Application development process flow spans over six key phases.

Mobile Development Process

Strategy 1

Analysis and
2
Planning

UI/UX Design
3

App
4 Development

Testing
5

6 Deployment and
Support

Strategy
The first step in the mobile app development process is to define your strategy for evolving
your idea. Although the objectives of one app may differ from those of another, there is still
an app-specific impact on the mobility strategy that must be addressed during the
development process.
In this phase, you will:

   Identify the app users

   Research the competition
   Establish the app’s goals and objectives
   Select a mobile platform for your app

Analysis and Planning

At this step, your app concept begins to take shape and develops into a full-fledged project.
The process of analysis and planning begins with the definition of use cases and the capture
of precise functional requirements.

Prepare a design when you've recognized the needs for your app. This involves prioritising
the needs of the mobile app and categorising them into delivery milestones. If time,
resources, or money are an issue, establish your minimum viable product (MVP) and
prioritise it for the first launch.
UI / UX Design
The purpose of an app’s design is to deliver seamless and effortless user experiences
with a polished look.
The success of a mobile app is determined based on how well users are adopting and
benefiting from all its features. The goal for mobile app UI / UX design is creating
excellent user experiences making your app interactive, intuitive, and user-friendly.
While polished UI designs will help with early adoption, your app must have intuitive
user experiences to keep app users’ engaged.

Information Architecture & Workflows

The first step of your mobile app design process is to determine the data your mobile
app will display to the users, the data it will collect, user interactions with the finished
product, and the user journeys within the app.
For companies, enterprise mobile solutions have users with different roles and
privileges, and it is essential to incorporate these rules as part of your app’s
information architecture. Workflow diagrams help identify every possible interaction
a user has with the app and the app’s navigation structure.

Wireframes
Mobile app designers often start app design with sketches on paper. Wireframes are
the digital form of sketches. Wireframes are conceptual layouts, also referred to as
low-fidelity mockups—they give visual structure to your app’s functional
requirements.
With wireframes, the focus is more on aesthetics and user experience, not on color
schemes and styles. Creating wireframes is a quick and cost-effective approach for
designing app layouts and iterating through them in the design review process. While
creating wireframes you should consider device specific design. So whether your app
is used on iPhone, iPad, or Android phone and tablets; it provides intuitive and device
specific user experiences.

Style Guide
Style guides are “living documents” where an app’s design standards from your
company’s branding rules down to the navigation icons, are documented.
Style guides include:

 What font family will your app’s text use?

 What will the color scheme be?
 How will your company brand be reflected in the app design?
Style guides contribute to an app’s design strategy. Establishing a style guide early on
as part of your mobile app development process improves the productivity of
your mobile app developers. At the same time, following a style guide will help keep
your app’s look and feel consistent. As part of your app design, you should consider
app design guidelines from Apple for iOS app and from Google for Android apps.

Mockups
Mockups, or high-fidelity designs, are the final renderings of your app’s visual design.
Mockups are created by applying your style guide on to the app wireframes. As your
app’s design begins to finalize, expect further modifications to its information
architecture, workflow, and aesthetics. Adobe Photoshop is the most popular tool for
creating high-fidelity mockups.
Prototype
While mockups display your mobile app’s functionality using static designs, these can
turn into click-thru prototypes with tools like Invision and Figma. Prototypes are
highly useful for simulating the user experience and the app’s workflows expected
from the finished product. While prototype development can be time-consuming, the
efforts are well worth it, as they offer early-stage testing of your app’s design and
functionality. Often, prototypes help identify modifications to the app’s proposed
functionality.
Some companies prefer even doing prototypes at a wireframing stage, especially when
an app’s functional requirements are not well thought out. Or, there is a need to
review the app’s proposed functionality with a focus group.

4. App Development
Planning remains an integral part of this phase in the mobile app development process.
Before actual development/programming efforts start, you will have to:

 define the technical architecture,

 pick a technology stack, and
 define the development milestones.

A typical mobile app project is made up of three integral parts: back-end/server

technology, API(s) and the mobile app front-end.

Back-End/Server Technology
This part includes database and server-side objects necessary for supporting functions
of your mobile app. If you are using an existing back-end platform, then modifications
may be needed for supporting the desired mobile functionality.

API
An Application Programming Interface (API) is a method of communication between
the app and a back-end server/database.

Mobile App Front-End

The front-end is the native mobile app an end-user will use. In most cases, mobile
apps consist of interactive user experiences that use an API and a back-end for
managing data. In some cases, when an app needs to allow users to work without
internet access, the app may utilize local data storage.
You can utilize almost any web programming language and databases for the back-
end. For native mobile apps, you have to choose a technology stack required by each
mobile OS platform. iOS apps can be developed using Objective-C or Swift
programming language. Android apps are primarily built using Java or Kotlin.
There is more than one programming language and technology stack for building
mobile apps —the key is picking a technology stack that is best suited for your mobile
app.
Mobile technologies advance much faster with new versions of mobile platforms.
Furthermore, new mobile devices are released every few months. With platforms and
devices rapidly changing, agility is essential for building mobile apps within timelines
and budgets. If time-to-market is a priority, use an agile development approach. This
approach supports frequent software releases with completed functionality. Defining
development milestones as part of the agile development plan supports developing
your mobile application in iteration.
As each development milestone completes, it is passed on to the app testing team for
validation.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE PROGRAMMING

LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGY STACK FOR

BUILDING MOBILE APPS —THE KEY IS PICKING A

TECHNOLOGY STACK THAT IS BEST SUITED FOR

YOUR MOBILE APP.CLICK TO TWEET

5. Testing
Performing thorough quality assurance (QA) testing during the mobile app
development process makes applications stable, usable, and secure. To ensure
comprehensive QA testing of your app, you first need to prepare test cases that
address all aspects of app testing.
Similar to how use cases drive the process of mobile app development, test cases drive
mobile app testing. Test cases are for performing test steps, recording testing results
for software quality evaluation, and tracking fixes for retesting. A best practice
approach is involving your QA team in the Analysis and Design stages. The
familiarity with your app’s functional requirements and objectives will help produce
accurate test cases.
Your app should undergo the following testing methods, to deliver a quality mobility
solution.

