Top 6 Tips for Optimal App Development

Having a presence on the app market plays a major role, especially for startups. Apps offer a good opportunity to massively increase the reach of your product and to significantly increase direct interaction with the users compared to conventional websites.

In our 6 tips for app development, we show you what you need to pay special attention to.

1. Native or Framework?

Of course, you want to place yourself directly, cost-effectively in the common platforms iOS, Android & Windows Phone at the beginning. Frameworks like Phonegap, Appcelerator, etc. offer a cost-effective alternative to individual native apps, but you should pay particular attention here.

In principle, these frameworks can create good apps, but only when it comes to displaying texts and other information.Facebook relied on HTML5 apps until the end of 2012, but quickly discontinued this approach because the performance was simply not enough. Apple still excludes non-native apps from the Appstore today.

2. Usability

People often try to squeeze a user interface into all mobile operating systems. This is good at first, but it should be limited to the graphical interface.

Menu navigation, icons, etc. should be presented to the user in their natural environment. It is not recommended to forcefully port an iOS menu into an Android app, as this will be reflected in the app ratings at the latest, as the user is forced to learn a completely new usability.

3. Rethink the user interface

If you have a website and now want to make the whole thing available as an app, it is unfortunately not enough to simply design the website “small”. While visiting a website on the computer, the user is sitting, usually has both hands available, is ready for input and has a longer attention span. The situation is different when using the smartphone.

Here, the user wants to consume information quickly instead of having to enter it in a time-consuming manner. You need to highlight the most important features of the product and present them in an optimal, mobile way.

4. Regular testing

Implementing automatic tests within the app is an important part of app development. Nothing is more annoying than a buggy app in live operation. In addition to automated tests, manual testing is also enormously important. However, this should never be done by the internal team, but outsourced to reliable mobile app developers Canada.

5. Don’t exclude older devices

New phones are launched on the market very regularly. However, the app should not run exclusively on current devices. Early Android versions are still very popular, so attention should be paid to older devices during development as well.

The performance of older, weaker devices should also be tested well. A one-star rating due to poor performance not only annoys the user, but also the owner of the app.

6. Tracking

The analysis of app users is essential. How long does a user stay in my app? Where does he interrupts the checkout process? How long does it take for the user to find an important feature? All these questions can be answered well with suitable tracking tools. After analyzing this data, optimization efforts should be taken to improve the usability of the app for users.

Besides the classic user behavior tracking, bug tracking is enormously important. Many app crashes cannot be reproduced on every device. Bug tracking provides a complete crash report, which increases the stability of the app.