Building your first app can be a really intimidating process, but the right approach can lead you on your way of ideas and set up a fully functional and successful application. Be it an issue that needs to be solved, a new game that needs to be made, or to launch your new business, creating an app incorporates creativity, technical skills, and strategic planning.
This is the quick guide on how to create your first app, from idea generation through launch. This will ensure that you go through your app idea with confidence and support you in moving forward from being an idea to becoming a reality.
Step 1: Define Your App Idea
The very first thing you do when you want to build any app is to define your idea clearly. And as such, you start asking yourself such questions as follows:
What problem does your app solve?
- To whom will your app appeal?
- What are the features you will offer in your app?
- You’re just beginning so don’t worry about the technical details of your application.
At least, however you should have a very clear idea of why you’re making this thing and what it is for. You surely don’t want too much complexity in your application for your first. Your idea has to be as simple and focused as possible.
Identify the Market
On the good idea, do further market research: are there applications already in the market? Analyze competitors’ applications as a foundation to understand areas that have conceptual gaps and areas that give opportunities to refine your idea or find a totally different direction. Browse in App stores, Industry blogs, and social media as your way of capturing user demands and trends going forward.
Step 2: Planning and Goal Setting
App development is planning. In this stage, you should do all of the following:
- Sketches of your app’s rough feature and functionality.
- A rough timeline for every single phase: design, development, testing, and launch.
- Set up targets such as downloads, user engagement, and revenue.
Main Features and MVP
If you start with an idea of MVP that, basically speaking, it’s your software product’s minimum version with only the core features necessary to solve the main problem, then after deploying the live application, you can get feedback and iterate in real data.
Common should have at least the following:
- User log in and registration
- Push notifications
- In-app advertisement/purchases
- Any other services integration: payment gateways, social media, etc.
Determine what is important for the first release and hold some features in reserve.
Step 3: Design the App Appearance
Write no code. Take some time to sketch out a basic visual definition of how your app should look and function. You don’t have to be an expert designer for this reason; rough sketches on paper or a wireframe will be enough to define the UI and UX.
Wireframes and User Flow
Start with some wireframes, which for this project, would be the simplest outline of each screen that you’ll have within your application. This will give you an overview of the structure that will be experienced by a user.
Lastly, you are supposed to come up with a user flow diagram; this implies various ways in which users will interact with your app. This can imply sign up, login with one you already have, purchase something, and accomplish a task. User flows ensure your application will give your users a feeling of intuitive flow to help navigate through it.
UI/UX Tools
Do you need designing tools that help to create high fidelity mockups? Upcoming is a list of popular and most used UI/UX designing tools:
- Figma: It is a web-based user interface designing tool that enables us to collaborate with other people.
- Sketch: It’s one very common designing tool through which we first outline and then design our app user interface or prototype.
- Adobe XD: A versatile wireframing, designing, and prototyping tool.
Step 4: Choose Your Development Approach
And now that you have a concept and a design, it’s time to decide what to build your app with. Well, there are so many ways of developing, depending on your skills, time, and budget.
Native vs. Cross-Platform Development
First you must determine whether you want to create a natively engineered app-one customized for one platform, like iOS or Android-or a cross-platform app-one that works on many platforms, but born of the same code base.
- Native Apps: The native apps run natively. One can even argue that they are the best to use because they are developed according to specifications for each platform. However, it gets expensive and time-consuming to develop for both iOS and Android.
- Cross-platform apps: If you choose cross-platform frameworks, like React Native, Flutter, or Xamarin, it will both save you time as well as money in getting the liberty of once-written code and deploying on iOS and Android.
Do It Yourself or Hire a Developer?
If you have some coding experience, you can really build the application yourself. Here are a few beginner-friendly programming languages and frameworks:
- Swift to code for the iOS
- Kotlin for Android
- JavaScript (React Native) for a cross-platform app
You may not have coding as your strongest part. You might want to spend more time on the business perspective. You probably just want someone else to handle this niche section of app development. You might be looking for a professional developer or a development team. You can find freelance developers on Upwork or Freelancer, or even contract an app development agency.
Step 5: Start Developing the App
After you have chosen an app development method, you can begin creating an app. Here is a general summary of the steps that are followed in the process.
1. Front-End Development
This is designing the part of the application that the users will actually interact with, so it’s called user interface (UI). In effect, it designates what the layout is going to look like, what the buttons are, what the forms look like, what the animations are, etc. Depending on which framework you use-React Native or Flutter, as an example-you are writing code that is going to render the visual elements of the application.
2. Back-End Development
In a nutshell-this is all the data processing and storage that goes on the back-end. These are things such as databases, servers and APIs. So, therefore, all of things; authentication for any user, storing user data, and interactions between the app and other services (for example, payment processing, cloud storage) are handled on the back-end.
Among the most well-known technologies used for the back-end are:
- Node.js (JavaScript)
- Ruby on Rails
- Firebase for real-time databases and authentication
3. Testing and Debugging
The testing of it is something you should do before launching your app, as it helps ensure that it works on different devices and screens without any errors and then offers a smooth experience to the user. There basically are three types of testing:
- Functionality testing: To make sure all features work.
- Usability testing: How easy or tough is it for a user to navigate through your application.
- Testing of performance: Check how fast an app loads, responds, and waits in load times.
- Compatibility testing: The os and devices which the app must work in.
For example, you can test your app on simulators and actual devices via Xcode for iOS and Android Studio for Android. You can also test it with beta testers or through services such as TestFlight.
Launch Your App
You have already successfully tested your app! Now it is time to launch it! What does launching an app mean?
1. Submission to the App Stores
Reach your intended audience by submitting your app to the app store that houses your target audience:
- Apple App Store
- Google Play Store
Every store has different requirements for application submission, not to mention design and content requirements, which also vary depending on the technical requirements. Be prepared to present an application listing description together with its screenshots and its app icon. Be prepared for some approval process that could take anywhere from just a few days to a couple of weeks.
2. Marketing and Promotion
Launched an application is just the beginning, but further it will require proper marketing tactics to download and interact with the application. The ideas include the following:
- App store optimization: Optimize the look of an app listing with relevant keywords and engaging visuals and get it ranked higher in the app stores.
- Social media marketing: Utilize any of the above-mentioned social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for your audience to make them aware of new apps released; start posting updates and interact with potential users.
- Influencer marketing: Find influencers, or microbloggers in your niche, for a review or promotion of your app .
- Paid advertisements: Throw money at targeted ads on Google, Facebook, or Instagram.
Step 7: Collect Feedback and Refine
Now that the app is live, and you can get now user comments and analytics about your app, you actually get to see in real time how people are using your app. So, you look at app reviews, in-app behavior, and any technical issues that bubble up. That gives you some ways to improve through the bug fixes, new features, or fine-tuning of the user experience.
This is always a learning process when you create an app for the first time. An important requirement to this learning is gathering feedback, which will help you evolve your app to remain useful for the users.
Conclusion
Building an app is, to some extent, comparable to the task of constructing a skyscraper because it may seem daunting, but the steps that break down the whole process make it manageable enough to convert that brilliant idea floating in your mind into real life. You would have to define the concept, plan the development process, and select the right tools and platforms, launching the application afterward and marketing it for public use.
With dedication and careful planning, creating an app can be a very fulfilling process for you whether you want to solve a problem, build a business, or just understand how one is created. The steps outlined below will take you through the process of creating your first app while opening the doors to an endless possibility that exists in the world of app development.