A service or a product, in today’s market most likely has an online presence to enhance user engagement and draw traffic. In this digital era, every activity is shifting to online mode from conducting classes to ordering food online. So, the number of applications in our play store is increasing at a very high rate. The approach of a producer to solve the pain points of a customer are most likely to be done by creating a mobile app these days. Even in this lockdown, you can get medicines and every other essential household stuff delivered with a few swipes on your mobile screen.

So, aren’t you curious about how this app development works or if you build one from scratch? In this article, you will learn about android app development, the stages one should follow, and finally about different types of mobile app development frameworks.

What is Mobile App Development?

Mobile app development rather than Android app development is more than just writing a piece of code. A lot of time, energy, and brainstorming go behind creating a perfect app for your audience. Mobile App Development, thus comprises an idea that will impact your target customers in a positive way, creating a product roadmap, doing thorough research, developing a minimum viable product (MVP), front-end and back-end design, rigorous testing, etc.

Android app development is a topic gaining high demand and many companies have also launched online certified courses for learning purposes. So, if you have an idea that will help a set of people overcome their day-to-day problems with a mobile application, here’s your chance to learn and execute your plan.

Step-by-Step Guide for Developing a Custom Android App

The biggest misconception or the wrong turn taken by most students while developing an Android app is directly jumping to the coding part. Coding is an important part of app development, but that is not the right step to begin with. So, here’s a guide that will help you understand the basics of Android app development.

• Proper Documentation for the Idea: Most developers try to address the important questions after the app is ready which is a wrong way of developing an app and launching it in the market. You need to create a document of the main idea of your application and how it is going to help your target customers.
  
  You need to make your team understand how the app will work and what problems it is going to resolve. In this stage, you should be able to answer questions like who are your target clients, what are the features you want in this app, what functions it will perform, your target geographical market, data processing approach, etc.

• Thorough Market Research: After you set on a specific target customer, you need to understand how effective your app will be to resolve their pain points. Is there a continuous need for your app in the market or the users are most likely to uninstall it after a few days.
  
  To ensure that this doesn’t happen to your app, you should conduct proper market research and understand the needs and requirements of your target audience. You should also conduct research on your competitor’s app and understand their market growth, customers, shortcomings, etc.

• Wireframing: Wireframing consists of developing proper information architecture. There will be multiple features and functionalities in your Android app and you need to list down these features in a systematic method and understand how one action relates to another in the app. Developing the wireframe for your application is like giving it the basic foundational shape and mainly consists of a screen, button, pop-ups, etc. Some of the common wireframe tools in the market are Axure, Sketchapp, Balsamiq.

• Building a Prototype and MVP: A prototype is the model of the app that is to test if all the functionalities are executable. Your prototype is not the final product rather a sample to make your clients understand the final product. Building a prototype or MVP is crucial as it will help you understand at an early stage if any particular function is not working out or even if more components should be added.
  
  One should not pour all the resources into developing the MVP rather keep it simple and give users the basic idea of what the UI of the final product would look like. The developers and designers can make changes after receiving feedback from the users.

• UI design: After creating the prototype, you share it among a close group of people to take their feedback and finally incorporate it in the final product. Creating the user interface (UI) is a very sensitive yet important task as the developers have to make sure the users can interact with the app without any disruption.
  
  UI comprises several tools and it should be designed in such a way that the users have all their answers right in front of their eyes. The color palette, font, shapes, etc should also be chosen wisely so that it has a positive visual impact on the users.  The next task is to choose a framework wisely which is most suitable and best for your app.

• Choosing an Android app development framework: Every app fulfills different needs of customers and thus it requires a framework that is most suitable for it. To understand which framework is most suitable for your app development, you should ask yourself questions like how communication will take place between cloud API and the device, what are the device features your app will use, will it require a camera, what kind of storage it will require, how easily or often the app will be upgraded, the cost of developing the app, etc.
  
  Some of the examples of different mobile app development frameworks are Ionic, Xamarin, React Native, jQuery Mobile, etc. Python and Javascript are very common languages used in mobile app development.

• Testing: Before releasing the final product in the market, your app should reach the desired quality. You cannot launch a product in the market that is filled with bugs or incomplete functions. Every feature and function need to work properly in an optimized way making your app very efficient. If you are building an Android app, your app should be tested across every Android device from smartphones to tablets to check if they are performing well on each one of them.

• Choosing a distribution model and release: For Android apps, the apps are released on the Play Store so that the actual public can use it. But, if you are building an app for in-house purposes, then there is a different procedure for that. But, no matter who your target audience is, your app should be very secure and your team should make sure that no user data is compromised.