In recent years, access to the Internet from mobile phones has increased compared to desktops. According to statistics, more than 77% of people use their smart phones for at least 4 hours a day. Each person uses 9 applications daily on average.
For this reason, application development is necessary due to its unlimited uses and benefits, and the application development market is a suitable and profitable market. If you want to stay ahead of this competitive and attractive market, be sure to read this article from the series of Android programming training articles.
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What is application development?
Application development is the process of creating an application or set of applications to perform various tasks required by a business. If you have a smartphone or tablet, you’ve probably used some game apps, messaging apps, or even navigation apps.
Applications help businesses to automate the process of doing things and increase their efficiency. Every application development process follows similar steps. In this article, we will mention these steps.
Stage 1: Idea generation stage
The first and most important step in the Android application development process is idea generation. You should try to come up with new and pure ideas in the ideation stage, using methods such as brainstorming. After generating ideas, the stage is to evaluate the idea. You should check if your ideas can be implemented? Have your competitors worked on that particular idea before you? What benefits and features will the implementation of this idea add to the application?
At this stage, you should define the purpose of developing the application, and the users you anticipate will use this application. In general, the ideation stage is a stage full of trial and error. At this stage, you need to pay attention to the details so that you can check your idea from all aspects.
Step 2: Developing a strategy
Strategizing and building a basic structure for app development is the next step in the Android app development process. To formulate a targeted and successful strategy, try to study and analyze the strategy of your competitors and write down their positive and negative points in order to implement better features than them.
Step 3: Create a wireframe
Wireframe is a basic step in Android application development. The design or prototype shows the basic structure of the application, its appearance, page flow path, etc. Wireframes not only help you create a specific image of the app in your mind with a prototype-like structure, but are also useful for identifying challenging areas.
Step 4: Evaluation of technical feasibility
Having deep technical knowledge about hardware and software requirements is essential during Android application development. There are many advanced integrated development environments (IDEs), tools, programs, and programming languages that help developers develop Android apps faster and more efficiently. For example:
Android Studio: Google has provided Android Studio as the official IDE for developing Android applications. Android Studio is a free open source tool that has various features like code editing, debugging, testing, etc. It helps you to build dynamic and high-quality applications in a short period of time.
Programming languages: Java programming language is the main programming language for Android application development. However, since 2017, Google has announced that Kotlin has become the official Android development language. Although choosing the right programming language for Android application development is completely optional, Kotlin programming language will be much easier and more useful than Java.
Step 5: User interface design
Designing an attractive user interface or UI is very essential for Android application development, so using the right colors and graphics and making a beautiful theme for the application is very important. Colors attract users and make them eager to use your app. Easy access and convenient navigation help users to have a seamless and good experience of the application.
Step 6: Testing
Full Android application testing is one of the essentials of Android application development. Before submitting your app to the Google Play Store, your app needs to be tested against various parameters and benchmarks. Your app should work well in different scenarios and be free of any bugs or programming errors.
Step 7: Implementation
After testing the application and verifying its functionality, the application is ready to enter the Google Play Store and launch. Google has a set of guidelines for publishing apps on the Google Play Store. If these rules and instructions are followed by the Android developer, the application will be placed in Play Store for download. But this is not the end of the work!
Tips on app marketing
You should know that app development is not something you can just give up on. You should constantly monitor the amount of downloads of the application by users and the overall performance of your application. Once your app finds its way into an app store, it’s time to focus on improving your app marketing.
You can communicate with experts and critics of the application field, ask them to talk about your application and its features and give their opinion. You can also offer free trial courses to users or even a percentage discount from the regular price. Additionally, you should make sure to write a brief and useful description of what your app does in the app description section of the Play Store or other app download stores.
The important points that you should observe in writing the description or about this app section in the Play Store are:
- The tone of the text in the description of the application should be understandable and simple for all users at any level of technical knowledge.
- Avoid writing very long and boring texts.
- Determine who your target market is.
- In each version of the update and development of the application, clearly identify the new features that have been added to or removed from the application.