How to Create a Successful Mobile App Starting from Scratch

There are currently 3 5 billion smartphone users worldwide, and they have between 60 and 90 apps installed on their devices For mobile app developers or anyone else interested in creating an app, this translates into a $150 billion opportunity

To take advantage of this opportunity, it’s no longer enough to simply make an app and publish it on a digital distribution platform such as Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store These days, the competition for mobile users’ attention is so fierce that app developers have to carefully plan each and every step in order to stand out

Regardless of if this is your first time embarking on an app development journey or if you have some experience with building mobile applications and want to learn something new, this article will teach you how to create a successful mobile app that users will keep coming back to over and over again

1. Conceptualize Your App Idea

Not all app ideas are equally great and worth turning into functional apps Before you start building your app, you need to verify that it doesn’t sound good only in your head It’s always a good idea to start with a bit of background research to learn more about your audience Here are some places where you can validate whether your target audience will be receptive to your app:

• Social media networks: Many app developers are reluctant to share their app ideas on social media because they worry that someone might steal them
• In most cases, such fears are completely unfounded, and they stop developers from collecting extremely valuable early feedback

• Meetups and hackathons: When you surround yourself with like-minded app developers who are trying to build mobile applications with the potential to top the charts, you become energized and inspired to make your app idea even better
• Meetups and hackathons are organized almost everywhere these days, so you just need to find one close to you and sign up
• Digital distribution platforms: Is there already a similar app published on one of the main digital distribution platforms? If there is, how closely it matches your idea? What do users like and dislike about it? When you seek answers to these and other questions, your rough app idea will start getting a more concrete shape

After a bit of research, you should be able to summarize your app idea with just one or two sentences:

• A navigation app with offline digital maps of all local shopping malls
• An app that encourages you to take a selfie every day
• It then turns the selfies into a movie
• Tinder but for finding people to do a specific activity with

A short description like this makes it clear what the main features of the app are, and you can either keep refining them on paper or, better yet, build a simple prototype to have a functional app as soon as possible

2. Create a Development Plan

Before the first line of code is written, you should already have a good idea about what it will take to build your app from scratch in terms of time and money

To accurately estimate how long it will take to develop an app, it helps to break down the development process into key stages:

• Planning: This first stage is all about defining the strategy that will make it possible to turn an app idea into a successful app, and it typically takes less than a month
• UI/UX Design: For a mobile app to be successful, it needs to have an intuitive user interface to keep users engaged
• Of course, your app’s user interface can evolve over time, but you should expect the first version to take roughly one month to create
• App Development: The actual development of your app will always be the most time-consuming step, and you should expect it to take on average four to six months, depending on the complexity of your app and the selected development approach
• Testing: Mobile app developers are not perfect, and they can make critical mistakes that must be discovered and fixed before the app is shipped
• You can expect the testing stage to take approximately one month

In total, it typically takes less than a year for an idea to become an app that’s ready to be submitted to major app stores But how much will it cost to create? To answer this question, let’s take a closer look at some of the most important factors that influence the cost of app development:

• The number of targeted platforms
• Hourly rates of developers
• Localization into different languages To get a rough estimate of how much it will cost to create your own app, you can use an online app cost calculator, and let it do all the number-crunching for you Unless you’re planning to create either a very large or very simple app, you can expect to spend around $50,000 when outsourcing the development to a relatively affordable agency

3. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP for short, is essentially the most barebones version of your app that you can distribute to early users in order to collect valuable feedback for future app development

An excellent example of an MVP is this early version of Dropbox com from 2009 As you can see, it contains only the Dropbox logo, a brief description, and a prominent download link Today, the same page includes a sign-up form, dedicated sections for teams and individuals, and a lot more

The point is that Dropbox launched as soon as they were ready to start helping users synchronize files across their devices, and the file hosting service has been evolving since then based on feedback collected from real users

Let’s summarize the benefits of building an MVP:

• Allows you to gather useful feedback very early in the development process
• Greatly reduces the time it takes to get your app to market
• Helps you create buzz around your app and attract investors
• Saves you money by steering development in the right direction
• Simplifies the app development process since there are fewer features, tasks, and people to manage