Mobile Apps are primarily computer programs or software Applications that are designed for phones, tablets or watches. These are developed for operating systems such as Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile. Initially, Apps such as email, calendar and others were created with a motive to assist in productivity. In today’s digitalized world more than 80 per cent of people owning a cellular phone, browse for products and services online.
Types of Mobile Apps
Techies have categorized mobile Apps into three types based on the technology that has been used for coding. They are:
Native Apps: These are built specifically for just one platform. Example, an Android App can be used on an Android phone only and not on iOS or Blackberry. The coding for native Apps is done using multiple programming languages such as Java, Swift, Python, C++ and others. Since the native Apps have a singular focus, they offer fast and reliable performance.
Web Apps: The behavior of web Apps is similar to that of native Apps, but is accessed via a web browser on a mobile device. Since they work on a mobile browser, they can be used on any mobile phone or operating system. HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and other such programming languages are used to design web Apps.
Hybrid Apps: These are web Apps that have the look and feel of native Apps. Building a hybrid App does not incur a considerable amount of time or cost. HTML5, Swift, Ionic are some of the coding languages that are used to build hybrid Apps.
Steps to build business Apps
A perfectly designed mobile App can provide a seamless and engaging user experience, thereby helping your business exponentially. It can help by improving sales, thereby increasing your revenue, increasing brand awareness, boosting your strategy for mobile marketing and a lot more. Following are the steps to build business Apps:
Objectives
In order to create an App, the first step you need to follow is, highlight the objectives behind building it. This will eventually save you from unwanted complicacies that you might encounter. Your App should adequately satisfy your audience as well as your business goal. Therefore, besides studying your potential audience and your ultimate business goal, you should take into consideration the market you are targeting, your competitors, budget and more.
Functions & Features
The next step would be to outline the functionality and features of your App. Once you have validated the purpose of building an App, you need to creatively detail your product in order to accomplish the result that you’ve hoped to attain. You may take into consideration features such as E-commerce integrations, chat, social sharing etc.
Research
Once you are done penning the features and functionalities, you need to do an extensive research about the competitors of your App. This will help you come up with new ideas and filling in the existing gaps in the market.
App Builder
After you are done mapping out the functionalities and learning about your competitors, you can start off by creating a mock-up of your App by assembling your individual ideas with a good App builder such as the VirtuApp App builder.
VirtuApp is a mobile App builder that helps businesses not only by increasing their sales but showcasing their products to a larger audience. It is affordable, easy to use, manage and update, thereby making mobile App creation a child’s play.
A mock-up helps you with an overview of what the App looks like, keeping aside unnecessary details that might distract you. Also, if you are designing an App for a client, a mock-up can help in testing the flow of the App.
Design
Next step would be to work on the graphic design for the App. The App that you are creating should be visually appealing to the users and should therefore include pixel-perfect visual details, graphic effects, animations, motions and more. Therefore, if graphic designing is not one of your strengths, you can outsource the work to a professional designer. If you are using an App builder like VirtuApp, then it takes care of the designing bit as well.
Landing Page
Once the design is ready, invest time in creating an appealing landing page in order to enhance user engagement. Most App developers tend to overlook marketing strategies. However, a well-designed landing page determines if a user is just trying the App out or becoming a customer. The App’s page should include a headline at the top followed by a brief introduction in the form of text or video, a call to action, a breakdown of App features and an ‘about us’ section. However, it is not mandatory to follow the exact order of the enlisted pointers.
Choice of iOS or Android
Now that all the groundwork is done, you can continue to build your App with an App maker. For example, VirtuApp offers an Apple App builder (iOS App builder) as well as an Android App builder.
VirtuApp’s iPhone App creator and android App creator are amongst the best App builders. VirtuApp has been built by spending more than 50,000 man-hours of effort and comes with an auto-release platform that updates the Apps for bug fixes and features once you publish your App on PlayStore or AppStore. It offers native Apps and therefore, you can expect the best performance. Also, the Apps follow industry standard security and backup and are therefore secure to use.
Therefore, your data gets safely stored in the cloud.
VirtuApp iOS App builder: Having the basic knowledge of using social networking websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn will help you create your own App. Since VirtuApp takes care of the challenging task of coding, you can start off just by registering your business and adding the required information into the VirtuBox platform.
VirtuApp android App builder: Because of its durability and advanced features, VirtuApp provides users a cloud-based platform that has a user-friendly interface. You can design your mobile Apps without the hassle of coding or previous experience in App building. You can register on the VirtuBox platform and create your groups and subgroups accordingly.
Launch
The next step would be to launch your App. The process of creating and publishing an App can be quite exhilarating. VirtuApp also takes on the job to launch your App on the App store.
Improvement
Post-launch, you can start working on improving your mock-ups and designs, building new features for the next version of your App. Also, do not forget to promote the App before you launch it.
Marketing
Apps are supposed to solve problems and save people from hassles of daily life. If your App has been created to target a certain problem, you need to market it efficiently for the information to reach out to the public. People need to know that there is an alternate solution to an older method. Therefore, as an App maker, focus on marketing your product well.
Data Collection & Analysis
The final step would be to use real-time feedback. Gathering quantitative data, using surveys and interviews for qualitative data and communicating with your users can help you build a personal connection. You can make a list of potential improvements and fix them eventually.
Summary
Having a mobile App is necessary for organizations in this digital age. The purpose of creating an App is to make an impact with it. Therefore, one needs to keep gaining insights and improving features to keep the App user-friendly and appealing. VirtuApp mobile App builder will help you build an App in a jiffy, saving the effort of development, deployment, updating and distribution.
About the Author:
Prakash Rastogi, founder and CEO of VirtuBox, holds B.Tech & M.Tech degree from IIT Kanpur with 14+ yrs of experience.He is a serial entrepreneur, currently working on Digital experience platform which helps businesses to digitize using mobile technologies. The aim of VirtuBox is to provide digital technology to organisations and individuals at affordable prices and that does not require coding.
If you have any question, please email me at durgtech@gmail.com