Congratulations! You’ve finally realized the importance of a purposeful mobile strategy for your business and looking to develop a mobile app. That’s the first step. The next step is choosing the right app development partner.

“Why does that matter,” you say?

Consider this: 70% of mobile users abandon apps because they take too long to load. 65% of the users say that they develop a negative opinion of the brand if their app offers a poor experience.

Evidently, it’s not enough to have a mobile strategy; you must have a user-centric app development philosophy, too. Only a proficient, experienced, and trusted app development partner with an outstanding track record of creating fluid-smooth and highly engaging apps can help you develop and implementing such a philosophy.

Here are some questions to help you find such an app development partner who will help you not only to launch a user-friendly app, but will also continuously improve it and engage your users better.

Have You Worked On Projects With Goals Like My Own?

Mobile apps are created to realize the unique goals of their owners, which are typically businesses. These goals can be cost reduction, revenue increase, user engagement improvement, customer acquisition, raising awareness, customer support, improve share of wallet, or a hundred other things. The trick is to find an app development partner who has worked on apps with identical or similar business goals as yours.

If your agency has never worked on similar goals, then the learning curve to get them up to speed may be too steep. Even then, they may not be able to develop an app that’s highly effective in realizing your business’s unique goals.

An app development agency that has worked with apps with similar business goals as yours, even if it’s in a different industry, can prove to be an invaluable digital partner in the long term.

What’s Your Research Process Like?

Initial research lays the groundwork for your app’s development. Once you supply the app development agency with your business goals, they must figure out how to translate them into an app that acquires, engages, converts, and retains your ideal users. Doing that entails extensive research involving several steps.

For one, the app development agency must understand your ideal users – identify their demographics, understand their needs, figure out their app usage behavior, and so on. By the end of this phase, a competent agency will have developed a clear understanding of how your audiences use apps and how they can be engaged effectively.

How Long Does One App Development Project Take To Complete From Start To Finish?

Reliable app developers take their time to understand the scope and complexity of your project before estimating a delivery timeline. They don’t rush and promise a short timeline to get your business initially, only to keep pushing the deadlines once the project is underway.

App development can take anywhere between a few months to a few years, depending on the project’s scope, complexity, client availability, technology partners’ availability, and so on. Trusted app developers help you understand how each of those factors affects your app development’s timeline and explain what you can do to speed things up.

What Services Do You Provide As An App Development Partner?

A long-term digital partner offers more than just app development. They operate as a one-stop-solution for all your app needs. They refine your app idea into core functionalities and features that help realize your business goal as part of the conception stage. They design the app, including its wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. They program it, test it, and deploy it.

Beyond these basic services, an app development partner consults you on your mobile strategy and helps you maximize your ROI from your app. They offer post-deployment maintenance and continued app development support to ensure that your users are getting a seamless app usage experience.

What’s Your SEO Strategy For Apps?

Search engine optimization is not a done-and-dusted initiative. It’s an ongoing process that helps you rank well in search engine results for the search terms that your audiences are using to find apps like yours. Mobile SEO is a niche category and entails a targeted strategy to boost your popularity among mobile users, especially on the app stores of iOS and Android. So, it’s great if your app developer has prior experience with mobile and app SEO .

Will I Be Able To Make Edits To My App On My Own?

As an app owner, you’d want to be able to make changes to your app with ease without involving your app developer. That’s great. But this can add to the complexity of the project.

Typically, app developers share the source code of the app with you, so you can make any changes you want to it. However, you may need a technical team to make the changes, depending on how the app is designed. If you’d like an easy-to-use content management system integrated into the app’s backend, which will let you make content changes to the app effortlessly and without a developer’s assistance, it may expand the scope of the project.

Convey your editing needs to your app development partner and make sure that both of you on the same page.

What Happens After The First Release? Do You Provide Long-Term Support?

The post-release phase is as critical, if not more, as the app development phase for your app’s success. For this reason, you need your app developer to offer post-launch support. They should constantly monitor users’ feedback, test the issues, and resolve them quickly to ensure that your users enjoy a flawless experience.

Ideally, you’d want your app developer to offer long-term app development support too. This way, your new third-party app support team won’t have to spend precious time and resources getting acquainted with your app.

What Does Your App Development Process Look Like?

The app development process varies from one agency to another. Most agencies follow agile, waterfall, and other app development processes, albeit with a few in-house modifications. Typically, the development processes tend to be flexible to suit each customer’s unique needs.

Whether you have an idea, a prototype app, a competitor app to be emulated, a mobile strategy, or just a vision for your mobile app, a customer-centric app developer will be able to turn your inputs into a highly engaging app targeted at your users. Successful execution, however, will require the skills, expertise, and commitment from a resourceful team. But, what is a resourceful team? A resourceful app development team has:

• UI / UX experts to visualize your app experience
• Front-end developers to develop the mobile App to make the idea accessible to the users/li>
• Back-end developer to create server and its supporting back-end infrastructure
• QA engineer to test the app for issues and ensure there are no quality defects
• A project manager to keep everything working together

Depending on the scope of your app, you may need even more or specialized help such as Business Analytics Expert, Software Architect, Product Manager, and so on. Ask your app developer to share their app development methodology, so that you can understand how they create the app, test it, and perfect it.

Communicate Transparently The Needs And Stay On Track

Every app development agency approaches app development in its own way. There’s no one perfect way to do it. Therefore, focus on learning how committed your app development partner is to their clients. For any questions, let’s discuss it! Contact us.