Mobile Application Development: An Introduction to the Life Cycle

The benefits of the digital age have confidently entered the life of every consumer. Once familiar things: diaries, planners, notebooks have become a vestige today. Most business processes and communications have moved to the online segment. The protracted pandemic has finally dotted the “and”: for normal learning, it is not necessary to attend an educational institution, and most office work can be done remotely.

Custom mobile app development is winning the IT services market as the share of mobile traffic consumers constantly grows. Mobile apps transform the process of interacting with customers, analyzing audience responses to new products and activities, and strengthening the communication between the brand and its final users. Along with shifting priorities, there is a need for new tools for doing business online. One of them is a mobile application. It would be wrong to say that the mobile app is new. They were before, in the mid-2000s. Only then, the possibilities of mobile applications were very different from today. Today, users have access to solutions that can cope with the complex tasks of design, analysis, and performance of consumer functions without installing the product on their hardware.

After the development of platform technologies and the modernization of the approach to processing information on the client browser side, mobile applications gradually began to crowd out their closest competitors – desktop applications. The reason is the basic competitive advantage in the absence of the need to install a product. Modern users are simply too lazy to install and expose themselves to the risk of viruses from third-party software. In addition, an uninstalled application is easier to uninstall if the product does not meet consumer expectations. In this article, you will see a quality and well architected framework review.

Mobile Software Lifecycle

The technical process of developing mobile applications is practically the same as creating desktop counterparts. As with any software development, the rule of seven basic steps applies:

• Planning. At the beginning of any IT product there should be an original idea.

• Registration. Design plays a significant role in the development of the site and consumer software products.
• Technical development. Choice of method, platform, creation of program code.
• Testing. Based on the chosen methodology, the product can undergo stage-by-stage testing, as a result of which each prepared module is checked for performance or testing after the complete assembly of the product.
• Official release. The release of the public version of the product, after successful testing and improvements.

• Marketing support. Mobile applications are a consumer product in most cases. In today’s competitive environment, success requires not only developing a high-quality solution, but also providing advertising, marketing activities, and feedback from the consumer.

• Technical support. Without normal support, the product can simply be excluded from the placement site. The Apple Store, for example, monitors product support, positive reviews, and malware before listing it on its site. It is beneficial for sellers to provide their customers with quality service, because after the sale of an IT product, the platform becomes a kind of “accomplice” of the sale.

The range of development methodology also includes “hybrid” solutions. For example, MVP (minimum viable product), which can be developed with the loss of some stages of production. In particular, testing for MVP is almost never carried out, since the product itself is a kind of trial version for testing.

Also, the development process itself can vary greatly depending on the positioning of the product, for which devices the application is planned to be released, and what business problems need to be solved. But today enterprise application development services are gaining immense popularity.

Popularity and profitability of mobile applications

The programming market changes with the same frequency as the ongoing changes in consumer preferences. According to recent studies, more than 70% of users place orders online using a smartphone or analog mobile device. That is, in the near future, mobile gadgets will almost completely replace competitive devices. In this regard, the demand for mobile applications will only grow.

Experts emphasize that with the right organization, a successful commercial idea, a mobile application can pay off in a couple of months.