Typically, the mobile app development passes through five main phases:

1. Conducting research and analyzing data of actual demographics, buyer persona, and their buying behavior patterns. Not to forget doing competition analysis!
2. Documenting your findings and preparing a wireframe with a clear understanding of proposed features of your dream mobile app
3. Brainstorming on penned down ideas and technical feasibility assessment to check platform, format, backend support and other jazz for your mobile app.
4. Building a prototype to check whether things are going in the right direction. Also, it is advisable to involve stakeholders at this stage to help you validate the information you have gathered.
5. Designing, developing, testing and deploying – typical phases for any development – comes now.

Each phase throws its own challenges for any mobile app developer. If we specifically talk about startups, these tough challenges, that they usually face at the time of mobile app development, lead them committing blunders.

Top 4 blunders usually committed by startups in mobile app development

It is a universal truth that startups, somewhat, faces issues with finances. At times, their passion to grow fast make them lose their patience. And that’s when they end up making mistakes which might cost them even more than anticipations.

Overlooking backend infrastructure

The startup infrastructure needs to be able to handle the workload that requires a mobile app development. Most engineering startups are not used to building the type of backend infrastructure that creates top mobile apps. Few things need to be taken care of e.g. pagination, maximum payload size, the latency of each API call, and other technical parameters that impact the performance of a mobile app.  

Emphasizing on in-house app development

In initial phases, startup feels make anyone proud. Hence, if it may end up thinking that since the existing team has HTML, CSS and JavaScript capabilities, the task of mobile app development is as good as plug-and-play.  It even might go ahead with the final decision of building it in-house.

Alas, confidence is not the only thing when it comes to development. One also needs equivalent talent and skill sets for perfect execution. If any startup has not excelled in right and relevant hiring, chances of failure are high. In case, any startup plans to build internally, they want to be confident that they already have the people and skill sets they need to execute.

Ignoring outsourced tasks

Let’s think one step further. On acknowledging lack of in-house skills, the startup has opted for outsourcing of app development. At times, might be due to lack of adequate experience, they feel that outsourcing is a one time job till the development is deployed. But no! It isn’t. During the entire phases of development, it is very much vital to stay in touch with the outsourced firm. For the best outcomes, startups need to be highly involved with the firms they’ve contracted.

Developing Apps that do not work across Multiple Devices

Today’s mobile market offers a variety of devices – smartphones, tablets, and wearables. And these options are a challenge for mobile app developers. Because with multiple devices, the complexity of development increases manifold due to their varied  specifications – different OS, different screen sizes, different screen resolutions, etc.

Sometimes in hurry, sometimes due to lack of finance and sometimes due to lack of talent, startups often commit blunders pertaining to device compatabilities.

Signing Off

In spite of challenges for startups in mobile app development – be it technical or financial – if they follow the right path with a growth oriented strategy in mind, success is surely awaiting for them! Today’s startup can be tomorrow’s enterprise!