Flutterexperts

Imagine, you woke up one fine day and you have an idea of an amazing app that can bring revolutionary changes, and you can see it clearly in your mind — you can picture it. You know that this app is going to solve a big problem for the users and you can see that people would like it too.

But if you haven’t built an app before and this is your first attempt, How Exactly are you gonna do it?

The ruthless Mobile App Development industry spares no-one with its cut-throat competition and building your own app in such a competitive environment can get really tough. There are so many things to take into consideration, that it gets very stressful to think clearly.

In this article, we will see a start to finish guide for building your mobile if you follow these steps in your plan. Let’s see what those are:

Identify The Purpose of the App

If you already have an idea for your app, that’s a great start. But to actually put that idea into reality requires clarity of the purpose. What are the mission and the purpose that the app is going to serve? What is that particular problem is the app going to solve? How is it going to make the lives of the users better?

Remember, all that starts well ends well! Define your goals early in the process to avoid chaos and any room for confusion.

Sketch Your Idea

You don’t need to be a professional artist to sketch out your app. By developing sketches you are laying the foundation for your future interface. In this step, you visually conceptualize the main features and the approximate layout and structure of your application.

You don’t need any specific tools to sketch your idea. You just need a pen and a paper and see your idea coming to life on paper.

List down all the features that you want in your app. I, personally, like to separate the features into two categories, ‘Must have’ and ‘Good to have’. List down the features that your app can’t do without under the ‘Must Have’ category. Other good features that are not crucial can come under the ‘’Good to have’ category.

Do Some Market Research

Before you jump into this market, do some research about it. Research who your competitors are, what are the new market trends around your idea. This research will give you an idea about your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses.

There are two types of market research you can do, that are the most helpful:

• Finding out what mistakes your competitors are making or have made
• Finding out if people are looking for an app like yours

You want to walk into the shoes of the customer, so to speak. Instead of assuming the needs and desires of the customers while sitting in your room in front of the laptop, go out and talk to the people.

Who is your app for? What are they like? How does your app impact a particular problem that users are struggling with? How are they currently solving that problem? What change do you, with your app, seek to make?

Sometimes, you build the app for yourself, and that’s alright. Do the market research just for the fun of it, to work on your craft. Don’t underestimate the importance of preparation, research, and insight, though!

Create Mockups Of Your App

It’s best to make mockups before you start to build the app. A mockup is a rough sketch of your app’s layout, user interfaces (UIs), and flow.

A mockup doesn’t include :

• Detailed UI elements
• Color schemes and effects
• The precise placing of UI elements

A mock-up is a way of showing how your app looks without any unnecessary details. A mock is a functional and not an aesthetical approach to your app’s design.

A mockup should also describe the flow and interactions of your app. What happens when you tap on that button? How do you get from screen A to screen B? What is the navigation flow of your app?

Apart from creating your mockup, you need to create a storyboard for your app. It will work as a guideline for your app screens so that you will know about the connection between two individual screens and helps to track the user’s navigation.

There are a lot of mockups and wireframing tools available on the internet. I personally like to use Balsamiq. But other than that there are some more really good mockup tools like:

• Proto.io
• Moqups
• InVision, and many more.

Develop a Prototype

After you’ve identified your approach of development, the next stage is developing a prototype. It is actually the process of taking your idea and turning it into an application with limited functionalities, it’s also called a minimum viable product (MVP). Choose the most basic features of the app and start prototyping them. The MVP allows the user to access and experience the app with tangible features rather than just visualizing or reading the product description.

The MVP is very useful in attracting investors, working with manufacturers, and finding licenses. You can also share the app with beta testers to get an idea about what needs to be changed to enhance user experience. You can find a number of prototyping tools online, the most popular ones are Balsamiq, Moqups, and HotGloo.

Start Designing Your App

Now that your app idea is taking shape, it’s time to start designing the application. Now is the time, where your designer’s job starts. He will now come up with a high-resolution version of what previously your mockups.

The design of the app includes pixel-perfect visual details, graphic effects, image assets, and sometimes even animations and motion design. It is crucial in this stage that you include the comments on the prototype given by the testers. After all, the app is going to be used by your target audience. Their experience on the app will drive you to the best User Interface.

Let’s Test Your Design

For the first time during the entire development process, you have the actual concept of your app in front of you. It helps to identify the bugs, crashes, and missing features.

To test your app, again there are so many online app testing platforms that can be helpful. Two of my personal favorites are MarvelApp and Framer. These platforms will allow you to import your screens, add links to test the flow and make the design clickable.

This process aims at creating an environment close to how the typical user works with your app.

Identify Your Development Approach — Native, Web or Hybrid

Selecting the right approach for developing your app is highly important. Ideally, the app development approach must be in accordance with the time and budget constraints.

Native

Native apps deliver the best user experience but also require significant time and skill to be developed. These apps are basically platform-specific (Android, iOS, Windows, etc.)and require expertise along with knowledge. Native apps take time to build and with an increase in time the cost of development increases.

