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The concept of a mobile-first approach is the new norm in today's tech revolution. This comes from my personal experience in building countless mobile applications for businesses and solopreneurs who had nothing more than a life-changing vision with them. By taking a mobile-first approach, I have personally seen immense hikes in traffic, engagements and revenue. If you're an aspiring businessman aiming to tap into the treasure chest called mobile applications, you need certain guidance and insights on how to go about it. And with this post, I will share everything I know that lets me build future-proof mobile applications users love. Just to put the entire mobile app development scene into perspective, understand that there would be over 7 billion smartphone users across the globe by the end of 2021. This is leaving the autonomous devices part of the Internet Of Things ecosystem. And by the end of 2022, the number of app downloads is expected to reach over 258 billion. No matter how motivating and reassuring these statistics sound, these are not the numbers you should focus on right now. What should matter to you currently instead is the fact that an average smartphone user in the US has over 100 apps installed on their phone. What's more alarming? It's the fact that over 79% of the users abandon downloaded apps after a day's use. Does app development still sound glamorous? From my perspective, it does and it's the sweet spot where you come up with fixes to your plaguing challenges. While these numbers can be threatening, these are also your opportunities to look into mobile app development aspects others have overlooked. From security angles to concerns on user interfaces, these abandoned apps would have ignored several key areas users need. As a compilation from experience, here are four Features you can't afford to ignore when building a mobile app. Enhanced Security Security is still one of the major priorities of both the dominating operating systems in the market - iOS and Android. With developers adding layers to security and privacy of data with the introduction of facial and touch recognition, users are increasingly demanding this feature in the apps they use as well. Apart from using this feature to unlock phones, customers are looking at this as a form of a firewall that prevents unauthorized access. This feature becomes all the more crucial if you intend to develop a fintech app, where people can make fraudulent transactions by gaining access by brute force. One of the ideal ways of implementing this feature is by adding this as a layer to navigational areas that are more vulnerable to threats. For instance, the settings module of any app, where people could restore passwords, change primary details and more. A wall asking authorization access in the form of facial or touch recognition can prevent intrusions and thefts of data. Push Notifications Regardless of what your opinion on push notifications is, they are here to stay. While sometimes they can be overly intrusive with frequent messages and updates, they are often messengers of good things when they deliver us discounts, deals and special accesses to offers. From a marketer's perspective, push notifications are used by
companies with an intention to ● Retain customers ● Push frequent app usage ● Deliver personalized message for engagements ● Send real-time messages ● Increase customer interactions as an alternative to emails and more One of the primary reasons I've mentioned push notifications as an alternative to emails is because of the backing statistics. According tothis infographics, the open rate of push notifications is 50% which is higher than emails. Its click rate is 7 times the click rate of emails. Besides, over 70% users feel that they are useful. The good thing about push notifications apart from their personalization features is that you can run targeted promotions through them. With the power of data science and analytics, you can segment users depending on a number of factors and engage uniquely with each audience persona. For instance, if you run a food-delivery app, you can pull out data on users who have not used your app for a while. With this, you can send personalized messages with customized deals and offers to rekindle app usage. Alternatively, you can also reward your most active users. While there are several best practices you need to take care to ensure these strategies don't backfire, push notifications are value-additions to your application. Offline Access This is the age of instant gratification. From instant search results to on-demand product deliveries, we have evolved into a generation that is willing to spend money to save time. With such a collective evolution of this mindset, it is imperative that your app has this philosophy at its fulcrum. While the internet is not a concern in third-world countries, developing countries are still implementing solid internet infrastructure. That's why it becomes important to add key functionality to your app - offline access. Because of weak connections, it could be that users don't get the information they are looking for on your app or access its features. This not only brings down the app usability but paves the way for its abandonment as well. That's why your app should have a layer where users can interact with your app offline or during instances of weak connectivity as well. It could be cached content or alternate features that pop up only when the app is unable to connect to the internet. Users don't want to look at a blank screen at any given point of time. To get some inspiration, think of Google's most creative Dinosaur game, which pops up when your Chrome browser doesn't connect to the internet. It not only retains users during service disruption but engages with them uniquely as well. Focus https://xyz.com on Customer Needs Than Wants There is a definite need for something in the minds of your users. That's why they access your app. During the ideation and development process, the focus should always be on fulfilling the needs of your customers than their wants. Consider an on-demand cab service app. Customers who use the app need a cab that could take them from point A to point B. For these specific few minutes, they are more focused on what they need and not what they want.
