Time is money and modern entrepreneurs know it pretty well. In today’s fiercely competitive market, it is important to bring your ideas into the market without delays.
That’s why appreneurs should consider strategies to save time on the app development and launch process. The faster you launch your app, the more leverage you get over your competitors. It’s that simple! In a rapidly changing market, a speedy app development can make a lot of difference.
It’s quite logical too. If there are delays in launching your app, the time your app hits the playstore, the market rudiments may have already changed. So, in the race of quality and speed, some app development tips can be useful.
Here are some delightful ways on how to save app development time.
How to Accelerate Your Mobile or Web App Development Process?
Each app that you develop will come with its own set of unique opportunities and pain points. You’d not find a cure-it-all magic potion to expedite the process.
Most processes are well-grounded on research, which can speed up your mobile app development process, without compromising the app’s performance. Here are the top tips for building apps more efficiently.
1. Brainstorm and Ask Relevant Questions
Don’t just plunge, plan well. The adage of planning well always helps. Before you start with your app development, you need to get your team together to brainstorm and ask relevant questions.
What’s the development platform—iOS, Android, or both?
What are the tastes and preferences of your target users?
What are the unique features that will make your app outshine the competition?
When you ask the pertinent questions, it helps to give a comprehensive base to start researching. The insights will be critical to planning your app development. As you know—it helps to get your foot right!
2. Reuse When You Can—Avoid Reinventing the Wheel
Every web app development journey is unique. However, many of your apps will have standard features. When developing an app, you can look at reusing platforms, frameworks, and code libraries.
Reusability often leverages domain knowledge. It also saves time as you can avoid re-creating or re-validating general solutions to recurring app requirements or design challenges. The best part is that it improves productivity and enhances quality.
3. Incorporate Scalability and Sustainability in Your App Design
App development, be it for the mobile or the web, is not a straightforward process. You need to consider numerous facets, and one of them would be scalability.
Using a scalable app is quite beneficial. It offers increased agility, flexibility, and sustainability. It would be quite short-sighted to disregard working on developing a scaling strategy.
You may choose to develop the app in a modular way. Such development allows you to upgrade over time without impacting the other parts of the system. Developers often prefer to use a development framework, providing a structure for the codebase.
4. Thorough Quality Assurance (QA) Before Starting Development
You may prefer to use mobile API integration over developing features from scratch, as they reduce costs and time-to-develop, and enrich app functionality. Some famous API examples include Google Maps API, Facebook API, and Skyscanner API.
When you decide to integrate APIs, you would prefer performing a round of QA on the APIs before beginning the app development work. Why?
APIs may have bugs, which could slow down your project. It’s not a good idea to leave QA to the end of the project. When you have a list of test cases ready at the beginning of the project, you can check every API endpoint that you plan to include. The process will give the API provider sufficient time to fix bugs, and you will get ample time to implement workarounds wherever necessary.
5. Seek Advice from Privacy and Security Experts
Users are getting demanding about privacy and security. Even if your users weren’t serious, you know it is good to build a secure product.
It’s an excellent idea to consult a trusted privacy and security expert, who can walk you through facets that you need to incorporate into the app. You may also choose to budget additional time for security testing into your QA plan.
6. Focus on Creating an MVP
Your dream app project is not a small undertaking. What if you’ve developed the complete product and then realize that there’s no market for it?
So, before you move ahead with developing one, you may prefer to launch a minimum viable product (MVP). It is a low-risk and lower-cost way of testing your app’s concept on the market.
When you release the MVP, you get the opportunity to start collecting timely user feedback. The invaluable perspectives can augment the app functionality and also increase user download and retention rates. What’s more? It will reveal if there isn’t any market for your app.
7. Cross-platform Tools Shrink Development Time in Half
When you work with major platforms simultaneously, you save development time. It also doesn’t restrict your potential audience on counts of a single platform. Cross-platform development allows you to target multiple mobile platforms with the same codebase.
The process saves app development time that you’d typically spend rewriting, translating, and re-compiling your code to work across different platforms. Some of the popular cross-platform development tools include Xamarin and Flutter SDK.
8. Get Agile
For the appreneurs who love to work smarter—the adoption of Agile methodology can help. When you choose Agile for your mobile app development project, you can enjoy a more streamlined app development process with faster delivery.
The Agile approach places a strong emphasis on people and collaboration, enabling them to understand customers better. When you get early user feedback, it helps to tweak features and functionalities early. As a result, you can enjoy better retention rates and enhanced ROI.
9. Wireframe Ideas Before Writing Code
A wireframe is a skeletal layout of how your app can look. It typically doesn’t include actual images or text, but it gives you a clear idea of the structure and placement of everything.
It extends a robust base to refine your app concept fixing any UX or design glitches quickly and efficiently. For creating digital wireframes, you can use Adobe Photoshop or wireframing tools such as Balsamiq, WireframePro, UXPin, or InVision.
10. Design Review Before Planning Sprints
Scrum teams offer one of the top mobile app development tips—to break down allotted tasks into actionable, aka sprints. Design sprints extend a visual walkthrough of your app and take around a week to complete the process. The app idea gets validated by prospective users.
The process offers critical insights into whether users value a feature, how they use it, and the app’s pain points. At the end of the sprint, you should have a partially or fully complete shippable product.
11. Get a Helping Hand
When you are ideating on your app project, it’s wise to do a SWOT analysis. The insights can help you to reflect on whether any tasks fall outside your area of expertise.
Picture this—you have all in-house developers who are experts at Android development. Let’s consider you choose to launch your new app on both Android and iOS.
Now, your in-house developers may find development challenging as iOS may be a gray area for them. When in unfamiliar territory, it’s wise to look out for an experienced development agency that can walk you through the development process.
The Final Say
To speed up the development process, don’t rush. That’s not an odd recommendation—it’s the best one. You need to plot down your steps, research what works best for you, and streamline your processes.
When you get your basics right, you can get your app out in time to dazzle your audience. The first step is to choose the right strategies, which will help you enjoy your dream app development journey.