How To Create An App for Play and App Store in 10 Easy Steps

Mobile is taking over desktop: the number of mobile users and time spent on mobile are seeing constant growth.

Providing seamless, yet engaging experience on mobile is now more important than ever, and it gives a true competitive advantage to businesses that get it right.

A great mobile app can exponentially help your business in many ways. It can:

• Increase your revenue by improving sales or introducing a new revenue stream
• Build up engagement and community by providing a resource for your audience
• Improve employee communication by being a core internal app for your business
• Increase your brand awareness and enhancing your mobile marketing strategy

However, creating an app can be an intimidating experience. You may be discouraged by high potential costs, technical teams, complex project management, months of work, and many costly risks among the way.

If that sounds familiar, this guide is for you. By the end of it, you will be able to:

• Define and research your app
• Create and test your app’s layout and use cases
• Choose your development path based on your resources
• Build and test your app without a single dollar spent
• Launch your first app in a matter of weeks with a minimum cost

We’re breaking down every step, giving you all the resources you need, and explaining all your options.

Let’s go!

Step 1: Define Your Objectives With a Mobile App

Before you start figuring out how to create an app, you need to first define the reason why you want to create that app in the first place. Without this clarity, your planning will be convoluted, which means your end result will most likely reflect that as well

Your app should satisfy two goals:

1. Your ideal users’ goal
2. And your business goal

First, let’s look at your audience (aka potential users). Whenever they interact with your business – both online or offline, regardless of the channel – they get to ask themselves: what’s in it for me? If they don’t see a benefit almost immediately, they will simply move on, and that’s true for your app, too.

An improvement for your business can mean many things, simply depending on your current situation. Some of the most common impacts a good mobile app can create for you are increased ROI, more returning customers, better productivity, reduced expenses, improved social proof, and a boost in brand awareness.

Now that we covered the basics, it’s time to go deeper. Remember, an app can have more than one purpose, and any of them can benefit your audience, you, or both.

So start by asking yourself these questions:

• What areas of your business need improvement?
• How can a mobile app impact that problem?
• What is the potential result?

Other key areas include your market and competitor research, timeline, budget, and more, but we’ll focus on these factors later in this guide.

Step 2: Lay Out Your App Functionality & Features

Now that you know what you want to achieve with your app, it’s time to define your mobile app’s scope (the part where you figure out how to create an app).

This is the time to get creative and write down all the functionalities and app features necessary to accomplish the solutions and results outlined in the previous step.

Some of the features may include:

• eCommerce integrations
• Contact us
• Forms
• YouTube or Vimeo integration
• Chat
• Push notifications
• Social sharing

Write down any features that will bring value to your app, and make this your guidance throughout the full app development process.

customers to similar goals.

This is also the time to not just focus on your local competition, but also look at the companies in the same market around the country or even around the world. This will spark new ideas and point at existing gaps in the market.

Look at their features, app layout and functionalities and take notes of anything that stands out to you or anything that you feel is missing.

including your market and competitor research insights. This is the time to give your app its first skeleton and piece these individual blocks together with wireframing.

Wireframing is a visual guide that will represent your app’s layout and the flow between the screen without the distractions of visual design and graphic elements. It is the bridge between your raw thoughts and a final product before any of the technical phases begin.

Your wireframing is driven by your use case(s) – the small, specific tasks your users can achieve with your app.

This is your unique chance to:

• Understand your use cases and the thought processes behind them
• Optimize the number and order of screens to reach each goal
• Create multiple screen flows to find which one works best
• Save hundreds of development hours later on

There are two ways to create wireframes: offline and online. If you prefer offline, you can simply use a pen and blank paper, or you can use templates like the ones from SneakPeekIt.

Online options include:

• Templates for Adobe Suite
• Specialized tools like Fluid UI, Balsamiq Mockups, Gliffy and Mockflow

Choose your tool or template, and start sketching. You should have one wireframe for each use case, and it should represent the full screen flow a user will see from opening your app to achieving their goal.

You’ll eventually want to have a few documents like the below image for each of the use cases your app covers:

This will map out the flow users will take from opening your app to achieving one of the goals you’ve set out.

Step 5: Test Your Wireframes

Now that you have your use cases and their visual representation, it’s time to test your app’s flow and user experience.

Testing will help you analyze your use cases, identify any friction points and question the ease of your mobile app processes. You will compare your screen flow with your user’s expectations and prevent any frustrations.

To test your wireframes and use cases, you should use a tool like Invision to make your wireframe interactive. Using Invision, you can connect screens and link actions to simulate the actual experience of your app.

It is really quick and easy to do this: you can register for a free account on Invision and create your project by simply clicking the ‘+’ sign and selecting ‘Create new prototype’. Once you name your prototype and select its type, you’ll be given two options: syncing with Sketch/Photoshop or adding image files from your computer.

