Optimising Mobile App Development

Every year the demand for mobile phones and mobile phone applications rises. Though application developers have been trying to optimise their apps for years, their job is still a challenge. A major difficulty in mobile app development is ensuring that the quality of their apps aren’t compromised by the sheer number of mobile users. Application developers need to make their products functional, easy to use and attractive to customers.

Though reliable high-speed Internet connections have become more readily available, network reliability for mobile devices is still patchy and erratic. As a result, mobile app development contains a new collection of problems, such as designing a mobile interface that matches the speed and reliability of a desktop, but with a tiny proportion of the resources and a host of new difficulties. These include shoddier network efficiency, render times, frames per second for video, and cross-app interactions. Therefore, it’s important that developers utilise all the aspects of the operation of the app that they do have control over. An app developer should understand application design, network availability, radio activity, and battery life work, and how they all interact, which can help make shrewder choices in creating a higher quality application. Here are some factors you should consider when trying to optimise mobile app development.

Market Research

Before even beginning to develop a mobile application, you should prepare by conducting some market research. Carefully observing the market can provide insights into your competitors, including their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. This information can help you learn from their mistakes and see what strategies work better than others. An overlooked source of market research is customer reviews, which can provide an immediate overview of what users like and don’t like about a certain application. You can make improvements to your application by observing these weaknesses and try to iron them out in your app.

Testing

Before you release it to the market, you should test your app. Having some initial idea of how users will respond to it can be extremely useful. To make sure that the app is easy and pleasing to use with the required functionality, you should test your app to make any required adjustments before making it available on the market. Once you’re satisfied with your alpha testing, you can begin the second phase of testing by releasing your application as it is to beta testers. This can guarantee that your application doesn’t have many errors or bugs. Beta versions can be released to the public for more feedback and more immediate value over a longer period of time.

Testing should focus on areas that can be conveniently changed by the development team. If there’s little chance that you’ll take action on the results of the tests, then there’s no point in testing. You should also minimise the potential risks and latency as much as possible. If the disadvantages of testing are overwhelmingly outweighed by the advantages, then testers are more likely to be motivated to test. This is achieved by finding areas where improvement is possible within the current development time frame.

A common complaint amongst mobile users is an inconsistent experience due to unexpected changes, or different versions with better service than they have access to. Therefore, it may be best for certain kinds of testing to only be done by new users, or on new versions of applications.

Data Efficiency

Mobile apps that excessively use data are much more likely to be quickly discarded and forgotten about, so it’s important to design your app in such a way that it consumes data efficiently. There are many easy ways this can be done which are frequently ignored, such as making sure a service isn’t running when it’s not needed for apps that require a service to perform work in the background. You can also release any memory when your user interface becomes hidden. Freeing UI resources at this time can substantially improve the system’s capacity for cached processes, which directly affects the quality of the user experience.

Marketing

Before your application launch, you’ll want to create a groundswell of interest to get the immense response you want. First, decide on the optimum time to start marketing. This is usually two to three weeks before the launch to give users enough time to learn about it.

An important part of marketing is thinking about how users find your apps. You might think that the main way to find applications is through the app store, and while this is a popular method, it is not by any means the only one. People are discovering apps in different ways, such as through search and search adverts. As a result, you will want to make your app easy to discover everywhere. This represents a significant shift in the way apps are discovered, necessitating mobile development teams to think about how to improve awareness of their app. This is important not only because search adverts raise visibility of the app, but promote app down
In order to gain prominence over your competitors, you shouldn’t disregard the importance of having a striking and easy to use application interface. Neglecting the user interface can affect the user experience negatively, and damage your application’s credibility. A common oversight is not ensuring that the app is fully usable on a variety of devices and mobile operating systems. There are many issues associated with displaying the app on different devices that need to be dealt with, such as by altering the media queries, JavaScript or CSS.

It’s important to keep your app simple as well. This doesn’t necessarily mean designing it in a minimalist style. What’s important is that a first-time user can just pick up the app and use it intuitively without having to consult a manual or guide. There are many ways of achieving this such as by using colours effectively. A simple app is more likely to be downloaded and regularly used.