How Do Mobile Apps Work?

What makes a successful mobile app?

Mobile apps should deliver frictionless user experiences with a polished and professional look. 

The limited processing power of your target mobile devices compared to desktop computers will constrain the goals of your app design. 

Some businesses go for a straightforward UX design that focuses on vital functions for a great user experience with fewer resources.

Certainly, a cool-looking UI design can encourage users to adopt your app. But a seamless, intuitive, and user-friendly UX is a must to keep them engaged. 

App development

Before developing an app, you should have identified your app users, established app goals, and decided on a mobile platform. 

Let’s evolve your idea.  

The front-end

The front-end is the native mobile app, the visual and interactive user experience that obtains data from an API, and the back-end or sometimes local data storage. The front end typically gets downloaded from the app store and resides on the device. It could take a single developer to a whole team of designers to design and build. 

They map out your app information architecture. Workflow diagrams capture user interactions with the finished app and the user journeys within the app. What data will your app display and collect? 

Wireframes allow designers to conceptualize their structure. Style guides ensure it has a consistent look and feel. And prototypes simulate the user experience and test the expected design and functionality. 

No team member should need to ask, ‘what is a ci philosophy?’, because continuous integration practices foster better collaboration and boost app quality. 

Design your interface for touch for the fast, convenient, and simple navigation mobile users expect.

A key element of front-end development is building the app logic that initiates the service calls to back-end services, retrieving data, and updating the back-end with the information produced from the app. 

APIs

Application programming interfaces integrate mobile apps with back-end services. Developers can use specialized APIs to interact with, say, a database used in the app. That reduces the number of parameters needed to extract the required data. 

The back-end

Reliable back-end services are critical for supporting the mobile app functionality that engages users. Developers must decide whether to build services or leverage third-party ones. For example, hosted shopping cart software might be more than sufficient for most eCommerce businesses. 

Similarly, businesses can run and manage their back-end or offload their app processing to the cloud. 

Most enterprise apps benefit from native development, especially services specific to the domain of the application that incorporates intellectual property. Meanwhile, APIs let you connect mobile apps that suck up considerable processing to cloud-based services without slowing down your device.

Cloud services also enhance mobile apps with features such as push notifications and AI analytics–great for increasing return on investment of SEO strategies.

When building mobile apps, pick a tech stack best suited to your needs. Ideally, your development environment should make it easy to integrate and use the essential capabilities that speed up the development process. You can still take advantage of individual services.  

Mobile app tests

Performing comprehensive quality assurance testing during development is the only way to ensure a stable, usable, and secure app. 

UX testing

Does your app correspond to the original design? If not, you won’t be making the intended impression. 

Functional testing

Test for bugs users might run into when using your application’s features. Delivering accurate app functionality is as crucial to its success as end-user behavior is hard to predict. Test enough users to cover as many usage scenarios as possible.  

Performance 

Evaluate that your app meets the minimum quantitative criteria. How long it takes for screens to load; how efficiently it leverages network bandwidth. Then test with a maximum number of simultaneous users to simulate how well your app handles usage spikes.

Security 

Security testing is a chief concern, but you can follow some best practices to safeguard your data. If users log in to your app, track sessions on the device and back-end. Then you can end them when a user has been too idle. Test data entry forms to catch any data leakage. 

Device and platform 

The dizzying advance of mobile technologies and platforms calls for an agile development approach. And if you want your app to work for all users, thorough mobile testing is indispensable.