Six Best Learnings from the Experience of Building Android Apps

It is a human tendency to get super excited when coming across a great idea! The same holds true for a mobile app idea; however, you may get too eager and try to include too many creative features. Also, right from screening through multiple app development companies and choosing one to design your mobile app, you would wish everything to happen in a jiffy!

It is here that you need to stay cautious as many businesses tend to make the same mistakes, while building Android apps. Your Android app development company is likely to follow your instructions to the hilt. So, you should only dish out guidelines after considering everything for a long time and having a proper plan in place. Also, instead of making common mistakes and then needing additional efforts to learn from that experience, you should take note of the learnings of other Android app development teams and apply it to your app development as well.

So, in this article, we identify the important findings obtained by others while building Android apps.

1. Do Not Rush Through Testing

Once your app has been developed by the app development company, you may want to quickly get through the testing process and release the app in the Google Play store. However, testing is as important as the development process and you need to adopt staged roll-outs: a round of alpha testing (where several Android app developers with the most high-end Android devices test the app) followed by beta testing (where a broader audience or user base is invited to test the app on different types of devices).

Such testing will help to identify different issues and bugs faced by Android users who have different versions of the Android operating system. After all, the screen sizes vary for Android devices and so do the pixel densities, both of which need to be tested thoroughly.

2. Avoid Excessive Usage of Sounds

Your app does not need to produce a sound every time a user clicks a button or an icon. The sounds should be restricted to a few notifications and exceptional cases within the app so as to avoid irritating or distracting your users, while they are using the app. Most importantly, sounds are more relevant for gaming apps, but, for any other type of app, you are better off keeping them to a minimum.

3. Give More Time for Getting the App Ready

The time to market for an Android app after it is ready is pretty short (i.e., you can get your app approved in the Google Play store in a short span of time), especially compared to an iOS app that has to face the stringent guidelines of the Apple store. Many Android app development companies tend to take advantage of this fact by rushing through the initial development and then constantly working on fixing bugs as part of the updates that can be released quickly to the store.

But, frequent updates tend to irritate your users and you should ensure that most of the app is developed and tested from the start. In simple words, give your app development company more than enough time to come up with the ideal app design.

4. Double Check the Security Implementation

With the Android platform being open source, it is necessary that your development team spends additional time in imbibing the right set of security features for your app. The developers tend to compromise a bit on security, especially when they have to do so much during the app development process.

Make sure you do some research as well to suggest a few security-based tools to be implemented by them, even though they might not be the optimal ones. The idea is to convey the message to your app development team that you are very serious about security and would not tolerate any lapses on that front.

5. Do Not Aim to Support the Prehistoric Operating System Versions

As a business, you would want your app to reach the maximum amount of people and are likely to get your app to support as many old Android versions as possible. If you do that, your development company is likely to spend a lot of time in fixing the various compatibility issues that arise with older Android versions.

So, you would do well to not be over ambitious and limit the support to only a few of the older versions of Android that are not prehistoric. Another strong reason to do so is that the older the Android version is, the more security gaps are going to be present in it.

6. Do Not Leave the Monetization Plan to the Last Minute

Android users are not willing to spend as easily as iOS app users do. This means that in-app purchases or a similar kind of monetization model is less likely to work for your Android app. At the same time, you may irritate your users with ads in the free version of your app.

Hence, it is necessary that you prepare your monetization strategy well in advance and get it right before your app is released for public use.

Now over to you. Have you explored app development companies? Do you have any points to add here?