Web

Web apps are quick and cheap ones to develop and can run on multiple platforms. These are developed using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript code. These web apps are less powerful than native apps.

Hybrid

A hybrid approach is the latest and arguably the smartest approach to develop an app. This approach combines prebuilt native containers with on-the-fly web coding in order to achieve the best of both worlds. In this approach, the developer augments the web code with native languages to create unique features and access native APIs which are not yet available through JavaScript.

One of the best hybrid mobile app development technologies is Flutter. Backed by Google, Flutter has changed the way we build apps. It is the most cost-effective and efficient framework ever. If you’re building your app, build your app in Flutter. Highly Recommended.

Let’s build it

once your app’s design passes the usability test and you’ve decided your approach, it is time to give a proper structure to your dream project. This process covers the coding part and the actual realization of your application. The mobile app development stage incorporates multiple activities like establishing the appropriate development environment, developing different parts of the code, preliminary testing, and creating the mobile application that can be installed and tested.

Usually, there are three aspects of any app- back-end, APIs, and the app front-end. Development is usually done in stages and you can expect your developer to provide interim builds that you will be able to run on your device itself.

Back-end

Database and server-side objects become imperative for supporting functions of your mobile app by connecting to a network. Configurations and changes could be needed to support the desired mobile app functionality if you are using an existing backend platform. The server-side objects developed during this stage must be configured and tested with the other components of the app.

Application Programming Interface

An API is a set of practices, protocols, and tools for developing software applications. It specifies how software components interact. Additionally, this programming interface is used when programming GUI components.

Front-endanalysed

The front-end called “client-side” programming is what your app users interact with. It implements required structure, design, animation, and behavior that you can see on the screen when you open up the websites, web applications, or mobile apps.

Test & Improve

Running a code review process during development helps in making sure that there are no major bugs left at the end to solve. Once you have a visually appealing and fully functional application, it’s time your developer conducts a final test of usability with other colleagues. In this process, there may be bugs that were overlooked, but here your developer can apply the last tweaks to your product.

Let’s Make it Public — Release time!

After all the hard work that you’ve put into this project, it’s finally time to give your dream project a fly. Your app is all set to be released in the market.

Now, when it comes to app marketplaces, different market places have different policies when it comes to publishing a new app. For instance, Android doesn’t straightaway review a newly submitted app, they’ll pass it and you’ll be able to instantly add your app to play store. But in case of iOS, it’s completely different, Apple holds the right to review and approve/reject the app before it goes live. Which may take up to weeks time.\

So, always go through the different publishing policies, before you set your launch date.

Maintainance — The Most Crucial State

One of the most important aspects which are mostly ignored by the development agencies/companies as well as app owners is the post-development Support. There are numerous vendors in the market like Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Vivo, Nokia, etc. who have customized their android OS as per their needs. Apart from different customized android OS, they have separate hardware and display resolutions. And not just Android, even iOS platform also has different devices and display resolutions. This entire web of different Operating Systems makes it impossible to test the app on every other OS in real-time.

There are two ways the user will interact with the app, either online or offline. With different interactions, the app shows different behaviors and bugs. We use multiple crash reporting tools and regularly analyze the bugs to keep the app experience intact.

The first two months after the app deployment are the most crucial in terms of app sustainability. For that, we use multiple tools for bug collecting, reporting, and eventually resolving. This entire bug life-cycle ensures the app is not Error-prone after published.

Don’t Forget to Market Your App

Whether you have just released your app or your app has downloaded by many, you should never stop marketing the app. Mobile app marketing plays a very important role in making the app successful. Market it as soon as it is released so that it is not lost in the ocean of apps on app stores. You will know through the feedback whether the users liked the app or not.

FlutterDevs’Approach

Once you have an idea for implementation, the most important factor is to check it’s Technical and Economical feasibility.

In technical feasibility analysis, your concepts will be analyzed by our technical experts to check if it technically possible or if it has some challenges.

In economical feasibility, the project is analyzed for its budget. A lot of times the complexity of the project can increase the budget which should be kept in consideration and the client should know about this.

At FlutterDevs, our expert team members Do Free Technical and Economical Feasibility Interactions, so that the client knows about the product before investing their money.

We also have a team of expert analysts, who will analyze and compare your product/project with your direct competitors in the market and help you define a better value proposition of the project so that you stand out among the crowd.

At flutterDevs we have a huge experience in all the processes of application development like conceptualizing, developing, releasing, marketing, and maintenance of the app. We have a specialized team to handle each process.

If you have an app idea, we would love to hear it.

---

Feel free to connect with us:
And read more articles from FlutterDevs.com

FlutterDevs team of Flutter developers to build high-quality and functionally-rich apps. Hire flutter developer for your cross-platform Flutter mobile app project on an hourly or full-time basis as per your requirement! You can connect with us on Facebook, GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn for any flutter related queries.

We welcome feedback and hope that you share what you’re working on using #FlutterDevs. We truly enjoy seeing how you use Flutter to build beautiful, interactive web experiences!.