What are the Common Challenges Faced by Mobile Developers ?
Based on my experiences as a Mobile Developer.
Work as a mobile developer in Kurio has given me some experiences and challenges that I must face as a mobile developer. Some of them was helping me to build better applications. Because as we know many of peoples are doing their activities through their mobile phone, and based on this fact now there are so many company or organization were trying to build their application in mobile based instead of web based to answer what peoples want. And the biggest challenges as a mobile developer is How To Make Their Application to be First Choice for User?
So, here are several common challenges for mobile developer when they want to build a successful mobile application.
1. Creating Application which is Get Noticed
As we know there’s immense and crowded competition in the mobile application market. Sometimes some applications have built with same function to user like shopping application, social media application, and etc. Thus, there’s a constant pressure to create application which get noticed from user. After you got their attention to use your application it means your application is better than the other. The more user of your application, the more sample and data you can get and you can use that to build some innovation in your application based on what user want so they want to come back to use your application again.
How to build application which is get noticed ?
- Validate your idea/application. You have to validate your idea to make sure you know what is main problem that your application want to solve, or what is main function of your application. So you can build your application with clear purpose and standard. You know definitely why you build your application.
- Know your application’s market and target. Is there a market for your application? Where will the application be sold? Who is your target group? Answer this questions to make sure you know what kind of market you want to use when sell your application and the type of user target that will use your application. This is will helping you to focus on them when you marketing your application. You know the good strategic to sell your application based on your market and target.
- Know your competitor and do a research of them. Is there a competitor of your application? What is their pros and cons? Do a research about them to help you build a better application although your application solve the same problem, you can build your application with your own image and way because you already knew about your competitor.
Remember — make an app which makes life simple, productive and pleasant.
2. Follow the Development of OS and Mobile Device
When you trying to develop a mobile application you must know definitely the playground of your application, where your application will run and how your application performance when run. To know about them you must follow and give attention to the development of OS and mobile device news. As we know users have many different devices with different OS version. In Android there are so many OS version that build with different and custom function, same with iOS with their OS version. The difference of the OS usually will give impact to you present the features of your application or how do you use the features of the OS version to integrate them with your application e.g How the background services work, What is lifecycle of the OS, How about memory and battery consumption, and etc. You need to consider the OS as well. iOS and Android — each of these main systems has its own main objects and patterns. So be prepared for some bug fixing every now and then.
Besides OS version, devices version is important too. As we know in Android there are so many type of device with different size, screen, pixels, setting and performance. If you are designing only for the latest platform is a big no-no. So the challenge is to create an app which can run across as many devices as possible. Countless mobile platforms have different limitations based on screen sizes, OS requirements, embedded technologies, pixel intensities etc.
How to deal with this challenge? To deal with technical OS issues, having a marked testing phase helps. Releasing a beta version of the app is also recommended to test have you use the OS features well. And to deal with device issues is make a responsive design. It gives screens more liquidity and thus can be adjusted to suit different formats and various screen sizes. Follow the development of OS and mobile device so you can build application with best performance.
3. Build Application with Great UI/UX
A good application is when the application is easy and simple to use so it gives a good experiences to user. This is related to build an application with good UI/UX design. An application with good UI/UX means that application has build with interesting, simple and clear UI/UX so the user will think this a good app because they can do what they want without being confused.
To build a good UI/UX, we need some research and experience. Every UI/UX design that we have made must be taking base on the data not by feelings or logic, because data is the best representative of your need to build. Usually a developer need an UI/UX designer to design their application because the UI/UX designer know the basic how to design application well. Keeping it simple and clear.
The challenge is to design an application which is self-explanatory.
4. Build an Application with Clean Architecture
As a developer it should be good to develop an application with good and clean architecture. This is related to the way you make your application so if you want to test your application to find bugs and errors it can be easier. And when there is a new people want to join to develop your application they are easy to understand your application flow. Beside it, an application with good architecture will give a good performance because you have put all materials code in the appropriate place. There are several common architecture known in Mobile Development e.g. MVP (Model-View-Presenter), MVVM (Model-View-View-Model), and etc. You can choose one of them and apply it to your application.
5. Give Attention to User Comment and Feedback
Analytics and data gives us all sorts of insights into what our customers want from our business. But sometimes don’t you wish you could get an answer straight from your customers? That’s what customer feedback is all about. It helps us understand the WHY behind what people are doing. Why are people using one feature three times as often as another? Why do most of your customers stop creating accounts on the last step? Or what causes customers to use your product less frequently (and eventually stop altogether)?
When we match customer feedback to what we’re seeing in our analytics, we get a much clearer picture of what’s going on. Then we’ll know how to fix problems and go after the right opportunities. Sometimes the feedback that had given by user also does not comply with your expectations and it make you feel upset. But this is a challenges to you to answer them with a great solution that will answer their feedback without doing some things that not related to your development and application limitation. Your customers will tell you what they want, but you have to act on that feedback when you begin to see those recurring themes.
Just remember, if you can keep your customer at the forefront of everything you do, you’ll always have a shot at building a successful business.
6. Retention Rate
Retention rate is the ratio of the number of retained customers to the number at risk. This is related to how their impression when they use your application for the first time. If your application gives them a good impression so there is more chances to make they come back to use your application again. It can be defined as a metric that represents a number of customers that are “loyal” to your business in one way or another. There is some tactics that you can use to make a good Retention Rate, i.e. App-On boarding, In-App Messaging, Push Notifications, Personalisation, A/B Testing, and etc. These things can help you to get they come back to use your application.
7. Promoting, Branding and Marketing
This is the important thing to you when you build an application. It’s a cliche that most developers don’t care about marketing their apps. However, it’s not true. There are several challenges which developers face while taking their apps to the market. The bottleneck competition, tight timelines and lack of right platforms push developers into keeping app marketing on the back burner. If you fail to promote and market their application, it seems you fail to build your application because people will don’t give their attention to your application and they don’t use your application.
Conclusion
Here some challenges that I faced and experienced as a mobile developer. To build a good application you must know both of “what to do” and “what not to do”. Are there any challenges you’ve faced while developing a mobile app? Feel free to add to the above list in the comments section below. I hope this article will help you to build a better application.
If you have any questions or complains, please feel free to contact me in these social networks: twitter, linkedin, or email. I’ll try to do my best to answer if I can, otherwise we will learn together :)
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