Are you thinking of developing a mobile app for your business or to market your products or ideas?? Do you know how many users are there who are using smart phones? Do you know how many users are using Android or iPhone?

As of 2015, there were approximately 4.43 bn people using mobile phones and this is expected to reach up to 5bn by end 2019. The numbers clearly show an increasing demand of mobile phones and mobile applications across the different geographies and markets.

But, with increasing requirement of Mobile applications, quality at times gets compromised. It is therefore absolutely imperative that the mobile app developers and the companies offering mobile app solutions should focus on quality, content, design and technology as some of the very important criteria.

The blog highlights key areas which one needs to focus before developing the mobile application.

1. Knowing your Customer & Competition:
   • Before hitting the market and start developing an application, one should conduct a proper market research. Analyzing the market thoroughly will give an insight about competitors, their strategy, their strengths and weakness. This information will prove to be useful as you can avoid repeating the mistakes your competitors made. Researchers often overlook customer reviews. These reviews can give you a glance of likes and dislikes of users about a particular type of app. Thus, you must ensure that you take a note of the pain areas and try to resolve it in your mobile app. This strategy can give your customers a much better experience while viewing your App compared to competition.
2. Budget:
   • It is important to plan your budget for the mobile app and allocate it properly among each stage of app development. I would recommend you to appoint someone who can keep a strict eye on the cost to ensure that your overall cost of developing a mobile App remains well within the budget allocated.
3. Application Type:
   • There are mainly 2 types of applications
     1. Dynamic or data driven
     2. Standalone
4. Application Management:
   • If your application type is Dynamic/ Data driven then you need to have an Admin module where Admin or owner of the application can manage data, product or information using web application or a separate admin area on mobile. Data managed by admin will be reflect to the end user. It is onetime process of development and will not require any further development until you change your concept.
5. Development Tools:
   • Generally, we think that Android, iOS, windows and Blackberry are the development tools to build any mobile applications. It is partially true but within these tools there are several sub tools and technology available which effects cost and user experience:
     1. Native:
        • Native platform can be a bit costly for development but will give user an amazing experience of using an application. It is the perfect fit for data driven/ Dynamic mobile applications.
     2. Hybrid
        • Hybrid platform can be cheaper than Native platform but it is good fit with Standalone application. This platform gives a user experience like using a web browser and slower response time. Ionic, PhoneGap, Reactnative are some of the hybrid development technology used now a days. React native is an improved hybrid technology which is next to Native platform in term of application performance.
6. Marketplace Costing:
   • If One needs to have a market place account wherein the mobile application needs to be placed to have it accessed globally:
     1. iTunes:
        • iTunes is used to place iOS based application in market which will cost you around US $99 annually.
     2. Play Store:
        • Play Store is used to place Android based application in market which will cost you around US $25 annually.
7. Platform Limitations:
   • Each development platform has some limitations in terms of building functionality and one needs to be aware of that. For example, for a music application which is selling audio tracks:-
     • In Android, you can integrate third party payment gateway to sell your music tracks if you don’t want to have in-app (payment gateway provided by market place) purchase.
     • Whereas in iOS, you can’t sell digital content (Music tracks) using any third party payment gateways, you must use in-app purchase and will cost 30% of the product price to seller. That means, iTune will deduct 30% cost from each purchase done by application users thereby making it much costly for the seller compared to Android platform.
8. Target Audience:
   • Defining your target audience is very important as the audience plays a huge impact on the development of your mobile application. All these questions such as who will be using this app, and how is it going to help them, be answered well before hand. If you meet your user’s expectations, your smartphone app is likely to get more popularity.
9. Testing before going live:
   • Defining your target audience is very important as the audience plays a big impact on the development of your mobile application. Questions such as 1} who will be using this app, 2} how is it going to help your customers should be answered in advance.
   • If you meet your user’s expectations, your smartphone app is likely to get more popularity.
10. Continual improvement based on user feedback:
    • Once the app is launched in the market place, one needs to continuously look for feedback and improvement. If there are some issues reported by users, it needs to be fixed on immediate basis. One can track number of installations and rating review shared by the application users and use the statistics along with customer feedback as an input for continuous improvement.