User Experience Testing

A critical step in mobile app testing is to ensure that the final implementation matches
the user experience created by the app design team. Visuals, workflow, and
interactivity of your app are what will give your end users first-hand impression of
your app. Make sure that your app employs consistent fonts, style treatments, color
scheme, padding between data, icon design, and navigation. Ensuring that your app
matches the original design guidelines will have a direct impact on its user adoption!
Functional Testing
The accuracy of your mobile app functionality is critical to its success. It’s difficult to
predict every end user’s behavior and usage scenario.
The functionality of your app should be tested by as many users to cover as many
potential testing conditions as possible. You might be surprised to catch bugs when
two different users test the same feature but get varied outcomes. For example, both
users can fill out the same form, but they both might enter different data—which
could lead to discovering a defect.
The purpose of functional testing is to ensure that users can use your app’s features
and functionality without any issues. It can be broken down further into system testing
(the app working as a whole), and unit testing (individual functions of the app
operating correctly).
If you are building an app for iOS and Android mobile platforms, then your functional
testing should include a feature comparison between both versions of your mobile
app.

Performance Testing
There are many quantitative criteria to use for measuring the performance of your app.

 How well is your app responding to the user requests?

 How fast are the app’s screens loading?
 Is your app draining the phone battery or causing memory leaks?
 Does your app leverage network bandwidth efficiently?
 Is the size of your app bigger than what it should be?

Even when your app passes basic performance criteria, test the app, API, and backend
for load by simulating the maximum number of concurrent users. Your app should be
able to handle the load and perform well even when usage spikes.

Security Testing
Security is of utmost concern for enterprise mobile apps. Any potential vulnerability
can lead to a hack. Many companies hire outside agencies to perform thorough
security testing on their applications. Your QA and development teams can take a few
simple measures to make your app secured.
If your app requires users to log in, these log in sessions should be tracked on the
device and the backend. User sessions should be terminated by the system when a user
has remained idle for an extended time (typically ten mins or less on a mobile app). If
your app stores user credentials on the device to make it convenient for them to re-
login, then you must ensure using a trusted service. For example, the development
platform for iOS apps provide the Keychain feature that can be used for storing a
user’s account details for a specific app.
Data entry forms within your mobile app should be tested to ensure there is no data
leakage.

Device and Platform Testing

On average, new mobile devices enter the market every 12 months with new
hardware, firmware, and design. Mobile operating systems are updated every few
months.
Multiple mobile device manufacturers like Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola use the
Android platform, but they customize the platform for their mobile devices (since
Android is open source). The devices come in different sizes and shapes.
Compare that to Apple, which has a lot more controlled environment, since they
control both hardware and the OS. However, there are multiple iPhone & iPad (Apple
iOS) devices out on the market.
This is where testing during the mobile app development process differs significantly
from web app testing. You can get away by testing your web app just on the Chrome
browser in a Windows environment. But your mobile app has to be tested on multiple
mobile devices or device simulators to ensure smooth working of your app for all
users.
The complexity of mobile app testing on all mobile devices, ongoing support costs,
and headaches of mobile device management are primary reasons why companies
tend to build their enterprise mobile apps for a single mobile platform (and often
provide mobile devices to their users). In our experience, most companies tend to
develop their enterprise mobile app first with Apple’s iOS mobile platform; only
where needed they build an app for the Android platform.
Testing is imperative to an app’s future success; it encompasses a substantial section
of our overall mobile app development process. Having a comprehensive mobile
testing strategy is a must for delivering a quality mobile app.
During the testing phase, there are many ways for distributing your app development
builds to the testers. The most common approach with iOS apps is using
the Testflight and for Android apps via email or Over The Air (OTA) installs.

6. Deployment & Support

Releasing a native mobile app requires submitting your app to the app stores, Apple
App Store for iOS apps and Google Play for Android apps. However, you will need a
developer account with Apple App Store and Google Play Store before launching your
mobile app.
An app’s release in the app store requires preparing metadata including:

 Your app’s title

 Description
 Category
 Keywords
 Launch icon
 App store screenshots

Once submitted in the Apple App Store, iOS apps go through a review process which
may take from a few days to several weeks depending on the quality of your app and
how closely it follows Apple’s iOS development guidelines. If your app requires users
to log in, then you will need to provide Apple with a test user account as part of the
release process.
There isn’t any review process with Android apps, and they become available in the
app store within a few hours of submission.
After your app becomes available in the app stores, monitor its usage through mobile
analytics platforms and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring your
app’s success. Frequently check crash reports, or other user reported issues.
Encourage users to provide your company with feedback and suggestions for your
app. Prompt support for end-users and frequently patching the app with improvements
will be vital to keeping users engaged. Unlike web apps where patch releases can be
available to app users instantly, mobile app updates will have to go through the same
submission and review process as the initial submission. Moreover, with native
mobile apps, you have to continually stay on top of technology advancements and
routinely update your app for new mobile devices and OS platforms.