Things to know before application development starts

Before application development initiation you need to clearly understand a few things. The main point is that a development team cannot create business for you. You must know why you need this app, and how you are going to earn on it. They can only offer opportunities to meet your needs and goals, and implement them in an app.

So, today we will talk about ways to avoid the most common mistakes before application development starts.

Things to consider before you start to develop an application

Any person, who is running a business, must understand their needs, growth strategy, milestones, and a budget. Let’s learn more about things to consider before you go.

Clear needs

Before searching for a development company, specify your business needs. Creating detailed project specs with outlined app’s functions and characteristics can help to avoid misunderstandings on different development stages. When you don’t have specific requirements to present to a development team, this usually leads to confusion and critical delays.

Identifying a development team

When you have a detailed specification for your app, you can better identify the skills required to complete the project. After that, you can make a research on the availability of professionals and costs for a development team in your country or outsource. For more information on the topic, feel free to check our previous article IT outsourcing: sunset or rise.

Intellectual property protection

Don’t forget to consult with the legal team about a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with a development team. Confidentiality is a top important thing, especially for brand-new products.

This document must contain information about who has access to source code, who is responsible for exact tasks, and define data to be considered confidential.

Growth strategy

Specifying a growth strategy before the development can become a basis for defining a roadmap for the development process. It also helps to evaluate the scope of the project, and outline the app’s functionality for MVP and future implementation.

Ways to earn

In most cases, you are going to create an app to make money. Well, you need to know the ways to earn providing the app before you spend money on its development. There are different strategies on how to monetize your project. For example, private advertisements inside your application to start earning on pay per click or pay per view basis. Talking about AR/VR technologies, you can find some ideas we shared on this subject here: A Complete Guide to Virtual Reality Game Monetization.

Realistic milestones

Remember that any project milestones must be realistic, achievable, and measurable.

Budget

Estimate your budget before cutting costs in the process of development. However, don’t forget that it’s important to keep the quality on a high level while considering the budget.

Pre-development stage

We have covered the main things to consider before the start. But there are still things to be considered in the pre-development phase when the project has already been initiated.

Design

This is one of the most important stages before development. If you pay attention to UX/UI process properly, further work on the app will go more smoothly. If you don’t make the user-centered design first, your application can fail easily. People are looking for convenience and great interaction experience, not for the most recent technologies, which are hard to use. So the more you spend on design, the less money will be lost on different possible adjustments and even re-creation of the app.

More details about the importance of collaboration between design and development you can read in the Development and design interaction overview post.

Platform choice

It’s possible that you want to develop an application for different platforms at once. For sure, Unity helps to develop for several platforms. But each of them has certain specifications, so better to start from one and then add one by one. Why is that so important? In general, the choice of the platform affects the scope and flexibility of an app. Let’s discuss this point in more detail.

Native mobile vs. Unity application development specifics

Native mobile development means a creation for one specific platform only. This provides access to an array of device functions, features, and apps. If you want to deliver an app for another platform, you will have to develop a separate application. This might be not the most convenient approach. However, there are some pros of native mobile development:

• The interface fits a particular device platform.
• Glitch-free app performance.
• Familiar UI elements for better engagement.

In spite of these points, cross-platform development is more popular due to some native development cons:

• The increasing number of device-specific attributes complicates developers’ work.
• Time and investment consuming as it requires an app development from scratch for each new platform.
• Increase time to market, which leads to more risks of financial loss.

Using cross-platform technology, like Unity, allows building an app supported by different platforms and OS. It’s pros:

• It requires only one-time creation and can be deployed multiple times across different platforms.
• Reduced costs for different platforms support.
• Easier and faster to market.

Unity specific key advantages include:

• Supports a broad variety of devices including PC, Mac, Android, iOS, The Web, video game consoles, WebGL, etc.
• Can be used for large AAA development project and small mobile apps.
• Engine for 2D and 3D building.
• It offers a great graphic capability, ease of deployment, powerful features and easy porting across platforms.
• Provides access to the Asset Store comprising a variety of plug-ins and resources.

Conclusion

Considering all the mentioned things in your mind before application development can be the key points to understand the requirements for your app and their correspondence with the business goals. Also, this will help you to avoid the most common mistakes and risks on the stage of the development itself.

l.sidorenko