We live in a time and age where almost every service under the sun is available at the click of an app, making mobile apps a must-have application for everyone. The massive success rate of various modern age services on mobile apps has forced traditional businesses to join the bandwagon too. The astounding range of access they offer is merely unbelievable, creating a massive demand for building apps for almost every business now.
Building an app is essential to promote, survive, and succeed in any business. Today many companies are thriving primarily because of a more substantial online presence, which has been made convenient and fruitful because of mobile apps development.
We all know that mobile application development is an expensive process because it has longer development cycles in comparison to the traditional method of web applications. Every mobile app developer is very well aware of the tug of war between speed and quality of his app. Henceforth, it is even more challenging as a mobile app developer to strike a balance in saving time, effort as well as money during the app development process.
The speed of a mobile app is the most relevant issue deciding the performance of that app. Thankfully, we have quite a few efficient resources these days, which are used to speed up the app development process without compromising on the quality of that app.
Presenting here, 6 must use hacks to adhere to speed up your mobile app development process without compromising on the quality of the app.
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MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
In today's app development world, the concept of a typical application is ever-evolving, and first-to-market is what makes the difference amongst competitors.
Sometimes chasing perfection during the development process delays the launch of the product, and it may fail that product. To combat this, MVP(Minimum Viable Product) is a beneficial idea to test the product and build up your quality in the market instead of launching a full-fledged, robust product.
By adopting the lean method, one can start testing their product in the market by launching it with bare minimum core functionality features and begin collecting the data by the build-measure-learn feedback loop.
Use the feedback wisely to address measures for improvements and release an updated, better version of your application. Additionally, use tools for the desired outcome, usability, download rate, and release timely updates by AGILE procedures. MVP is usually considered as the first phase of AGILE.
Never forget that MVP is a minimum essential feature, not minimal efforts from the development side. Your MVP must be fully functional, complete with all features and products that address the user's concern and helps to gather review and data on the next update in real-time.
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Go Agile
Agile is a smart work philosophy- an extension to MVP concepts of software development that favors short release cycles and frequent deliveries. Most of the start-ups these days use them to penetrate the market and replace them later with a more robust solution.
Agile is a combination of concepts that includes prioritizing time, expenditure, and features of your app where a bare minimum product is released first, and other features are added later on in 3-4 phases.
By following Agile practices, one can speed up the development process dynamically as it provides early feedback in real-time, ensuring less wastage of time on unnecessary features.
Using this structure in the development process considerably increases your chances of success in the market as it provides:
- Versatility
- Real-time testing
- Early market entry
- Enhanced visibility
- Cross-Platform Tools
All mobile app developers are continually wondering which platform to support for yielding the best results out of their application. Because restricting your application to a single platform means limiting the reach of the product.
Easier said than done! Developing for multiple platforms is not easy as it doubles up the development time or sometimes even more than double.
The solution to all this is simultaneously creating and maintaining various codebases for all the major platforms to save uptime and performance.
Today we have access to cross-platform tools that allow us to target multiple platforms with the same codebase, reducing the time spent translating, rewriting, and recompiling the code structure.
Adobe Phonegap and Xamarin are two such Cross-platform hybrid solutions, allowing a single codebase to target multiple platforms where developers build once and get two apps(supporting both Android and iOS platforms).
Hybrid solutions have their drawbacks, like taking up a substantial amount of memory and handling animations with less fluidity.
- Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Wireframing is the essential fundamental step in the application development process unifying everyone under the same vision and bringing the whole team on the same page.
A wireframe is a low-fidelity visual representation of the app's user interface, acting like a decent blueprint for the entire development team. It helps the development team identify the uses of the applications, its primary functions/ additional functions, and user base, among others, in the initial stages of the development process.
Low-fidelity wireframes are always advisable to use as they map out the entire procedure from design and architectural point of view, saving a lot of time and hassles in final stages by identifying any possible roadblocks beforehand.
Most experienced developers know that directly going into coding is not prudent, so they always recommend low-fidelity wireframes to locate and alter UX issues before starting the coding process.
Low-fidelity wireframes are the preferred choice of developers, designers, coders, and project directors in unison to save time, effort, and money as they involve less detailing and are more abstract. To avoid time-consuming misunderstandings and miscommunications, low-fidelity wireframes are the way to go!
Also, one can create digital wireframes using image-editing software and presentation tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Keynote, Powerpoint, Balsamiq, and MockFlow.
- Outsourcing
In today's practical scenario, outsourcing makes sense to save crucial time in your development process. By outsourcing the specified needs of the application, you can concentrate the efficiencies of your developers on a particular product rather than distracting them with the multiple needs of the project.
Suppose, if your team has expertise in iOS development, then you can outsource the Android development work. This way, you will be saving your in-house programmers a lot of time and effort. Also, it is very economical to outsource some work by hiring an entire development team on hourly rates.
- Automated Testing
Automated testing is a smart way to run tests as it saves much time and human resources. For a secure, high-quality application, we need to subject our code to a rigorous testing process.
Although testing is a time-consuming process, we can automate the testing of mobile apps to get them faster in the market.
There are quite a few right automated testing tools available like Appium that provide developers with the freedom to run tests without taking much time and lesser human intervention.
Alternatively, Appium is a cross-platform tool, so one can write once and use across Windows, Android and ios platforms
Summary:
- The best way to reduce development costs without sacrificing quality is through offshore and nearshore outsourcing firms, as one can hire big development firms in another country on lower hourly rates. This way, you get an experienced, highly skilled team of developers exclusively for your project.
- Time - both the time is taken to build an app and its release time in the market - is a crucial factor determining the success and failure of an app. Building an app is a different thing, and releasing it on time is a different ball game altogether. Usually, the difference between a successful app and a failure is its time of release in the market.
- Focus your work efforts into what is most important and try to reduce the work volume as much as possible by using the tools that help you achieve specific goals that otherwise require individual coding.
I hope you implement these golden hacks, and they will allow you to build robust, useful, and dynamic applications in less time and money without compromising on the quality quotient!
