Mobile application development is the set of processes and procedures involved in writing software for small, wireless computing devices, such as smartphones and other hand-held devices.
App development is similar to other software development, including web apps. But the biggest difference between app development and traditional software development is the ability for mobile apps to use native features on a device.
Mobile apps are built for different operating systems, like iOS and Android. By leveraging the built-in features of smartphones, apps offer an enhanced user experience compared to mobile web browsing.
Types of Mobile Applications:
Before Developing the mobile Application, you should know which type of Mobile App you will be creating. Below are the types of Mobile Application:
1. Native applications. These applications are built using integrated development environments (IDEs) and languages for mobile OSes such as Apple iOS or Google Android. Native apps enable you to customize necessary features, but they can be more costly than other technologies.
2. Hybrid apps. These are web apps that act like native apps. They are developed using technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Hybrid apps are more cost-effective to develop than native apps and can be created faster, but they aren't as feature-rich as native applications.
3. Progressive web apps. A PWA is a website that looks and behaves as if it is a mobile app. These applications are developed with web technologies such as Facebook React.
4. Encapsulated apps. An encapsulated app runs within a container app. Products such as the Microsoft Power App drag-and-drop app creation tool enable less experienced developers to build a mobile application rapidly. But the lack of isolation from the core OS, OS lock-in and the relative newness could pose problems.
5. Frameworks and libraries. You can use this reusable code written by someone else to accelerate your development of a mobile app.
Mobile App Development Process
1. Strategy
Firstly, we have to produce a strategy to determine how your business can improve through mobile application? customers benefits? Business partners or employees?
In this , you will
Define app's purpose
Identify app's audience
Research the competition
Establish the app's goals and objective
2. Analysis and Planning
In this stage, Analysis and Planning begin with defining use cases and capturing details functional requirements. When you have identifies the requirement for your app, prepare the roadmap of product. This includes prioritizing mobile app requirement and grouping them into delivery milestones. Resources and Costs are often concern, define your Minimum Viable-Product (MVP) and prioritize for initial launch.
Planning phase of developing an app includes identifying the skills needed for your app development initiative.
3. Build UI/UX Design
UI/UX design is used to create excellent user experience, making the app interactive, intuitive and user-friendly. The UI design will help with early adoption, the app must have intuitive user experience to keep app users engaged.
Information Architecture and Workflow: Determine your data and mobile app will display to user, the data is collected, and how user interact with the finished product and user journey within the app.
Wireframes: Wireframes are conceptual layouts that give visual structure to your app's functional requirements. With wireframes, the focus is more on aesthetics and user experience, not on color schemes and styles. It is quick and cost-effective approach to mobile app design.
Style Guide: It documents your app's design standards - color scheme, typefaces and graphics, according to company's branding guidelines. It improves the productivity of your mobile app developers, consistency across your app's look and feel.
Mockups: These are the final rendering of your app's visual design. Mockups are created by applying your style guide on to app wireframes.
4. App Development
Before actual development, you need :
Define technical architecture
Technology stack
Define development millestones.
A mobile app project is made-up of three parts-
Back-End/Server Technology
Database and server-side project needed to support mobile app functionality. If you are using existing back-end platform, you might require modification for new mobile product.
API
It is method of communication between the app and back-end server/database. Leveraging microservice-based architecture with proper encryption standards allow companies to create a scalable and secured interface for data exchange between the front-end and back-end of mobile apps.
Mobile App Front-End
Mobile app consist of interactive user experience that rely on real-time data and require network connectivity between app's front-end and back-end.
5. Testing
Quality Assurance testing during the mobile app development process makes application stable, unstable and secure. For this, you need to prepare test case that address all aspects of app testing.
Testing Process:
User Experience Testing
Confirms the final implementation matches the user experience as created by the app design team. make sure the app employs consistent fonts, style treatments, color scheme and padding between data, icon design and navigation.
Functional Testing
The Functionality of the app should be tested by users to cover as many potential testing conditions as possible. The purpose is to ensure that user can use app's features and functionality without any issues.
Performance Testing
There are many quantitative criteria available to measure your app's performance
How your app is responding to user requests?
