5 Ways to improve Mobile App Development Timeline

If you are entrepreneur providing software services, then time is your money. To stand out from the competition and stay in the market you should have wheels attached. Mobile app development is not difficult but is definitely one of the most time-consuming processes. On the contrary, less time to market is what going to get you more clients.

Every year thousands of mobile applications come up, but how many get installed, we get to know about that only through graphs and statistics.

There is nothing to get intrigued by these facts; all you need to do is follow industry benchmarks, meet customer expectations, and according to the schedule. And how to do that we will see in the further sections.

But before that, you have to understand few pain points of developing a mobile application. Basically, developers will have a difficult time addressing these three elements.

For every mobile application, the needs differ, but I have taken the reference of two most popular applications to highlight common challenges faced by our developer community.

To stay away from such time-consuming development cycles, the developers should,

• Use MVP Model
  • It’s one of the biggest mistakes developers do; they take time to create a complete functional model of a product and present it to the market and again work on the feedbacks. It is time-consuming as well as a contradicting practice to the concept of early time to market.
  • Short for Minimum Viable Product, MVP is a complete product that has basic features required to address customer’s core requisites. With MVP, developers can market the product in a very less time with improved ideas and implementations.
  • In any case, MVP disallows developers from creating the whole set of non-essential features for a website or mobile app thus preventing them from losing their valuable time as well as money.
• Create Low-Fidelity Mock-ups
  • The best way to figure out the information architecture is to start with low-fidelity wireframes.
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  • If I have to go from basics, wireframing is essential for screen design process.
  • Be it a website or a mobile app, if you straightaway start with development sans any plan, then it will be a disaster. It is as simple as having a blueprint for building a house.
  • So without a basic plan, it is not feasible to fill in the blocks of code. Since we are concerned about speeding up the app development process, it will be quite sufficient if developers create a low-fidelity wireframe.
  • The best way to shoot up the speed issue is to address everything at the primary stage, for which developers need not create high-fidelity wireframes using graphics and other stuff wasting their time.
  • Low-fidelity mockups help define the visual hierarchy, the link between screens, pages, and helps in defining the priority of each content piece.
  • Once a rough sketch of the product is prepared, developers can either retain the concept or discard it if ideas are not tuning. No much harm was done here as time and money was efficiently managed.
• Try Hybrid Development Solutions
  • Developing a mobile application with hybrid technology saves you a lot of time. First, your mobile application will run on every operating system. Second, you need not have to write separate code for each platform and actually saves you a lot of time.
  • Mobile application developers always struggle with speed and quality. Faster time to market implies their product should reach every individual who is a part of that market consistently. Be it an iOS, Android, or Windows device user.
  • Cross-platform hybrid development solutions like Xamarin and Adobe PhoneGap, allows targeting multiple platforms with a single code base. Not having to write a fresh piece of code for each and every platform, developers will find it convenient to market the product quickly to the large customer base.
• Employ Agile Development Methodology
  • Agile development methodology is a software product development approach, where the whole process/task is divided into subtasks. Mobile app development team adopting this methodology will find it easier to complete the tasks of assorted requirements within the given time frame.
  • Also, unlike the classic waterfall model, agile development methodology allows addressing quality issues at the earlier stages of development process.
• Get Automated Testing Models on Board
  • You know, it is actually hard to account for the number of Android devices that are available in the market. Manually testing each one of the devices for the mobile application will increase the time to market.
  • Also, it is not just the OS; your tests should be fragmented for devices with varying screen-sizes, OS versions, and the models.
  • It’s quite challenging, exhaustive as well as time-consuming
  • Appium, Calabash, Selendroid, EarlGrey, Robotium, Espresso & XCTest UI are some of the best open-source mobile app testing frameworks that will help you address even the smallest quality issue through providing a comprehensive automation workflow. So, automate your app testing process and build better mobile apps.