impossible to achieve a deep brand experience without deliberate branding efforts. This is where branded mobile apps come into the picture.
Mobile apps are becoming an innate part of our everyday lives. App owners can utilize this channel to their brand’s benefit. The more branding elements you get right within your app, the better the impact you can expect on brand marketing results. You can even collect data from this app to understand your target audience better and improve your brand marketing strategy.
Achieve increased customer engagement level
One of the best ways to increase revenue generation and brand awareness is to focus on increasing the customer engagement level. If you successfully boost how frequently your customers engage with your brand, you will experience an increase in ROI, customer lifetime value, and other important metrics. For app owners looking to increase the engagement level, they need to include certain features in the app.
Perhaps the most important for them is segmented targeting. This includes creating multiple user categories and controlling the type of content delivered to each segment of users. User segmentation allows you to provide accurate recommendations, send personalized messages, and understand your customers’ journey better.
Other in-app elements that can help achieve higher customer engagement level include loyalty programs, continuous features updates, and discounts. Apart from the features, it’s crucial to pay attention to UI/UX design. A poor UI may compel your users to uninstall your app and move to a similar and better app.
Have a competitive edge in your niche
In the ever-changing digital landscape, it’s pretty tough to keep up with your competitors. A mobile app gives you a significant edge over your competitors.
Compared to conventional websites and digital platforms, mobile apps do a much better task when it comes to offering speedy communication and enhanced customer experience. Considering the number of ways a mobile app strategy can improve your business processes, its overall effect on your revenue generation will eventually become evident.
Build a personalized marketing channel
Another area of business that can benefit a lot from a business mobile app development is the marketing department. The first and foremost advantage digital marketers enjoy when businesses opt for mobile apps is the direct access to user information.
The data collected from user sessions within the app can be very helpful in improving your marketing efforts and campaigns. Once your marketers get access to all the data they need, an app allows them to deliver more effective and personalized content to users as compared to other traditional marketing channels.
How to develop a mobile application?
If you’re wondering how to develop an app or give an edge to your existing business with a new application, here are certain steps you should consider before the development begins. These steps are crucial to the success of your application, so don’t skip over them.
Define your goals
When starting with the app development process, you must have clarity regarding your goals.
What are you setting out to achieve? What problems are you trying to solve with your application? Your goals will ultimately determine your entire app development process. If these aren’t clearly defined from the start, it’s easy to get lost along the way once you start building your app.
Don’t set any goals – set measurable goals. Otherwise, you won’t be using your time and resources effectively. You can set goals related to the end-users as well as your business. Every goal should have clear KPIs to measure and track its success.
For instance, let’s say you want to build an app for your e-commerce shop. Your goal might be to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates on mobile devices. To ensure that you achieve this goal, you must know your current abandonment rates to measure them against the numbers when you eventually launch your own app.
Research the target market
When developing mobile applications for your business, you need to conduct research and find out more about your target market. This will help you understand how consumers interact with brands, leading players, market dynamics, and more. You should also check user reviews for top apps in the market. This will help you come up with a better product.
You also need to understand your target audience. Learn about your users’ location, average age, and the types of devices they use.
Decide your app features
It’s crucial to have the right features integrated into your app. You have to identify the features that are necessary to serve your users in the best possible way. While adding popular features to your app might sound attractive, unnecessary features may leave your users frustrated.
Furthermore, the more features you add, the more it will add to the cost and lengthen the mobile development time. So, it’s advisable to focus on simplicity in the early development stages.
Choose intuitive UI/UX design
What is the first thing your customers see when they open an application? It’s not the features but the way your app looks and interacts with users. User-friendly and easy control of app’s features is what makes it appealing to its users. The app functionality is useless if the app users are not able to actually implement it in real life. This will leave them frustrated, and they will move on to another application.
While user interface (UI) refers to how your mobile app represents itself to the user, user experience (UX) is how the user interacts with the app and give
