Why Invest in App Development?
Apps can be a great addition to your business, considering their popularity. As of 2024, Google Play has over 2.87 million available apps, and the Apple App Store has about 1.96 million. Only this year alone mobile apps are expected to generate more than $935 billion.
Still, with such a big profit potential comes an equally large competition. To succeed, you need a good project plan for mobile app development. To help make your vision a reality, we’ve prepared a guide on how to prepare and build a project plan for mobile application development.
Start the Project Plan by Defining the Product
The app development process consists of a few stages:
- Planning
- UX/UI design
- Development
- Shipment
The first phase of the project plan for mobile app development would be defining the product. App development without a clear purpose will probably be a waste of time and money.
Below you can find questions that will help you to go through this step.
The first step of planning your app is defining the product. To create a solid definition, ask yourself these questions:
What Is Your App’s Purpose?
Analyze this question from two perspectives.
The first one is from the point of view of a business:
- What challenges does your app address?
- What do you want to achieve with the app?
Do you want to increase brand awareness, get new leads, sell, educate, or entertain your customers? The purpose doesn’t have to be complicated – the easier, the better. If the definition of your goals is longer than two sentences, it’s likely too elaborate and not targeted enough.
Consider Monopoly Go – one of the most popular gaming apps, which earned over 600 million in 2024. The purpose of the app was simple: to entertain.
What Is Your App’s Niche?
The second perspective is that of your customers and their needs. Put yourself in your potential user’s shoes and think:
- How will your app improve their lives?
- Which problems will it solve?
- Why would they want to use it?
There’s a huge competition out there. People need a good reason to choose your app over others.
Want to build cross-platform mobile apps?
What are Your Apps’ Main Features?
A good starting point for planning your app is deciding which features are ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice-to-haves’. As you get a better idea for your app, some of them might change places, or even be dropped completely.
Based on the ‘must-have’ features, you can build an MVP to check if there is any interest in your product without too much investment. With an MVP, you can enter the market with the core functionality and get direct feedback from real customers.
Once you know if your app is worth further investment, you can add all the ‘nice-to-haves’ to make your app more user-friendly.
If you want to know more about building the MVP, check out our video:
How to Measure Success?
Setting the KPIs for your app and choosing the right tools to measure them are essential for future success. Though collecting and evaluating data starts after the final stage of the development process, many decisions made during the next steps will be based on the expectations you are setting right now.
The KPIs you should consider are:
- Load Speed – Mobile users aren’t known for their patience, so load time is one of the most important factors for an app. If the load times aren’t up to the standards, users are likely to switch to something faster.
- Daily and Monthly Active Users – Active users are those who launch the app and actively use it. This number should grow month by month, and if you can see a drop, take some marketing actions to boost it.
- Churn rate – It shows how many users decided to abandon your app after using it a few times. Ideally, this number should stay low. If there’s a surge of app uninstalls, consider checking for bugs, refreshing the app with some updates or trying a new user interface (UI).
Market Research
Once you know what you want to achieve and deliver, start gathering information about the market and your target group. The possibility that your app will have no competitors is unlikely, so you’ll have to provide something new or in a different way to stand out.
Target Group
Let’s assume you have already decided on the main features of your app. Analyse the product and benefits it provides to make a list of people whose needs your app will fulfill. Understanding the target group, what are they like, and what are their pain points, is the key to deciding on the product’s UX/UI design and monetization options.
Next, identify your target audience’s demographic. The main factors are age, location, gender, income level, education level, family status, and occupation. We’ve prepared a list of questions to help identify your audience’s demographic, using a yoga app as an example:
| What do you want your customers to do? | Buy access to premium features |
| Will they be limited to any demographic profile? | Women, 20-40 years old, employed, married or single |
| Are you planning to have any localization limits? | Living in the UK |
| What needs and problems do they have? | They want to get access to professional yoga teachers and to choose the right training routine; they want to learn yoga at home |
| How does your app help them solve these problems? | We provide different types of training with the possibility to buy a one-to-one session with the chosen teacher |
| What drives them to make a purchase? | Sample lessons showing the possibilities of the app; positive reviews |
| Are they using similar apps? | Yes; Down Dog, Daily Yoga, Asana Rebel |
| How would you reach the audience? | Ads on Social Media, ads in app stores, create a website |
Listen to Your Audience
Once you define the target audience take a look back at your features – should you add anything? If you need inspiration, check out the reviews under competitor apps.
