As people continue treating mobile app development as a stand-alone project as your mobile apps should be a part of your enterprise-wide strategy, myths continue to be perpetuated. Too often, some companies treat them as a compartmentalized effort. It is not the right way to go about it when it comes to making mobile app development an IT initiative. Even when IT may need to do the heavy lifting, its business needs must drive growth. While planning and developing apps instead of being driven by individual functions such as marketing or sales or product lines, a centralized approach is crucial.
Many still hold on to the below-mentioned common mobile app development myths. Let us get real before diving into them. To shed on inhibitions, the industry and your market are not going to wait. Your customers will not hesitate to abandon you as you should fail to meet their demand industry standard. To keep you from building the right mobile app for you, let us examine some of these myths.
1. The Costs Are Astronomical When it Comes to Custom Software Development
You will be tempted to forget about custom software with the first quote you get accompanied by the many zeroes. They are far cheaper when it comes to standard-off-shelf solutions. Many business owners forget that even ready-made software comes with a hidden price nevertheless. For the added users, once you update your subscription, you will have to pay. The extra feature comes with an added price tag even. These are all the added costs that form to be an excellent big sum. To fit the default set of features, consider how often you will find yourself having to transform your business process. You will soon realize that custom software development will be saving you money in the longer run.
2. Porting Is Not Hard Though it May Sound to be
It is not as simple as pushing a button to port an iOS app to Android. Even though you have completed the design and branding on another platform offers an initial boost, porting is very intense. Developers have to translate code into another language with the use of different libraries. The application of the unique design principle of the target OS is then made. To go through it, the platform-specific bugs and concerns take time. It demands the same thorough approach as building a new app while converting a visually appealing functional app.
3. Bug-Free Software is Possible
In muted voices about that perfect code they have crafted around the bonfires on a chilly night, tipsy engineers speak in this way. Not a single error is possessed by anyone who has ever written a program. You should not be taken aback by every single bug your users point out to. Each of the software is a living thing, progressing and ever-changing after all.
4. Agile Development Allows Changes at Any Given Stage of Development
To the pre-approved list of requirements and features, several stakeholders try and make the changes without the proper understanding of software development processes after the project is already underway. Merely rewriting a few lines of code is the small change that is not entailed here. Through the entire architecture, even minor changes can ripple, causing several errors and bugs. The cost thereby rises as there is an alteration of the development timeline. Next time, you need to consider whether these changes will indeed be an added benefit to your business or make the final product considerably better for the end-users. When you feel that you need to remake the user interface or add extra features, you need to stick to your original plan for now and consider changes within future software releases.
5. More Hands Deliver Faster Results
Unlike the traditional product cycles, software development does not work quicker with more members of a team. The timeline of your project gets updated with the addition of new people to the team that will not fasten when the release date is pushed back. It is a complicated endeavor when it comes to software development. It means that the project manager has to spend that much more time bringing them up to speed while bringing in new players. After they familiarize themselves with the entire concept, new team members will have to find their places in the project. The release date might have to be pushed back even further, and your key project manager and critical developers will take time to adjust.
6. The Project is Pretty Much Done After the Final Release
For the testers, developers, and support managers, there is still a lot of work left. Your users might require training even if the interface is streamlined and straightforward to grasp the software’s features entirely. To provide ideas for future updates and improve the user-friendliness of your product, user feedback can then be used. To the growth of the product over time, one has to plan while compiling a roadmap. Since you will soon learn that bug-free software is just another myth, you might also have to debug and maintain.
7. Traffic Will Increase With App Store Optimization
The iOS app store has over 2 million apps, and the Android app store has over 3.8 million apps. No app will make it to the top 50 or the top 10 by merely optimizing. Even within a day, ASO cannot help you build Rome. It does the trick in the way you are displaying your app. Traffic is generated through the app. Devise a marketing plan, focus on your segment of the customer by diverting all the channel traffic to your app, and target social media.
8. The More the features, the Better
Your application will become unresponsive, bloated, leading to too many memory hogs and a vast number of functional issues when you populate your app with several features. You need not think that your mobile application is a mini version of your company’s website. Instead of settling the app with hardly required features, you need to focus on the essential elements you need to work on wisely.
