5 App Development Mistakes Brands Should Avoid

Introduction

Within highly competitive and selective industries, investing in a mobile app for modern business ventures is necessary. They allow a company to provide its customers with a streamlined platform for transactions and engagement. However, companies should always take care to develop their app in a way that’s efficient and results in a fully functional, on-brand product.

It can be quite a challenging task if you don’t have in-house developers, and working with an external agency can help to a great extent. If your company operates within a highly competitive market, like New York City, you should consider outsourcing mobile app design and development in New York.

Whether or not you seek outside help, the following errors are some of the most common critical mistakes that companies make during the app development process. By understanding these pitfalls from the get-go, you can avoid making the same mistakes yourself.

Rushing The App Development Process

Rushing through any process can result in oversight and simple mistakes made in haste. Speeding through app development, being a sensitive process in itself, can result in an app ridden with bugs, crashes, and incompatibility, among other issues.

In today’s highly competitive market, users uninstall 28 percent of all apps within 30 days of installation. This statistic alone is enough to warrant companies to be wary of rushing through their app development process. Take great care in each phase of idea validation, design, development, debugging, launching, and marketing, to make the user experience as smooth and approachable as possible.

Making the App Too Complicated

Designing an app that’s hard to use can severely hinder the user experience. The entire point of creating an app is to provide potential customers with a streamlined platform to explore what your company has to offer. Over-complicating the app results in a poor first impression and can further deter them from using the app again. Your app needs to be as user-friendly as possible with minimal bugs and other technical issues.

Marketing or Advertising Your App Prematurely or Too Late

Marketing is the final phase of app development, not including post-launch maintenance. However, it is a crucial phase because a subpar marketing strategy can jeopardize all the hard work you put into your app’s development.

Many times, apps fail to find success in their respective customer base, and premature marketing of a failed app can result in devastating financial losses. You can also lose significant customer trust due to failure to provide against aggressive marketing promises.

As mentioned before, the statistics of an app’s lifespan are not in your favor. In such a narrow time frame, you should avoid delaying your app’s marketing campaign at all costs to avoid losing out to potential competitors when trying to capture a customer base.

Mirroring Your Desktop Website

Mobile apps have distinct and critical differences from their desktop counterparts. Apart from crucial design differences, desktop apps often have many more features than their mobile apps; this is due to the much larger display that desktop monitors provide. If you moved all of the features to a much more compact mobile app, it would result in an overly cluttered design, resulting in an overall poor user experience. Make sure you balance out user-friendliness and feature add-ons when designing a mobile app.

Seeking Help From an Agency After Starting App Development

If you bring a developer into the fold after you’ve already begun, you may face compatibility issues. Programmers often have unique styles. Some might prefer to write codes in one language, while others might choose something else. Some might work with simple algorithms, while others might be more comfortable with complex ones. To avoid compatibility issues in your app, only have one developer, or one group of them, to work on your app at a time.

Your App Reflects Your Business Image

A mobile app is a concise display of everything that your business has to offer. You must provide it with the utmost care and avoid the mistakes mentioned above at all costs. When it comes to apps, the first impression is the lasting one. A troublesome app launch can result in your company losing out on a golden opportunity to expand your brand visibility and reach more consumer markets.