You can now add images of individual screens from your wireframe. In each of these images, you can use the options at the bottom of the screen to link screens to one another. Once you’re finished, you can share your prototype using the ‘Share’ option at the top-right corner of the screen. And that’s it!

Use this to share the project with your colleagues or your customers to test the use cases and the intuitiveness of user’s journey, from opening the app to reaching the goal.

You can also ask your testers to write down the answers to these questions:

• After you’ve opened the app, is the access to the main menu obvious?
• Can you easily identify all the tasks you can accomplish with the app?
• Did you have to tap ‘Back’ for any of the tasks you wanted to achieve because the path wasn’t intuitive?
• Were you looking for an option that wasn’t there?
• Are there any options you found redundant?

Answers to these questions will inform your action items in the next step.

Step 6: Revise & Test

After you gather all your feedback, you need to group it by similarities. If a few people told you there are redundant options in your app, group these together. If some of them said they had to return to the previous screen often, list all the reasons why.

When you sort all the feedback accordingly, build your task list of revisions and updates you need to make to your wireframe. Then, implement these changes and make your wireframe ready for testing again to ensure all friction points have been removed.

Test once again, and once you’re happy with the feedback you’re getting, you’re ready to move on to the next big step!

Step 7: Choose a Development Path

Your app’s use cases and functionalities are now mapped out, and it’s time to actually build it!

In this step, you’ll have to choose your development path. It boils down to two core options:

• Choosing a programming language to code your app
• Using a mobile app building platform to create your app, like BuildFire

This decision will largely depend on your budget timeline – here are our recommendations:

< $10,000

Build your app using a mobile app building platform like BuildFire, or use something like our Pro Services to work with developers who will hand-craft your app. This is also an incredibly cost-effective option when it comes to long-term ongoing maintenance costs, keeping them under $100 per month.

$10,000 – $50,000

If your timeline allows it, use a mobile app framework to build your app. It can take about six months for the design and development to be completed.

$50,000+

With this budget and more than six months time, you can afford to build native iOS and Android apps from scratch, and it’s a brilliant option in case your resources allow for it. If you choose this option, allow for extra time and budget requirements throughout the project, as well as high maintenance costs.

Let’s look at each of these options in more detail.

Coding your app

In the case of coding your app, you can choose one of the two further paths:

• Native app development. In this case, you’re building your app from scratch for the operating system you chose. If you want your app both on Apple App Store and Google Play Store, you’ll need to build two separate apps from the ground up.
• Mobile app framework. This path allows you to build a hybrid app that can be deployed on multiple platforms. Simply said, you can distribute the same code base across different operating systems. Some framework options include Ionic, Framework 7 and PhoneGap.

Native app will provide you with the most robust and reliable performance, but it’s costly and demanding to develop. Keep in mind you may need to work with two separate developer teams to cover both platforms. You also cannot streamline any updates because of two separate code bases, and each custom feature may add weeks and months to your deployment and updates.

Hybrid apps, however, have a feel of a native app, but they are developed as a single code base that is deployable on both iOS and Android. While their performance can lag compared to native, this gap is getting smaller and it’s only truly applicable at the gaming level.

Developing hybrid apps through a mobile app framework may take significant time to develop, and as with native apps, any extra and custom features may add more delay to your launch and strain to your budget. It’s important to account for these delays and costs early in your project.

Using a mobile app building platform

When you choose to go with a mobile app building platform, instead of developing from scratch, you are given the freedom to create your mobile app’s look and feel and instantly see any changes you make without having to change any code – all within minutes.

All the features you need can be built in immediately using plugins, rather than waiting for them to be coded over several months. With BuildFire, you can choose any plugins from 3rd party developers, BuildFire’s plugins, or your own custom plugins. You can be sure your app will look and function exactly the way you imagined without months of developer work and expensive changes!

This option doesn’t require a large upfront cost or development expertise. It also doesn’t cost thousands of dollars a month to maintain them. In fact, with BuildFire, you can get any updates live in a matter of minutes, all from a single dashboard and immediately visible on both Apple and Android devices.

Remember: the simplest of information-based apps will cost a minimum of $25,000 when sourced by a small app agency, but with a platform like BuildFire, you can create, publish, and utilize the exact same app for under $100 per month!

When you make your decision, it’s time to move onto the next step – app building!

Step 8: Build Your Mobile App

If you’ve decided to code your mobile app from scratch or through a mobile app framework, this is the time to start your ongoing work with developers and designers. You’ll collaborate with them to bring your ideas and wireframes to life, closely monitoring every step to ensure consistency between your vision and the end product.

In case you’ve chosen a mobile app building platform, this is where the fun begins!