Creating a mobile app to accompany a brand or product is pretty much expected these days, but lucrative success is very rare, even if it is worth the roll of the mobile dice. The good news is that, with some research and know-how, launching a successful app can be well within your reach.
The first step to success is dedicating time to research and troubleshooting. The more effort you invest into these developmental steps, the simpler and smoother the later phase of development will be. Start with exploring the market you are targeting with your app and see what is driving customer spending. Check on market trends and how your potential competition reacts to them. This will help you better position your app to meet these trends more efficiently.
Concentrate On Your Objectives
To ensure a successful app launch, you need to know how to define the objectives of both your app and your launch. Once you’ve answered those questions, set some measurable goals and strive to fulfil them. The ultimate success would be either worldwide adoption or a successful sale of your app and IP, and the key to all of this is to know your demographics first. Once you have this vital piece of information, you will find the planning stage much easier to navigate.
Design and Development
After you have ensured that you have a place in the market for your ideas and products, start implementing and building them. Most apps take an average of three months to develop, but very few are ever actually finished. The most important aspects of this step are to decide on which platform the app will be released; if the app will be native, Android or iOS exclusive; or if it will be cross-platform. The attitude needed for any successful app development needs to be continual feedback, testing, and improvement.
Testing, Testing
As soon as you have a build or prototype available, you need to start testing and generating feedback. Using a QA engineer is the most reliable solution for this stage of the process. When you set out the testing process, specific goals and concerns need to be clearly laid out, and results need to be scrutinized. Knowing about issues and being able to dedicate the appropriate amount of time to fixing or circumventing them could be the difference between a huge hit or a big fail.
Think About Deploying a Beta Release
When all the features have been set up and your app is ready for the big wide world, consider creating a closed beta release of the app to a few specific users with the aim of testing your app in a real-world environment, but without the dangers of errors in real users hands. Just like the previous step, this release should be carried out with the aim of collecting data about the app user interface experience and functionality and facilitating any last-minute fixes that can be implemented before the real launch.
Launch Day
This is the day you have been working towards. Your only goal on this day is to publish your app’s download button. Everything else should have been tabled and attended to by now. Now is the time to launch an all-out campaign to boost recognition and adoption of your app. Whether you’ve opted to advertise through traditional channels, SEO marketing, or social media platforms, your main goal is to motivate for that download as loudly as possible.
The main key to success is knowledge and gathering as much knowledge before coding your first line will be more beneficial than anything else you could do. Use this information to make informed decisions about the market, your plans, and even when you decide to sell or call it quits. Never forget, even after your app is released and is a smash hit, it’s never time to stop innovating.