9. Native App Development is Essential for a Better Experience
You can get the best mobile experience through the native mobile application. The native approach for mobile app development may prove to be the wrong choice in a few instances. Your target audience, when and why they make use of your application, everything has to be taken into account. The occasion will not call in for a native app at times, and here a hybrid or a web app might get the work done.
10. Mobile Apps do not Interface With the Legacy Systems
In the Enterprise Resource Planning system or ERP, organizations make significant investments and are still unwilling to invest in the development of mobile apps. There is always a seamless solution where a suite of enterprise apps might connect to multiple backend systems and APIs like Oracle, Sharepoint, SAP, and MySQL. For mobile devices to easily access legacy systems with the assistance of seamless integration of technologies, a backend as a service solution is enterprise-grade with an API infrastructure.
11. Mobile App Analytics Data will Tell You How Your App is Doing
Mobile app analytics does help to gauge the performance of your app. The overall health of the app is what you are looking at. You need to look for screens with minimal engagement, locating complex engagements, measuring and comparing your app performance on different screens, identifying the screen at which users tend to leave the app is what you need to look more closely at. To the health of the applications, these pointers are essential.
12. iOS Must Come First
It is not a universal truth, while it does make sense to prioritize iOS for some apps. iPhone is no longer the only smartphone brand known for its camera anymore as a matter of fact. You need to get into the target market of the product. Who will be using it? Which are the pain points you are trying to resolve? It will consume your budget and time away from your most eager users if your market’s demographics prefer Android when it comes to prioritizing iOS.
13. Quality is Enough
Users will eventually appear to download it and spread the word as many companies assume this if they build a good app. If you do not market and promote your app, the likelihood of getting any users at all is quite slim in reality. For establishing a strong user base, only the well-marketed apps get a break in today’s app saturated market. Marketing is just as crucial to an app’s success as development and design areas. Some people do not account for the time it takes to market a new app. There is no excuse to launch without a proper marketing strategy in place with so many ways to advertise apps today.
14. The Development of Mobile Applications is Cheap
It might tempt one to think that developing smaller screens is affordable and straightforward as mobile devices are small. Mobile app development is not as easy as the development of any other software. It is mainly involved in the process where an entire team is composed of several roles.
15. Mobile Applications Reach Out to Users on Their Own
It does not mean that the work is completed when one uploads an application into the application market. It should be getting to phones, tablets, and other users’ devices for the applications. For marketers, this is a considerable challenge. Getting a new application to people is a daunting task since the competition here is enormous. It costs a lot of money and also a significant amount of effort.
16. Development Ends With Placing an Application on the Market
It does not mark the end of the development process when it comes to releasing an application. You will always find bugs that need to be repaired later, although most of the mistakes should be corrected during testing. Further development is also undergone through these applications. New features are added to respond to the more recent versions of the mobile operating systems that often entail the need to rewrite part of the application code, control applications, and change graphics.
17. An Application is Developed For All OS
To the users of all major operating systems of Android, iOS, and Windows, each application might not be available. It is usually a question of strategic decisions, and it is usually enough even to concentrate on single operating systems, especially for internal corporate applications. It is mainly a matter of money as well as strategy. It also depends on the size of the market, the target group’s definition, and other factors for consumer applications.
18. High User Ratings on Applications With the Best Graphics
For the success of mobile applications, high-quality graphics are required. However, a nice jacket will have many downloads as it does not guarantee that the application will be successful. The usability or UX, simplicity, and clearly defined purpose of the application are required mostly.
19. It is Sufficient to Consider Only Development Costs When Planning the Budget For a New Application
It is not just about its programming when it comes to mobile application development. A whole range of other activities here in this process. Project management takes approaches to care, and they should plan and manage carefully. The process can take place more only for the smaller applications.
20. Multiple Operating Systems At Once There are no Useful Tools For App Development
To the reducing costs and speeding up development, cross-platform application development can significantly contribute to it. Even if the application’s outcome is available for Android, iOS, and Windows, its critical parts are developed only once.
It need not be all doom and gloom when it comes to app development. When it is done right with all the realistic expectations, a mobile app proves to be a powerful addition to the technological ecosystem of an organization.
Dilip Tiwari
Dilip Tiwari is Digital Marketing Expert at USS LLC he likes to share Tips on Digital Marketing Services, Google ads management, Amazon ads management, and other blogs ideas.