5 STEPS INVOLVED IN ANDROID APP DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

In this article, we are going to cover the 5 essential steps that are involved in Android App Development Process for the Google Android platform.

Let’s discuss the important steps in creating your very own Android App.

Android App Development Process

Step 1) Ideation

It often happens that we shortlist the ideas that we consider important and amazing. Even though these ideas seem to be amazing and brilliant, they may not necessarily fill a gap or even look to address a pain point. An idea can only be viewed in the form of a mobile application if it is able to solve a genuine problem of the target audience who are going to use this application to make their lives easier. Therefore, the idea used for the app has to be convenient and feasible. This can be determined by performing market research, doing competitor analysis, and establishing well documented and defined goals. A popular form of market research is by using?online research panels?to collect data. There are lots of ways to conduct market research, so find a method that works for you and give it a go!

A very vital part of the entire mobile application development process is going to be a thorough understanding of both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. This is because they both offer a gold mine as far as market research is concerned. Once you have filtered down your idea and specifically outlined the target audience for your app, you can go through similar apps that provide the features, see the number of reviews, and so on. Doing this will not only boost your market research but also give you a thorough understanding of the competition. After using these apps you can analyze what’s missing in them and what will make your app stand out from the competition. You will also gain an edge over your competitors after doing this.

After determining the feasibility of your idea, the next step to accomplish is to create a timeline and the specific goals that you can set out to achieve against your milestones. Your objectives or tasks will include sorting out the budget and the scope, coming up with a universal selling point, establishing the specific features that your app requires, figuring out the recent trends of machine learning and AR/VR that can be used for the app as well as its promotions and so on.

This can be a lot clearer when you set out to develop your app in the next step.

Step 2) Designing

Now that you have identified your target group, your features, your budget, as well as your timeline is figured out, it’s time to start working on the conceptualization and visualization of the basic functionality that the app provides and its user interface. There are various ways to go about the designing phase of the mobile app development process

Storyboarding may usually involve actually chalking out the user’s journey as they navigate through the user interface as well as explore different features. Here are some things that you need to remember while you are storyboarding are:

Visualize and conceptualize every layout and design of the user interface, and placing every element including banners, text boxes, buttons as well as the icons in the right place.

It is always good to have a UI as long as you are ensuring that the users expectations are not compromised

The screens of your app should clearly align with the primary objective, your user should not feel lost while using the app.

Feel free to experiment with the layout of the screen, see if changing the size of a button or the placement of the icon can aesthetically make the user interface better.

Once you are done with finalizing the look and feel of the app the next step is to get down with the technicalities. You need to figure out what APIs do you need, whether you need push notification services, what kind of analytics tools and user engagement platforms, the databases that you will require and so on. You will also be able to determine whether you need to build the app from scratch or you can use an existing app’s architecture in order to base your app on.

The final stage of designing is the prototyping phase. This phase allows you to check whether your app is living up to the expectations from the functionalities and is also getting tested by the various stakeholders that are involved in the mobile app development process. You can use multiple tools including Marvel and InVision to build a high fidelity prototype that you can get it tested for glitches and flaws in the UI/UX. Even though the prototype is a barely minimum product, it is important that you build it with the utmost care, because the prototype will be the foundation on which the developers will build your app.

Step 3) Development

While a lot of developers prefer to build the app from the ground up by themselves, there are many mobile app development platforms like GoodBarber and Shotgate that can be used to build a fully functional prototype, in order to begin with. This is the point where you start setting up a developer account on the app stores and when you plan on releasing the app. However, even before that happens the mobile app development consists of multiple phases as follows:

The Alpha Phase: This is the phase where the core functionality of the app is developed but it is not tested. At this phase, the app has a lot of bugs and glitches that need fixing.

The Beta Phase: This phase involves implementing all the major features and functionalities of the app, and the app is made to go through a round of light testing. Even though most of the bugs are fixed, a few remains. After this stage, the app can be released to a select number of users for testing and evaluation purposes.

The Release Phase: This is the final phase that comes after every bug is identified and fixed. This occurs after several rounds of testing the app can be released to the audience.

Step 4) Testing

No matter how seamless your mobile application is, that appears to you. You can never have enough rounds of testing in order to ensure that it fails proof and ready for any user. Mobile app?software testing?is something that you do during the development stage because it can be expensive to fix glitches and bugs later on when you are too deep in the development phase.

This is the phase where you thoroughly test the application and make sure that it conforms to the specifications that you initially set out to achieve.

Step 5) Launch

Once you have made sure that your app is ready for the main launch event, your next step is to launch the app on the respective app stores.

Conclusion

It is true and overwhelming that the app development process can be exhausting. It requires a heavy investment financially, as well as much amount of time, and resources are invested in. But, if you have done it right, from the start of identifying the need gap to consistently ensuring quality performance after the launch, then it is indeed a very rewarding process. A?mobile app performance testing?would be good way of testing the app while revealing any bugs during development. Hope you like this blog on Android App Development Process

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