Best Practices for Mobile App Development

By NIIT Editorial

Published on 11/02/2021

7 minutes

Mobile apps are the lifeline of people in the 21st century. As of writing, there are about 5.22 billion mobile phone users in the world most of which are smart and run on apps. The global mobile app industry accounts for a $190 billion revenue (2020) which points to the volume of interest from the public at large. With the total number of apps on both Android and Apple play stores well beyond the 2 million mark, there are a couple of industry-standard guidelines that dictate how mobile apps should be developed. Let us explore some of them, shall we!

Break Down Large Milestones into Smaller Ones

The System Development Life Cycle of mobile apps includes a lot of rigmarole. From research to design, development and the quality assurance, ad-hoc changes are almost always an expected finality. Therefore, it is wise for project managers and their subordinates to breakdown tasks into short-term goals for better initialisation. Daily morning team-huddles can thereafter target what is to be completed on a day-to-day basis.

Prioritize Procedural Development Over Completion

Yes the deadlines are there for a reason, to push the teams to innovate products, and reach the market for the first round of customer feedback. But the urge to strike through your bucket list ASAP often results in avoidable blunders. It is always recommended to do things right in the first instance. Go back to the drawing board and revise the designs if you think there is going to be road-bump later in the ride. If you get stuck anytime remember the golden rule of mobile app development, iterate, test and improve.

User Experience is King

The audience holds the ultimate power to vote up or strike down the app. They will do this based on their experience with the user interface. Is it intuitive enough? Does it self-direct or encourage people as per their natural tendency to react to in-app signages and directions? Moreover, what is the loading time of the app? Have you abided by the general principles of minimalism that populist opinion has grown used to. Finding answers to such questions is key as you venture to refine the UI of your app.

App Store Optimisation

Native mobile platforms, namely Apple and Google have their respective developer guidelines to aid professionals in the right direction. Any deviation from this path, is a risk towards a potential blacklisting of your app. Therefore, do your best and ensure complete dedication to abiding to such guidelines.

Rigorously Test the App

The more you test the more you would get to know the inadequacies of the app. It is better to debug the application earlier than let users expose the same in full view of online shaming. Revising your features based on the feedback is another thing, but never let the reputation of your app reach a stage where your app store ratings fall due to detectable concerns.

Update Yes, Too many Updates, No

As you make inroads towards market share capitalisation after launching your mobile app, software updates have to be prioritized. Even if you land rave reviews on the playstore, it doesn’t mean there is no scope for improvement. In fact, that is when you need to be on toes to integrate the latest technologies so users get the best functionality possible.

Beef Up the Security

With users banging on the heels of tech firms for privacy mobile app developers have come to realize the importance of enabling security benchmarks such as end-to-end encryption. In addition to this, 2 factor authentication, and sign-in alerts are a few other things people have come to expect from their everyday apps. It would be lucrative for developers to pay close attention to keeping mobile app security at the cutting edge of emerging technology.