How To Create a Mobile App Development Strategy

Introduction

The Importance of a Mobile App Development Strategy

The market for mobile applications is hot right now, due to the high mobile devices usage worldwide. A look at mobile app statistics in 2024 paints a picture of an already saturated market, with over 8 million mobile apps available for download. 

Surprisingly, that’s not stopping mobile app developers. Statistics from Google’s Play Store indicate that mobile app development companies launch a record 1,476 apps daily. 

Evidently, the competition is fierce. Therefore, your mobile app must stand out from the competition, so that your target audience downloads it and you can generate income from it. How do you do that? It all goes back to your strategy. 

The mobile app development strategy you create is important for several reasons: 

Steps to Craft a Mobile App Development Strategy

Mobile app development strategies cannot be the same across all mobile app development companies and developers, especially when it comes to custom app development. However, there are several common steps you should follow to ensure your development process flows seamlessly, even if you’re developing custom mobile apps. These include:   

Identify Your Target Audience and Market Research

When developing a mobile app, understanding your target audience and conducting thorough market research are crucial steps. Here’s a more legible breakdown of this process:

Understanding the Target Audience:

Developing User Personas:

Market Research through Competitor Analysis:

Leveraging Competitor Insights:

In summary, identifying your target audience involves understanding the problems your app solves and who it benefits. Developing user personas and conducting market research, particularly through competitor analysis, are essential to create a mobile app that resonates with users and stands out in the market.

On the other hand, if you’ve done your research and there isn’t any other mobile app like the one you want to develop, you can create a user persona by leveraging the following:

Define Clear Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Mobile app development strategies must support and align with the overall business strategies for them to be successful. And since your business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) inform your business strategies, you must first understand these. Business objectives or goals are the results your company aims to achieve in the long term. To measure these, you use KPIs such as profitability, impact, etc. 

If your company is well established, the business objectives and KPIs are most likely already defined. However, if this isn’t the case, you can either involve other stakeholders within the organization to help you define them or use the following questions:

The answers to these questions can help you understand the company’s overall goals and objectives. And with that, you can align your mobile app development strategy with them. 

Select the Right Platform and Development Approach

App Store, Play Store, or both? This decision on which platform to use for your mobile app will generally come down to three major factors — target audience, market share, and revenue model. 

Ask yourself:

The development approach you choose is also important when creating a mobile app development strategy. There are three main development approaches you can choose from:

Emphasize a User-Centric Design

User experiences can break or make the success of your mobile application. Therefore, your mobile app development strategy should stress creating a mobile app with a user-centric design for maximum user engagement. This means you should develop a strategy that emphasizes creating a mobile app with the end mobile users in mind. 

Go back to the market research you conducted in the first step and the user persona you created from it. Examine their preferences, ages, interests etc., and create a strategy that emphasizes this. Your prototype testing and surveys can also help inform this strategy, because you’ll receive information on what exactly they want to see on the app. 

Detail Your Development Roadmap

Your mobile app development strategy should have a detailed outline of the steps you’ll follow during the development process. It should cover:

Phases

These are the different stages the development process must go through before you launch the end mobile app into the market. 

Milestones

These refer to the significant events during the development process that signal the start of another phase. 

Estimated Timelines

It’s important to set average durations for which specific tasks and phases should take to complete. This ensures that you distribute your time well enough so you don’t waste time on tasks and complete the development in a set duration.  

Leverage Flatirons Expert Mobile App Developers

Need to outsource mobile app development? At Flatirons, our mobile app developers have a track record of building and designing mobile apps that align with and help our clients achieve their business goals. 

When you hire our mobile app development agency services, we own the whole development process, from mobile strategy, prototyping, app store optimization and maintenance. This allows you to focus on other important aspects of your business. Contact us today, and let us help you develop mobile apps that stand out.