Top 11 Challenges in Mobile Application Development

Building a successful mobile application requires a lot of upfront work, including idea generation, processing, development, testing, and launch. You may have a fantastic idea and all the resources in the world, but it doesn’t give you guaranteed results. Poor implementation of ideas and strategies wastes your time and money, whereas using the right approach will create a masterpiece.

After practicing everything right and correctly, you will still face many challenges. This article contains several professional observations that mobile application developers face during mobile application development. Let’s take a closer look at challenges during mobile application.

Challenges During Mobile Application Development

Rush into Development: 

Many developers rush to finish the task on time, but this is not the right way to develop an app. Developing a mobile application needs a lot of research and patience. The best way to start is by getting to know your target audience. Find the answers to basic questions such as their area of interest, what attracts them more, what motivates them? These questions help you learn all about your audience interest and devices usage situations:

• Where and when users access them.
• What exactly do they do?
• How much time do they spend on an app?

Spend more time finding answers to these basic things to develop your business app more effectively and result-oriented. 

Proceed with pre-planning 

Once you have decided on your target audience, make a roadmap of the development process. A clear roadmap of the whole process will help you process the entire development process in the right direction and finish it on time. In the planning stage, you can collect the resources, test the tools which you’re planning to use. List the functionalities, options, and platforms your client wants for his app. You can also discuss the budget of the whole process. 

Make the best of what you have.

Most modern developers contain a decent set of frameworks and other development tools designed to integrate an application into the operating system.

With their help, you can implement features such as determining the user’s location and making things available for them on their locations. It is good to design a user-friendly interface and keep a few things universal such as functionality, menu, content, etc. An expert good mobile app developer should explain this in simple terms and keep things usable. It is believed that this kind of technical education motivates people and stimulates creativity, thus facilitating the emergence of new ideas. You show your expertise and development qualities through your designs. 

Focus on details

Small things sometimes leave a significant impact. A mobile app should be attractive, responsive, and enjoyable to use. Focus on small details of the app, the screen of a mobile device is small, use all its space as productively as possible. Undoubtedly, users will appreciate small details and perceive your website, especially in relation to fans of new products – your target group, if you release the application for the first time. Keep all the essential features on top where you want your user to pay special attention, such as CTA, Menu bar, contact us, etc. It will help users find the app more interactive and user-friendly and improve user engagement. 

Prioritize UI and UX design:

A mobile application is useless if it’s not user-friendly. Always remember you’re designing an app for your audience, so keep sticking to it. An attractive design is good, but your audience expects more than that. They want a more user-friendly user interface to browse any application, and it helps users find what they are looking for. Understand your users and what they need to do with your application. Keep them in your mind while designing a business application to get more audience engagement and conversions. 

Server performance

For quick responses from the app, you need to have good server performance. The delayed responses and response time can affect user perception and overall application performance. Moreover, the number of API requests from the application under test can cause an overload. With each new functionality introduced, the API call stack increases, which affects the overall performance. API testing before release helps to minimize the risks of low or insufficient mobile application performance.

For those cases when the main server is unavailable, it is worth creating a backup one to receive data without delay. To prevent data breaches, synchronize failover and primary servers, develop a backup policy, and follow it.

Choose reliable tools

Tools and techniques make the application more professional. With the help of app development tools, you can stimulate the performance testing and development process. You can design a reliable but high-performance business application by choosing high-performance and reliable testing tools. It will let real users determine the upper limits of the system throughout, evaluate system performance under expected load, and measure software stability as processing power increases. With the help of tools, you can identify errors and flaws that arise in the app and also give you ways to solve these errors. 

Consider platform fragmentation

Many developers like to release the iOS version of the application first. The main reason behind this is to build the fragmentation of devices running other operating systems and, as a result, the need to develop different versions. When creating an iOS application, the developer knows precisely which engine the application will run on and its support features. The designer will be pleased because the resolution of the Retina display is twice the resolution of the usual one, which significantly simplifies graphics scaling.

The Android platform is somewhat different: various devices with different screen resolutions and platform versions. Android app development tends to take longer. Google has a lot of credit for providing resources and actively fighting to reduce fragmentation.

Release updates frequently

Not sending updates is the most significant mistake mobile app developers make after creating the app. It is crucial to focus on the main functionalities of the first version of the applications and keep updating them to provide a better browsing experience to users. Don’t be afraid to turn down opportunities you’re not 100% sure about.

It will allow not only to release the application earlier but also to track user metrics and feedback. In addition, you will be able to release relatively small updates frequently. Thus, users will significantly influence your application. Following these design principles will ensure that problem areas are identified accurately and in a timely manner.

Prioritize Effectively

It is likely that after identifying and eliminating errors, you decide to add new functionality and features to the application. This is often not easy to implement. A designer, developer, and product manager may have different points of view. Discussion, which is quite natural in such a case, can take a long time and be unproductive.

There is an excellent method that you’ll find helpful in aligning team priorities. It’s called KJ Technique that allows you to prioritize areas effectively. The great thing about this approach is separating ideas from the discussion. First, team members write down their thoughts on paper and stick them on the wall – they see each other’s ideas, generate new ideas, and stick them on the wall. As a result, similar arguments are grouped, the groups are given names, they are voted on, and, thus, priorities are identified. This is an excellent opportunity to involve and motivate everyone in the decision-making process, and besides, it’s pretty funny.

Perform client-side testing

The goal is to identify factors that affect customer experience and slow down the work of an IT product on its side. Given the sensitivity of users and the desire of companies to meet their needs, it is worth paying attention to client-side testing. It will help ensure flawless mobile app performance.

There are many reasons for testing a mobile application. This is how software defects are detected that make it difficult to load pages and applications; specialists ensure that updates do not disrupt the system, check the download speed from different regions, and optimize the processing of large data arrays.

Performance testing is a must-have for a mobile application as it helps avoid software inefficiencies and achieve a positive customer experience.   

By keeping all these factors in mind in your quality assurance strategy, you can achieve high performance, including stable devices, servers, and networks interacting with the tested solution. Also, avoid the other factors that can affect the web application’s performance. If you want to make your mobile application searchable and rank its top on search engine pages, it is recommended to practice digital marketing services.

Integrated online marketing services are perfect for medium and large businesses, chain stores, distribution centers, and companies with vast branches. It will keep your mobile application or site displayed on top of search engine pages and bottom of the search results and help users find the mobile application on SERPs without getting lost. After all, a target audience clicks on the top lines and never goes down. So, if you’re designing an application, invest some time in its promotion.