Customers sharing reviews often go into detail about things they like, what they don’t, and what is missing, answers to which will help you envision the best user experience. If people are pointing out a feature they hate, don’t add it to your app.
Don’t worry if your concept changes a lot after this step or you plan out many new features – it’s quite common as you get to know potential users more.
Competitors
Your competitors are apps that:
- Fit your app’s niche,
- Target a similar audience,
- Have similar features and are shown under the keywords you target.
Make an effort to understand how those apps work, and what problems they solve. Think about what you’d do to improve them. Once you establish your main competitors, check their online presence. Learn how they reach customers if they have a website or are on Social Media, and what marketing activities they do. Next, consider:
- What does your app provide?
- How is your idea different from the competition?
Why would customers choose your product over theirs?
After a deep competitor analysis, you can update the definition of your product in your plan to make it unique and high-value.
Decide on a Project Plan For Mobile App Development Strategy
So you’ve defined the market and your app – you’re ready to make some important decisions.
Choose the Ideal Platform for your Mobile Application
In many cases, it’s the platform that determines how successful the project is. When choosing one, consider some important factors.
Features
Compare the features you want to develop with the capabilities of a particular platform. For a custom app with a native look and performance, WP, iOS, and Android are the best. However, if you want to make a more all-inclusive app, cross-platform app development will be a better choice.
Both of those approaches have their pros and cons. While native app development allows you to access features unique to a specific operational system and achieve great performance, cross-platform development is generally faster and more budget-friendly without sacrificing app speed.
Target Audience
When choosing the platform based on the target market, consider your geographic criteria. If you plan to target a certain country or continent, certain platforms might work better than others. Globally Android is the most popular mobile platform with over 70% market share, however, in countries like Japan iOS reigns supreme. Once you know where your target persona might live, you can find out which platform they are likely to use.
User Expectations
Now that you know who your target market consists of, it’s time to think about the expectations of your future users. Expectations are different for each app platform. For example, Apple users are willing to invest in in-app purchases, as they are loyal to the brand, but they expect good usability and trendy design in return. Android users are more understanding of shortcomings, but also less keen on paying for apps.
Development Cost
The cost of the app development can vary depending on the platform you choose and the complexity of the process. Choosing React Native to build your app can help you cut costs, especially if you want to deploy cross-platform apps.
Setting the Timeframe
Mobile app development is not a fast process, but it’s worth spending all this time on development to make the app perfect. On average, building an app takes 3-9 months. You can tentatively schedule the release date and verify it with your developer.
If you decide to outsource the development to an experienced agency, they should be able to give a more precise estimation. However, if the project is more complex, it can be hard to estimate the delivery time, even for seasoned teams. One of the projects we worked on was an MVP for an insurance company, which aimed to validate a new business idea. The customer asked a question: Can it be done in 4-6 weeks? After choosing the main features and requirements, we decided to create a cross-platform app with React Native. We kept the schedule and provided high-quality MVP that helped the customer recognize the app’s potential.
Choosing the Right Partner for the Development Process
Think who you want to partner up with for your project – an in-house development team, a dedicated agency, or freelancers. The choice largely depends on your budget and the size of your company.
Reading reviews and testimonials are part of this process. Clutch is one of the independent portals where you can verify what agencies said about themselves. It’s always worth checking the portfolio of the potential partner to see what projects they’ve done in the past. Ideally, they’ve worked on something similar to the idea you have for your app.
Read more about choosing a React Native development agency in our article.
To help you create a development plan, we’ve prepared a downloadable checklist that will make the process much easier.
We’ve prepared the checklist to help you prepare an app development project plan
Successful Project Plan For Mobile App Development
Creating a project plan for mobile app development is a fundamental step on your way to make a successful app. It can significantly decrease the number of bugs and reduce the time of the whole process. Remember that mobile app development is an ongoing process and even after appearing on the market, your product may need some work, especially after the first reviews.
Build your app with top mobile developers
Read more
Benefits of Using React Native for Mobile App Development
React Native vs Flutter: What’s Better for a Cross-platform App?
Costs of Hiring React Native Agency vs Developer
Sources
Mobile App Download Statistics & Usage Statistics (2024)
Highest Grossing Mobile Games Worldwide In 2024
Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide
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Jack S Winslow
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love this article