Mobile App Development Process Steps to Build Your First Successful App

When you get an idea to develop a mobile app, you will come across a lot of questions. Like

• What to know before developing a mobile app?
• What is mobile app development lifecycle?
• What are the steps in developing an app?
• How to develop a mobile app from scratch?

In fact, being a mobile app development company, we receive a lot of such questions. So we decided to write a blog on the same topic which we can share with our future clients as well. Bookmark this article if you are planning to develop an app. Reason? Because this article will help you to understand the basic app development process steps.

9 Mobile App Development Process Steps That We Follow For a Successful App Development

Step 1: Project requirement discussion

At first, we will have a typical phone call, casual, short, just to identify if we can assist you if we can take this project forward.

What do we expect from you, from our clients?
First, we want the basic details from your end. Like what kind of application you want to develop, what is your budget, what is your timeline, do you have any other app similar to your app idea? At RH Web Develop, we believe that "healthy conversations lead to trustworthy relationships for future ventures." The more we know about your app idea, the better we can assist you.

30-min free consultation
Our sales representative team provides a 30-minute free consultation, where you can ask questions related to your app idea. Then, our team prepares a proposal for you. Our aim is to check the feasibility of your app idea and suggest the best technical go ahead.

Step 2: Business Insight & Estimation

After consultation with you, we have a kick-off meeting, wherein we decide the team members and provide recommendations or suggestions for your app development. Our process in the meeting starts with a QA involvement and test case availability.  The early involvement enables QA to understand customer requirements better. Application flow-related queries get resolved in the very initial phase. 

Once requirement analysis and designs get freeze QA starts with the test cases creation. It requires 20% extra efforts of whatever efforts we have estimated for testing.  We try to cover the maximum positive and negative test scenarios while writing test cases. We also create a test plan document to define testing scope and objective but it depends upon the project requirement. This allows us proper cost estimation for your app and provides a feasible concept of real mobile app or website.

Step 3: Signing NDA 

Now after the test cases and cost estimation, if you are willing to go ahead with us for your customized mobile app development, we make it official by signing the agreement, NDA.

Why NDA for your app idea?
We ensure that your app idea is safe with us. In fact, it avoids misunderstandings or miscommunication between us.

What you will get in the project development agreement?
After completion of project discussion and providing an estimation, the next step is to sign a project development agreement which is the key to associate with RH Web Develop. The agreement contains - Project deliverable, Milestones, Legal clauses, and Reference/Annexures.

Being a professional in the app world, we provide mobile app development services specified on-paper. Our real-work starts after signing an agreement which consists of understanding project requirements, defining communication method, scheduling scrum meetings, file sharing, and expected delivery phases in set milestones.

For your app development, we do a kick-off meeting at our company. This meeting defines the app developers and other team members, who will work on your project.

Step 4: Wireframing of the app

After the project, requirements are understood and communication methods (Slack, Skype, Basecamp) are set, the question of how much time will it take to design an app arises. The designing part is the most intricate mobile app development process step. 

What is the wireframe?
The wireframe can be understood as a pillar for your application/website. It helps you to understand the flow of the system and gives a rough idea of how the system would function. The wireframe helps in the precise estimation of the development timeline. It also helps the designers get a gist of the system flow and aid them in creating flawless and accurate designs.

Which tools our BA team uses for wireframing your app idea?
Our Business Analyst team analyzes your app idea to make a wireframe of required features using Balsamiq 3.5.17 and AdobeXD wireframe design tool.

Why do we need wireframe? What is the importance of wireframe?
An app has many features, for instance, you want a chat feature in your app. But there are a variety of different chat types viz one-to-one chat, group chat, timeline management. That particular requirement can be clearly penned down in wireframes and gives an idea to the stakeholder how the chat flow would work.

Step 5: UI/UX design

Before starting to prepare initial app designs, we sent you a questionnaire which helps us in knowing your preferences. It consists of questions like.

Questions we ask our clients

• Which color would you prefer for your app?
• Basic preferences for color and fonts
• Which apps do you like?  

This helps us to know your preferences.

What do we deliver during this phase?
The sample contains app icon, splash screen (first screen), log in or sign-up form, the home page. We prepare two UI/UX choices for you. After sending the samples, we wait for your feedback and make the changes, if any, according to your preference.

After the final approval on the design, we make a systematic app development flow to start app development process to make it a user-centric product by using Flinto or Invision.

We prepare an up-front design of your complete app without writing a single line of code.  

Step 6: App development

After coming together with app designs, the mobile app developers get down to bring everything into action. Project manager defines tasks to the developers and a systematic mobile app development plan is made to achieve the set milestones. 

We value your time and money, thus, a discussion of every thought, suggestions or decisions are done with you. The progress of the mobile app development process steps is given to you by a "walk-through of the developed app screens" via project management tools.

Step 7: Q/A testing

When you decide to create a new app, it is inevitable to keep testing the app. It helps in keeping the cost low and to build a qualitative app. The farther in you go into the mobile app development cycle, the costlier it becomes to fix the bug. 

The application is tested to check its usability, compatibility, interface checks, and performance. We have around 50 iOS & Android devices to check, locate, and fix issues that arise due to UI. The devices come in different dimensions, screen sizes, OS versions. Thus this type of testing ensures us that there are no functionalities which are causing the problem to the application when it is live and used by the users.

For keeping a track of your mobile app testing phase, QA sends a release note with every build release.  We develop and test simultaneously to find bugs as early as possible. Parallel testing is done as soon as a module s developed or milestone is completed.

First, we perform the unit test, QA testing using a black-box testing method that is commonly performed for functional and regression testing.

After completing testing and making your application 100% bug-free and smooth from our side, we send it to you, and we call it UTA (User Acceptance Testing) testing.

Step 8: Launching the app

How to publish app on Appstore and Playstore?
Don't worry. We assist our customer for uploading their application on Appstore and Playstore without charging any additional cost.

What do we need from your end?
We only need developer account credentials from the customers to upload it.

Is it easy to publish the application?
The AppStore and Playstore are having strong policies to make the app live, but we do have quite good expertise in this domain where our experts help our customers to get it live. In fact, we have successfully launched over 3500 mobile applications to date.

Step 9: Post-production support

As your application gets in the hands of users, feedback will pour in and for future versions of the app, you will need to incorporate that as an app update. Every app will need new features and technological updates. Typically, as soon as the first version of your app is released, the development cycle begins anew. 

We, at RH Web Develop, provide you with an "after launch service program" which is 3-month support.

What you will get in this free support?
During this period, if we face any issue or bug, we will instantly fix the issue. Once the duration of free support is finished, if a customer would like to extend the support period then, we prefer to sign an annual maintenance contract which can protect to the app owner if any new issue/bug will arrive then, it can be immediately fixed.

Conclusion

We hope that sharing this information about our app development process will give you a better idea while selecting the best app development company for your project. Every human tends to do some mistakes, and thus, we also are made up of the same origin. But our escalation ratio is very less, about 5-6% of projects hardly go under escalation. 

Our team members are committed to providing YOU with the best experience possible.