How fast are the app's screens loading?
Is your app draining phone battery or memory leaks?
Size of your app is bigger than it should be?
Security Testing
Data entry forms within your mobile app should be tested to ensure that there is no data leakage.
Device and Platform Testing
During the testing phase, there are many ways for distributing your app development builds to the testers. The most common approach with IOS apps is using the TestFlight and for Androids apps Over the Air (OTA) installs or through Google pay.
6. Deployment and Support
While packaging your app for app store submission, use a name and bundle identifier that is different from QA version of the app. This way you cam continue to the future upgrades to your app prior to releasing them.
App stores require preparing metadata including:
App's title
Description in brief
Category
Keywords
Launch icon
App Store screen-shorts
banner graphic
Promotional video.
Programming Languages used for Android App Development
1. Java
Java continues to remain a top Android app development language because it is stable and secure, supports multi-threading, is portable, and is great for complex architecture – a huge asset for many developers today.
2. Kotlin
Kotlin is a typed language that can run on the Java virtual machine. It is an open-source, multipurpose, and pragmatic computer programming language that combines both acquisitive and functional programming features with the aim of allowing faster compilation.
3. C/C++
C++ is a more generic, object-oriented language that supports dynamic memory allocation to make it execute faster – particularly useful for CPU-intensive apps such as games. Many software developers leverage C++ for cross-platform development or for native development within Java or Kotlin apps.
For experienced C++ developers, the support for C++ lowers the barrier to entry to Android development. However, C++ is not flexible enough to make the entire app and can make for a more buggy, inflexible app if overused.
4. C#
C# is a .NET programming language developed by Microsoft and supported by Visual Studio, considered a “core” language since it performs well and can be used for a variety of projects. C# is based upon object-oriented programming, making it possible to build the app incrementally and support easier management.
5. Lua
Lua is a lightweight scripting language that has a strong following in game development and UI. Lua is an embeddable language, making it possible to use Lua for Android or for cross-platform development with the help of an engine such as Solar2D.
6. JavaScript
JavaScript is one of the top programming languages all around, versatile for many kinds of projects, and known to be fast and adept at creating rich user interfaces and experiences. JavaScript is the language used by several cross-platform frameworks including React Native, Angular and Vue.
7. Python
Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics – meaning it is an easy-to-use programming language that can help speed up development time and comes with a large open-source community and robust frameworks and libraries.
Programming Languages used for IOS App Development
1. Swift:
Swift is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose, open-source programming language for iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and iOS development. It was created by Apple in 2014 to give developers a powerful language to develop iOS apps. According to swift.org, the language was designed to be safe, fast, and expressive. It’s intended to be a replacement for C-based languages. The Swift language is constantly evolving, and the community continues to grow. Swift source code can be found on GitHub, making it easy for anyone to access the code.
2. C#
C# is a general-purpose, modern and object-oriented programming language pronounced as “C sharp”. It was developed by Microsoft led by Anders Hejlsberg and his team within the .Net initiative and was approved by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) and International Standards Organization (ISO). C# is among the languages for Common Language Infrastructure and the current version of C# is version 7.2. C# is a lot similar to Java syntactically and is easy for the users who have knowledge of C, C++ or Java.
3. Objective-C
Objective c is an object-oriented programming language. It adds syntax and semantics that allows for an object oriented language. But it doesn’t support multiple inheritance property. Objective C can be called the super set of C language. It contains classes and objects in addition to C language.
4. Flutter
Flutter is Google's free and open-source UI framework for creating native mobile applications. Released in 2017, Flutter allows developers to build mobile applications with a single codebase and programming language. This capability makes building both iOS and Android apps simpler and faster.
5. React Native
React Native (also known as RN) is a popular JavaScript-based mobile app framework that allows you to build natively-rendered mobile apps for iOS and Android. The framework lets you create an application for various platforms by using the same codebase.
6. HTML 5
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is used to design web pages using a markup language. HTML 5 is the fifth and current version of HTML. It has improved the markup available for documents and has introduced application programming interfaces(API) and Document Object Model(DOM).
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