Entrepreneurs and businesses that develop mobile apps are quite familiar with the continuous struggle between quality and speed. During a mobile app development, the extra-long development cycles compared to the traditional web apps, are highly problematic for entrepreneurs and developers. And when choosing which one to market can be the huge difference between runaway success and a product that will never make it off the shelf.
Fortunately, there are several resources nowadays that can be utilized to speed up the app development process. So, if you are looking to create mobile apps without frustrating long development cycle, here are some great ideas to hack the mobile app development timeline.
Before you jump ahead to the time-consuming process of creating mobile apps, it is smart to use a low-fidelity wireframe to plan and map out the layout of your app from an architectural and design viewpoint. Low fidelity wireframes, in contrast with high-fidelity wireframes, should save you more time since they’re rough blueprints. They include less detail and are more abstract.
Wireframes give programmers a better idea of the features and functionalities that you wish to build and will provide your UX designer more clues in how to design the interface. Getting everyone unified and on the same page will save you a good amount of time.
Instead of entering the market with a robust, fully formed product, consider launching only a minimum of a viable product, or MVPs, to enter the market immediately. Quickly start collecting data with build-measure-learn feedback.
Use the collected feedback to constantly adjust the development process. Operate on very short sprints or interative cycles, where new updates are released in 2 – 4 week periods.
Consider outsourcing some of your development efforts if your app requires some level of coding. Outsourcing it to developers is usually more efficient than getting your in-house development team to do it. This is particularly true if you are coding add-ons to the core product or just coding versions for different devices.
For instance, your in-house programmers are knowledgeable in the development of Android apps, but you also want to launch for iOS. Rather than forcing them to struggle through iOS development, consider hiring a team with proven experience like netgenapps.com. By doing this, you are also ensuring that your in-house team is concentrating on their main operations.
Xamarin and Adobe PhoneGap are cross-platform hybrid solutions that allow you to use single codebase in order to target several platforms, instead of writing native code for separate platforms. With it, you get to build one and get 2 apps, for both iOS and Android platforms.
However, hybrid apps do not come without their disadvantages. These apps take a substantial amount of memory and handle animation with less fluidity. Some startups use them to immediately penetrate the market and then later replaced them with native apps in order to offer a more robust solution.
Once you have built the core product, it is time for you to think about how your mobile app would effectively engage your clients. Mobile engagement platforms are full of pre-made applets which you can add to core products without additional coding.
These kinds of applets usually include new feature tours, sharing tools, feedback tools, and special offer notifications and prompts to convert clients from free to premium.
Automating your mobile application testing is the best way to have a fast development cycle while also offering quality and secure products. Through app testing automation, you can run various tests simultaneously, which would otherwise take hours to complete when done manually.
By speeding up the testing process, you’ll be able to expand the test coverage in the same amount of time, plus you will be more confident that your app is bug-free. One of the most popular automated testing software available on the market today is Appium which is an open-source test automation framework for use with a hybrid, native and mobile web apps for Android and iOS.
