Top 5 Web and Mobile App Development Tips for Startups

Plenty of apps have taken over our lives in this digital era and, for businesses, having a mobile presence has become imperative to survival. For a startup, releasing a mobile app is a milestone, but it’s not always easy to do. Get it right, and it can boost your business, helping you reach new heights. Get it wrong, and it can make things even more difficult for your company.

By the year 2023, mobile apps are expected to generate over $900 billion in revenue. However, the reality is that many apps fail. When launching your next web or mobile app for your startup, it may be exciting to quickly get your idea off the ground. However, to ensure that your next project doesn’t crash and burn, we’ve provided these helpful tips:

Web App Development Tips

Stick to Your Project Scope

This is one of the biggest problems product teams face. Once you start describing and documenting your requirements, the scope will always change. Accept that the scope can change and plan for it, but don’t reengineer your project every time one of your team members has a new idea. Stick to the problem you’re trying to solve and only think of doing reiterations once you have a Minimum Viable Product that you can test.

Start with a Progressive Web Application (PWA)

A Progressive Web Application enables you to build a web application that behaves like a mobile app with all its features. With a PWA, you don’t need to have a mobile application to get your business up and running. You can start with a simple PWA and add features and functionalities as you need them. Once your PWA has reached its maturity and you’ve gained a solid user base, you might decide to implement a mobile app that takes all this data into account.

Determine Your Architecture and Framework

This is a vital decision to make when building web and mobile apps. Choosing the right architecture and framework is important, especially if your web app will be one of the building blocks of your business. To determine which framework to use, you need to talk to your customers and have a clear idea of both your target audience and which platform provides you with the right tools to cater to your business’s requirements. One wrong decision can lead your sales to drop drastically, and customers might not return.

Take Advantage of APIs

Implementing APIs to their full extent may make your company more profitable and help you take your business up a notch, making it more user-friendly. Plus, leveraging APIs helps you reduce your network usage by querying and rendering only the data you really need, and it is essential for delivering the smooth experience mobile users are used to. Plus, mobile APIs enable your data to be synced across devices to reduce data usage and save battery.

Follow a Mobile-First Approach

Good support for mobile devices has been shown to increase e-commerce conversions by 64%. The mobile-first approach strategy posits that you should design for small screens first, and then you can eventually work your way up to larger screens. Going from desktop to mobile makes you scale things down, which does not lead to desired results every time, compared to going from mobile to desktop and scaling it up accordingly.

Mobile App Development Tips

Reuse Code

Reusing code is a priority for every developer. Why reinvent the wheel when you can reuse it? By leveraging frameworks and libraries like React Native, developers gain access to stable, trusted code libraries they can use. The code in these libraries can serve as the building blocks of your mobile app. However, be careful when reusing code. Keep it well-architected and modular so other developers and team members can make sense of it.

Create an Offline Experience

In some cases, you will want your app to offer some functionality even when there is no internet connection. Make sure to determine if your app can operate at least partially without an internet connection and how much data it would need to function in places where you can’t rely on a stable internet connection.

Focus on User Experience

Proper UX and UI are a must because no matter what you do, making your product easy for users should be your main priority. No matter how much you spend and how much you work on making your website look good, if it does not make users’ lives easy, your efforts are just a waste of time, money, and resources. Ensure that your app is designed so that even a person with little to no prior knowledge can understand it. Improving your app’s UX and UI will make the user’s life easy, which in the long run will help you in turning that one-time visitor into a loyal customer.

Invest in SEO and ASO

You probably know that proper SEO can help a website get better rankings on a search engine. App Store Optimization (ASO) refers to the process of improving app visibility within the app stores and increasing conversion rates. The primary concern of ASO is not just ranking high in the app store but also increasing click-through rates (CTR).

Don’t Stop Testing

Before going live, test every possible scenario to avoid future mishaps. When you are an online business, your entire brand depends on your online presence, so do not risk putting it in jeopardy. It is important to test everything, again and again, to prevent any problem in the future.

Build Your Next Mobile App with Salsita

Startups’ ideas are often unique and groundbreaking, but the best ideas can come to nothing without the proper guidance. That’s why finding a company that understands what you want and shares the same interests as you is critical. See case study here.

Legazey MVP: Go or No Go? (Case Study)

Alfredo Sciascia, a C-level executive began looking for developers to build an MVP for his social media startup. His search led him to Salsita, who recommended marketing research and UX exploration as crucial first steps before kicking off development.

Salsita Software - BlogRazi Alakhdar - Marketing Manager

Salsita’s team can help you build the best app for your company. We ask the right questions and have the expertise to develop your idea into a compelling product. At Salsita, we write code that will continue to work for you even as your app user base grows and more customers become interested in your product.

With Salsita as your implementation partner, you gain the help of an experienced agency that’s there for you every step of the way, from idea to concept to development and maintenance. If you want to learn more about our mobile development services, read this article: Salsita Development Services.