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Not all mobile app developers are created equal. To transform your paper sketches, written requirements and product vision into a successful mobile application, you need an experienced team of product managers, designers, developers and quality assurance professionals who live and breathe mobile. Want your app to delight your customers and stakeholders? Then, select a mobile development agency like CognitiveClouds with experience shipping numerous successful apps with millions of collective downloads.

Is a mobile first strategy right for your product?

When you design for mobile first, you simplify your product’s core features and provide value to customers wherever they go. To succeed with a mobile first strategy, you must interview potential customers and define user personas to confirm that a mobile first design solves the core pain points your customers experience daily. Once you determine that a mobile first strategy is right for your product, focus on one core use case and table everything else for version two. Focus is key to the success of your mobile app.

For every mobile first success story like Uber, Whatsapp and Instagram there are thousands of mobile first product failures. Are you building a consumer app or a business app? Mobile first consumer apps and games are the most common success stories you read about in the news, but they’re hard to monetize if your users don’t return every day. Freemium and SaaS subscription models are proven monetization methods for mobile first business apps, but these products often require companion web applications for office workers to generate reports and assign tasks to users in the field.

How to hire a mobile app developer

Are you overwhelmed by the thousands of app developers on the market? Are you looking for a development partner who can design and develop an awesome app within your time and budgetary constraints? The most successful mobile apps are built by teams that work closely together, so find a mobile development company with the capabilities to design and develop your app from start to finish. In addition to helping you launch your app, an excellent full-service app development agency should help you define the core product features you customers need and guide you towards a product/market fit. Below are a few things you should consider when you evaluate mobile app developers.

When you select a native or hybrid approach to your app’s development, you can eliminate a number of firms from your list. Some mobile development firms specialize in hybrid app development, others specialize in native app development and few are great at both. Focus on companies with expertise in the development approach you’ve selected. The rest of your decision making criteria should come down to tools, skills and processes.

Design Driven Development - Since native mobile app development takes longer than web development, you want your iOS and Android engineers to understand what they’re building before they write a single line of code. When you start with design, you clarify unknown and ambiguous requirements, so your developers don’t waste time building the wrong thing. Your designer should give your development team wireframes for every screen within your app, which acts as a visual spec, leaving little for your engineering team to interpret. Tools like InVision help your designer create clickable prototypes that clarify user flows and allow developers to ask questions about features.

Integrated Design and Development Team - To keep your mobile project on schedule, your app designer must work closely with your mobile developers. When they review design assets early and often, your developers advise your mobile designer how to implement the standard animations and UI design languages for each mobile platform. Experienced mobile developers expect design assets to be delivered in specific screen sizes and resolutions, so your designer may need to redraw assets if expectations aren’t set early. These are just a few reasons why communication between your mobile designers and developers is crucial to your project’s success.

Platform Independent Designs - Regardless of whether you’re launching on iOS, Android or both, you should follow Google’s Material Design Guidelines for Android and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS. When experienced Android users encounter an app ported from iOS to Android without adopting the correct design language, those users get annoyed and often delete the app. Apple’s App Store has its own strict requirements for store submissions and your app may be rejected for distribution if it doesn’t follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. The additional cost to create independent design assets for each platform pays off multiple times over in the form of user retention and growth.

Agile Development Sprints - When your development team follows an agile development process, you receive multiple development builds of your app throughout the project, which allows you to give feedback and suggest minor changes. While your app’s UI is defined during the design process, it’s hard to user test some features with just clickable prototypes, so expect some iteration during the development process to ensure your app delivers an experience your users love. As you get additional builds of your app, more features are added until your app is feature complete and ready to ship. Two-week development sprints give your quality assurance team sufficient time to review all the new features being released, and tools like Trello and Jira help your project manager keep tasks organized into sprints.

Backend and REST API Development - Just about every app on your phone and every app we build connects to a cloud-based backend application via REST APIs. When you’re looking for a company to help you with app development, make sure they know how to build robust backend applications capable of supporting your expected user base. Are you planning on supporting millions of users after your first month of operation? You need a great backend engineering team to create a scalable architecture and remove bottlenecks as they arise.

Testing and Debugging Builds - Bugs are part of every software development project and mobile has its own challenges because there are thousands of screen resolution, screen size, operating system version and processor speed combinations that need to be supported. Because iOS is a closed ecosystem with great development and testing tools, it’s easier to debug iOS apps when compared to Android apps. It’s cost prohibitive to test your Android app on every Android device ever created, so you should select the most popular Android devices in the country you’re targeting for launch and then use a virtualized testing suite to catch bugs on other devices. A good development partner will help you understand the OS versions and hardware you need to support in order to reach your target market.

At CognitiveClouds, we follow these processes and have the skills required to design, develop and launch mobile apps your users love. You’ve made it this far, so how about that free consultation?