• Who are you targeting with your mobile app?

Knowing your audience is just as important here as with everything in business. Understanding who your target audience is can help you determine the features your app should have. An app that is meant for public consumption would be quite different from one that is meant for a closed circle user base such as internal use within a company and so on. Also, mobile users are different from users of PCs and learning about their preferences and usage metrics will help you develop an app that is best suited for the user base for whom you are developing your app. Answering these questions will give you a picture of where your user base is – would it be an Apple user group or an Android one or can target users in both?

• Finalize the details of your app

You need to get every last detail worked out before you begin working on your app. What would your UI look like, what are the features on the app, are you going with a beta version, getting response from users and then releasing the final app or would you be coming up with two versions – free and premium. If so, what would be the features be in each case. Similarly, you should also consider your revenue model.

Would it be a paid app or are you going to generate revenue from ads? What would your marketing strategy be for your app? How would you make noise and get it noticed before release and how to plan to convert free users into premium ones? Is there any plan for feedback collection and what about support and maintenance?

You need to answer all these questions and finalize the plan before you begin development. These aren’t the things that you can postpone and be done with them later, it simply won’t bode well if you choose that path! And answering these questions will let you finalize the mobile app development platform too.

• Should you build your own app or get someone to do it?

If you IT team has the expertise to build the mobile app for you and they have the time and resources to do so, you can go ahead with doing so. Otherwise, you would have to outsource it to someone who is an expert at developing iOS or android apps and begin the search for the right partner to do so. While choosing the right partner can help you ease a lot of worries, you should ensure that there are no gaps in communication between you and the mobile app development company. For otherwise, you are sure to end up with something that is completely different from your expectations and this will cause further delay and complications.

• Security and Maintenance Planning

Surveys in recent times have come up with shocking figures that show how poor the security in mobile apps are. Security is something you need to consider seriously as you collect user data and a breach in security could cause harm to both your company and your users. This is particularly true in case where card information or payment related information and other personal information of users is stored.

Maintenance is another area that is lacking in most mobile apps today. If post release, the user has some grievance or issue, it needs to be sorted on priority for otherwise, it will only lead to bad reviews and ratings in App Store, Play Store and so on and this will ultimately lead to you losing substantial userbase.

Thus, when developing a mobile app, you need to plan ahead and keep all of this in mind to ensure that you are indeed prepared for everything!