Mobile applications

Mobile application for business. Much more than an icon on your smartphone's home screen.

The mobile application, according to the latest market research, is a popular way to make purchases on the Internet and 97% of users in Europe who make purchases online cannot be wrong. At the same time, mobile website adaptation is inferior to applications in terms of attraction and conversion, and here’s why.

About 51% of users check their applications from 1 to 10 times a day, while the conversion rates in mobile applications leave browsers no chance - applications win by more than seven times.

Moreover, a business with a mobile application receives wider coverage and flexible management of user acquisition through push messages and personalized offers. It’s also worth talking about additional income, because in addition to profit from sales, a business can monetize a mobile application using advertising, paid features or subscriptions.

The advantages of developing a mobile application are indeed obvious, but what are the stages of its development?

Main stages of mobile application development

Application development is an interesting process, consisting of several mandatory stages, and not always starting with analysis and definition of a clear technical specification.

1. Analysis

At this stage, the goals and objectives of the mobile application that it must solve are determined:

• increase in sales;
• promotion of business products and services;
• increasing customer loyalty
• audience expansion.

Based on the customer’s idea, our team studies the target audience and segments it into smaller clusters depending on the needs of the business. Assess the benefits of the product and predict its expected need in the market.

Analysis is always about the effective synthesis of customer ideas, business needs and current trends in the mobile application market.

Result: The niche and idea of the future mobile application are known, development markers and tasks that the future software will solve are identified.

2. Terms of reference

The basis for applied development of a mobile application, which involves close work between our team and the customer. The terms of reference contain a detailed description of all the requirements for the application, its functionality, design and other aspects of development. This document consists of maximum detail, which minimizes risks and ensures successful development of the project.

Result: Requirements for the application, its functionality and design are defined and documented.

3. UX Design

Having received a sufficient amount of information at the stages of analysis and formation of technical specifications, our team begins prototyping the future application. At this stage, designers, marketers and developers visualize the concept, its structure and user interaction.

The prototype includes the creation of the first sketches of the interface design, the development of screen layouts and the formation of the overall architecture. The prototype allows you to see the concept of the application live before the start of its full development.

Result: The first wireframes have been created, which means that there is already a sketch of the future application of low accuracy and without design.

4. Design creation

Plays a crucial role in creating an attractive and user-friendly user interface. At this stage, we work on the user-friendliness (UX), overall aesthetics and user-attractive (UI) style, and analyze competitors for a more profitable restoration in the business niche.

Result: Wireframes have already received their first design, UI kit and clickable prototypes.

5. Development

Based on solutions, experience and feedback received at the prototyping stage, developers begin writing application code, create the necessary functionality based on the selected stack, and configure interaction with databases and external services.

Result: the application has already been developed and is ready to be sent to testing, where it will be checked for errors and QA bugs.

6. Testing

At this stage, the created application is checked for errors, bugs and vulnerabilities using different methodologies and types of testing. Detected inaccuracies in the application are sent back to the developers, corrected, and undergo another round of checks until the application meets the appropriate level of quality.

Result: the application has a high level of quality and works without errors.

7. Release: uploading to the store

After a full development cycle, the created application is uploaded to the App Store for iOS or Google Play for Android. Moreover, if the application requires a client-server architecture, it must be deployed on servers. The release process takes some time, so it consists of several stages:

• checking for compliance with requirements: design of the application icon, description, screenshots and videos, privacy policy;
• filling out an application and waiting for approval;
• Once the application is published it becomes available to all users.

Result: the finished application can already be downloaded on page

8. Project support and development

Any application, after uploading to the page, always requires support, which includes the release of updates and improvements to the application, its adaptation to changes in the niche and user requirements, solving problems and questions that arise when using the application.

Technologies we use to develop a mobile application

Avada Media developers use a stack of technologies in their work that are suitable for developing mobile applications for IOS and Android.

Android and Kotlin

Our developers use Kotlin to develop software on Android. It is fully compatible with Java, which means it can be used in apps, backend, web, and even desktop. As Andrey Breslav, the author of the language, says: “Kotlin is a language for all platforms.” We agree that this is exactly the case and here's why:

• for mobile applications, code written in Kotlin is “cleaner” than Java. You can fit 18 lines of Java into one line of Kotlin code. Less code means faster development and faster release of a new app in an old one.
• simplicity of the code - ease of edits. And this is another position to increase the speed of application release.

At the same time, Kotlin and Java can be used together, which allows you to implement all the advantages of these two languages in one project.

SWIFT and iOS

When developing on iOS, developers use the SWIFT language. The main advantages of this language are simplicity, speed and security. Introduced by Apple in 2014, SWIFT has become the flagship of mobile application development on iOS, because it:

• optimized for the development of complex business applications;
• allows you to see the result of the code immediately in the sandbox without the need for constant compilation;
• has many functions for memory management;
• got a cleaner syntax when compared to Objective C.

Team, values, innovation - 3 main principles of successful development

We create innovation in every application. Using a stack of popular, in-demand technologies and innovative approaches to software development, we help our partners and clients develop the optimal solution to achieve business goals, based on the optimal price-quality ratio.

We are confident that successful projects are created only by a team. With more than 10 years of experience in the development market and more than 100 developers on staff, we are ready to offer IT solutions for any business.

At AVADA MEDIA you will find programmers with senior and middle specialization levels who have experience working in large-scale projects. Depending on the complexity of the project and the scope of its development, we can provide the project with both individual specialists and entire well-coordinated teams for mobile development. Such teams consist of several specialists who cover the full cycle of mobile development with their skills:

• project manager (PM) for team coordination and communication with the customer; mobile-developer for implementing software code;
• UX/UI designers to create a user-friendly and aesthetic interface;
• Quality Assurance specialists who will check the received product for compliance with quality standards.

Teams work using the SCRUM methodology. The project manager, as well as the customer, have full control and awareness over each stage of development, while the team still has enough free space to make local decisions.

SCRUM also provides for the decomposition of large tasks into smaller ones, which are included in sprints - time periods into which the entire development is divided and during which the team needs to achieve certain results.