It’s no longer difficult to create an app. Determining what to construct is. Last year, there were approximately 149 billion apps worldwide downloads with nearly half of them being uninstalled within a month. Most of those failures start with decisions taken before a single line of code. These are the six most important ones.
1. WHAT PROBLEM APP TRIES TO SOLVE
If an app is just going to provide the same information as your website, it won’t keep your users around. People install an application for one simple purpose: Order more quickly, track something, book something, update information. Write that one job in a single sentence. If it can’t be written, it’s not ready to be developed, and it never will be. Check with 10 actual customers before you make the final choice.
2. NATIVE OR CROSS PLATFORM
Native translates to two distinct applications, one for the iOS and one for Android. React Native or Flutter, both are cross-platform development frameworks that allow developers to write code for both platforms, reducing development costs by approximately 30%-40%. If your app requires extensive graphics or access to hardware, select native. In most apps for business, cross-platform will be sufficient, and will be easier to maintain with a small team.
3. WHAT GOES INTO VERSION ONE
Each additional screen is an additional cost, testing time, and delay. The first version needs to contain just the features required for the one primary job. Start small, observe what real users open up and make the rest of what they say they want. Roughly speaking, it’s for learning, not for displaying all the things you had thought of in the first meeting. The smaller the launch, the less expensive the error!
4. WHERE YOUR DATA WILL LIVE
An app can only be the front; the data must be the backbone. Firebase has pre-built logins, databases and notifications to help you get up and run quickly. A custom backend in either Nodejs or FastAPI will be slower but will provide complete control and lower scaling costs in the future. Make this decision early since after the launch, it is normal to move the backend, which will require a large portion of the rewriting of the app. Additionally, look at how your bill will look with users 10 times higher.
5. HOW USERS WILL COME BACK
Installing is simple, maintaining is the challenge. In the first 30 days of installation, the uninstall rate is close to half of all downloads. Plan a simple onboarding, send push notifications for real value (order updates etc.) and not daily marketing messages. If people forget about an app within a week, it’s like an app that never existed. Retention should be planned prior to launch, not retrofitted.
6. SERVE & MAINTAIN IT AFTER LAUNCH
Android and iOS provide significant upgrades annually, libraries are deprecated and store policies constantly change. If an app doesn’t get updated, it will remain so and can even be delisted from the store. Many teams account for approximately 15% to 20% of the building cost for maintenance annually. Make that budget in advance rather than after receiving the first crash report. An application is a service that is running, not a delivered service.