Your app should deliver this hassle-free. But the case is different when they board the cab. The mind automatically switches to different wants once the need is attained. For inspirational purposes, you can consider your customers' demographics, region, preferences, likes and dislikes, spending capacity and more to come up with a version of the hierarchy of needs. This will give you a significant idea on the priority concerns your app should solve and then move on to other problems if required. Developing a mobile application is an exciting and rewarding process. But along the way there are also tons of hindrances, pivoting, failures. Though they shouldn't bother you, they should definitely teach you to develop a mobile application that users find useful. If all this sounds too daunting to you and if you feel, you only want to somehow get an app developed, reach out to experts in the industry. Anyprominent app development company would know the intricacies involved in developing mobile apps. Good luck! One constant truth about mobile app development is that there is nothing that's constant for long. New technologies and trends are reshaping the application development ecosystem. There is a marked shift towards light weight, fast-loading apps that reduce the time to market and overall development cost - as well as providing above-par user experience. Enterprises are embracing mobility with a focus on result-oriented customer experience across multiple platforms. However, businesses are also working on tighter budgets and shorter timelines to release their app. Here are a few ways in which Xamarin is speeding up the app development timeline: 1)Multi-platform capabilities- Xamarin enables you to use a single codebase across platforms, be it Windows, iOS or Android. You don't have to rewrite the code for each platform. Xamarin enables code sharing up to 75% across platforms leading to faster release cycles using fewer developer resources. 2)Lean development methodology- Another trend that has gained momentum for enterprise apps is the lean methodology - that advocates building only a minimum viable product, or an MVP for a quick release. This is followed by collecting data and reviews in line with the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The feedback is then used to continually inform and improve the development. The process operates on shorter, iterative cycles called sprints wherein updates are released in shorter 2-4 week periods. Xamarin's philosophy is to support this agile development process - bringing efficiency to the build. 3)Xamarin.Forms- Xamarin.Forms is a natively backed UI toolkit abstraction that lets you build native UIs for iOS, Android and Windows Phone from a shared, single C# codebase. By using the native controls of target platform, Xamarin.Forms delivers the native experience for each platform. Xamarin.Forms offers more than 40 cross- platform layouts and controls that are mapped to native controls at runtime. These apps don't face the limitations of other toolkits like browser sandboxing, limited APIs or poor performance at the same time rapid prototyping and shared code up to 100% ensures that apps are built really fast. 4)Powerful mBaaS- Many organizations building their mobile apps spend a lot of time and effort in business critical functions like offline/online setup, data synchronization with cloud, social media integration etc. These functions use up a great deal of time and resources. Instead, they could be managed through a robust mobile backend system (mBaaS) like Azure Mobile Apps Service. Xamarin facilitates seamless integration with Azure mBaaS enables businesses to focus on their core tasks like improving efficiency and user experience. 5)Xamarin Test Cloud- Testing mobile apps for quality, consistency and stability can be quite the challenge
considering the number of devices and platforms. Xamarin Test Cloud automates application testing on thousands of mobile devices using the cloud. It allows developers to test up to 2000 devices in the cloud and test any features or simulate user actions like pinching, swiping, tapping or scrolling. Test Cloud reports on performance issues within any OS with step-by-step monitoring and tracking of memory and performance. With Xamarin, building mobile applications is accelerated with the power of the native platforms and a number of strong features like complete binding for the underlying SDKs, modern language constructs, modern integrated development environment etc. Owing to its powerful features and reduced time-to-market, Xamarin has filled a void in the app development market where developers can use a modern language to ship quality apps quickly across all platforms. Have you used Xamarin's sophisticated framework yet? What are your views? Please let us know in the comments section below.
