The world is on the verge of ending a quarter of the 21st century and it seems like mobile phones are competing with human beings in terms of population. Mobile users are increasing so rapidly that no business can survive without taking note of their presence on mobiles in terms of websites or applications. There can be seen a surge in the importance of App development Companies or especially Android App development companies. These companies have android developers with years of experience building fully functional, robust, and futuristic custom apps for a variety of Android devices.
And in today’s era, there is an app for everything from food delivery to weight loss. So, businesses and app development companies, in collaboration, need to develop out-of-the-box solutions that promise an innovative edge over the competitors of businesses. App developers use their expertise to formulate unique solutions that meet your business needs. Let’s take a brief overview of the phases involved in app development.
Requirement Analysis:
This phase is started once a lead is converted to a client and a contract is done between the business and the app development company. The main motive of this phase is to understand the client, understand their business strategy so that the app development company can get an idea of the client’s pain points and the innovative minds at the app development company come up with the best solution for those pain points of the client.
Often tours and visualization sessions are arranged to give a detailed idea of the client’s business. The more time is spent on business understanding, it is better for the android app development company to design the best solution for the client.
Prototype / Wireframing:
Once the requirements are gathered and the best possible solution is presented to the clients, they tend to give some feedback and accept the solution. Then that solution consists of only functionality description and paperwork. Such a solution is not clearly understandable for any client just by reading some paperwork. Therefore, prototyping or wireframing is done for each screen the client will see once the solution will be deployed
Tools like adobe XD, and Figma are of great help to design the User Interface (UI) for the proposed solution. The App development company hires specialized UI/UX designers for such tasks. In this also, meetings are scheduled just like the Requirement analysis phase. In such meetings, the client gives feedback about the color palette, font size, font style, and overall experience and positioning of elements in the UI design.
Final Solution Drafting:
In the Prototyping phase, the client gives feedback on the proposed solution’s user interface. This feedback is noted by the person in contact with the client (generally the scrum master) and is conveyed to the UI/UX designers so that the UI can be updated accordingly.
This process continues till the client and the app development company both agree on the user interface or prototype. Once the prototype is finalized, it is documented in wording and is frozen (Kept as the final version). This endeavor is undertaken in the solution drafting phase. The document created in this phase acts like the Bible of the project and is shared with the android app developers to start the build phase or development phase.
Build Phase:
This is the phase where actual development is carried out. Multiple developers collaborate and work in sprints to achieve the milestones mentioned in the Final Solution Document. Each sprint is reviewed and finalized by the client. In each sprint, deliverables and acceptance criteria are defined based on the solution document and there is no scope for nonspecific or relative terms so that targets are calculative and measurable. Once the deliverables are satisfied, the client gives a closing signal for that sprint and marks it as ‘done’. The definition of marking as done is also explicitly mentioned in the solution document. This definition is very important in legally proving whether the project or its subtask is completed or not.
Generally, these sprints are planned, but many times this timeline is kept flexible due to unforeseen errors and bugs. The efforts of developers are calculated in terms of man hours so that billing can be done from the client side based on it. The purpose of this phase is to convert the documented prototype into a system that addresses all established requirements. At the end of this phase, the deployment phase begins.
Deployment and testing:
This phase is important from the perspective of the end user. Once all sections mentioned in the final solution document are completed, those are deployed on the decided hosting platform (mostly Play Store in this case of Android mobile applications)
A beta version is launched to perform thorough testing of each functionality and it is again made sure by the client that all the documented stuff is present in the application or not.
This step is quite relative to the size of the client company and the size of the project. Some app development companies use CI/CD pipelines which means continuous integration and continuous deployment. If such a model is adopted, testing becomes a day to day chore. Each sprint is directly deployed once the client gives a closing signal.
Whereas if the app development company is following the waterfall model, then deployment becomes the last phase of the application development process.
Loop from step 3 to step 5 (depends on size of the project):
As mentioned earlier there can be 2 possible ways for the app development company to work based on whether they are incorporating CI/CD or not. Similarly, once the app is completed and deployed, clients may ask for changes based on the market conditions, policy changes of policy or any strategic advancement. In such scenarios, all steps from solution drafting to deployment and testing are repeated in order to release an update for the completed app project.
In this way, app development companies are leveraging skilled developers and helping businesses to grow their mobile presence. Some companies also offer support for existing apps that are yet to be upgraded or are seeking for new version release.