DEV Community: Devika

10 Common Misconceptions About Apps

Devika — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 05:02:29 +0000

As experienced software developers, we’ve had a hand in building an array of digital solutions, for a variety of people, across many different fields and industries. We’ve worked alongside people who have extensive knowledge of software development and those with none to create scalable, purposeful solutions for their businesses.

Along the way, we've come across an abundance of misinformation about applications, from their purpose to the price to the process needed to create them. To debunk some of these myths and help paint a realistic picture of what it involves, we’re taking you through ten common misconceptions of app development.

1. There’s only one type of app

When you think of applications, your mind probably goes to a mobile application like Instagram or Facebook. However, there are many different types of apps with many distinct features. These include mobile, web, hybrid, and progressive apps and a whole configuration of things in between!

Picking the right fit for your business starts by defining what you want the digital solution to achieve.

2. One app fits all

While apps often share features or components, such as buttons or login portals, every app is individually designed to cater to your business’ needs and purpose. To achieve a tailored design, the first step is not to pick up the keyboard and start building but rather pen and paper so your developers can get to know you and your business better.

By doing so, we can create specialized solutions that are designed to alleviate the pain points of your business.

3. Apps ensure business growth

If implemented thoughtfully and purposefully, apps can lead to business growth. However, these concepts are not synonymous. To achieve higher adoption of your app, a key piece of the puzzle is to identify the solution you’re providing your customers.

4. Build once and it’s done

Creating and launching an app is just the start of the process. Just like a house or car, apps need continuous maintenance and support to keep running.

To achieve this, you’ll need to work with a developer to continue integrating the latest features and components into your design. This may include additional security or safety elements or communication tools to improve the experience for you and your customers.

5. Apps are only for your customers

As well as increasing convenience and accessibility for your customers, apps can also improve your team’s communication and internal systems. By providing an integrated platform for your team, processing, tracking, and managing customer inquiries can become a simpler and more seamless process.

6. Great ideas make great apps

While you may have a fantastic idea for your app, you still have to work within the parameters of the tool you're using. This doesn't mean you should limit yourself or your ideas, but it is important to be flexible and adaptable during the development process. Luckily, we usually find a workaround to ensure you get the desired effect you’re after without compromising quality or cost.

7. Apps are simple

While the concept sounds simple, an 'app' is actually an individualistic expression of a much bigger ecosystem. It’s full of tiny components that are designed to do specific jobs, communicate with each other, react to events from other components, and eventually reflect data back to your customers in a simple and easy-to-understand way.

A nice way to think of an app is like a warehouse factory that builds cars. Before you can drive the car, every piece of machinery needs to be prepped and primed and every cog, gear, and sprocket needs to be well-oiled and thoroughly tested to ensure it’s in drivable condition. This is the same process developers undertake to ensure your app runs smoothly and continues to churn out value after it launches. Fortunately, apps have the added advantage of allowing real-time updates, meaning they can be tweaked and changed as you need.

8. You need to build a native mobile app

Apple has made the word ‘App’ synonymous with mobile applications. In doing so, whenever the word ‘app’ is used, people automatically think about a native mobile application.

While native mobiles apps have many benefits thanks to the latest native OS functionalities, a downside is that they can dissuade users as they require an initial download and install.

In saying this, applications can come in many different forms, and with the optimizations in modern-day web technologies, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have become increasingly popular.

PWA’s provide a low-friction experience that can be consumed on smartphones, tablets, or desktop browsers. With higher adoption of technologies such as QR codes and NFC tags, PWA’s may be a better option for you.

9. Apps are hard to build

‘Hard’ or ‘difficult’ is a bit of a loaded word in the services industry. A more practicable metric is risk. Once you measure the risk, you can put together a plan and begin to estimate timelines. This is something your development team should help you with.

Measuring risk requires extensive planning to unearth all the unknowns as early as possible. Once all of these questions have been answered, a roadmap can then be devised and development milestones can be laid out.

The application build itself, for Devika, is the easy part.

10. Apps are cheap

Apps may be small, but it takes a lot of research, designing, testing, and development to ensure they operate and function well. For this reason, apps are an investment with prices starting in the thousands. In saying this, if your app is built well, it can become one of your biggest business assets.

An added benefit of working with a software company like Devika, is that you have access to a multitude of skills and experience with an entire team of specialists on your side.

If there are common misconceptions we haven’t covered or myths you’d like to see busted, we’d love to hear them!

All About Apps

Devika — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 01:50:33 +0000

Apps are an ingenious tool that can do wonders for your business when they’re purposefully and thoughtfully made. Well-built apps allow you to connect and communicate with your customers in a way that benefits you both. By transforming the customer experience with functionality and aesthetics, you can create an engaging and enjoyable experience that keeps your customers coming back again and again.

A not-so-good app will leave you short a few thousand dollars, with a persistent headache and the same problem you started with.

To help you create an asset for your business that benefits you long term, our team is taking you through the fast-fading trends in app development, the next big things to keep an eye out for and the process to follow to get started.

You’ll be hearing from our Senior Developers Matt Rowles, Byron Papanikolaou, Thomas Nixon, and Devika’s Founder Ken Kencevski as they share their personal and professional experiences in application development.

Senior Developer, Matthew Rowles at Devika

What things are important to consider before building an app?

“First and foremost, you’re building a product, so the app/s should revolve around the products’ target customers, which from day one will be a niche persona within an industry. Every product is an experiment until proven otherwise, so you want to start small and grow with the early adopting customers while looking to expand the channels to additional personas.

“Before you commence building, you want to mitigate risk by trimming any excess bloat by narrowing the minimal viable product down to what we call 'the lean path to the market'; what is the smallest thing we can build to prove the hypothesis and begin testing with customers? Sometimes this isn't even an MVP, but a prototype on a whiteboard with some user testing!”

When technology is constantly evolving, how do I know what to build an app on?

“Look for established ecosystems from day one; the web, mobile app stores, platforms with marketplaces e.g., Salesforce and so on. In terms of technology, try to sit at the cusp of the bleeding edge; tried and tested technology that has been in production in most regions around the world for more than 36 months, yet still fresh enough to maintain the status quo.”

What’s a fast-fading trend of apps at the moment?

“Hyper-wedge/niche; setting out with a grandiose plan of building platforms is almost impossible, so what we've seen people do is build a feature as a plugin for or on top of another app and grow their own small set of loyal customers. Generally, what will happen is one of three things; 1. the feature will be implemented (fail), 2. the feature team will be acquired (success), or 3. the feature will grow into its own product, which means a wedge will be driven in enough to become a competitor to the system it once was a parasite to!”

What is the next big thing for mobile apps that’ll be game-changers for business owners?

“The introduction of mobile platform APIs in browsers is really interesting. Being able to access biometrics and AR/VR capabilities via the browser will change how people build apps. Also, new laws are coming which will enforce OS owners such as Apple with iOS and Google with Android to open up their platform to other marketplaces (Google already does this to some extent). It will be interesting to see what this will open up.”

What’s the first application you ever built?

“When I was in high school, I built a retro point-and-click adventure game that took five minutes to complete. More professionally, we launched an online car buying service with some colleagues in 2015, which was the first of its kind and really exciting.”

Senior Developer, Byron Papanikolaou at Devika

What things are important to consider before building an app?

“It’s important to know how much is involved before the code even hits the compiler. An idea is the first spark, but then it needs to be validated. This can happen in many ways, such as market research, focus groups with potential customers, or even using a prototyping tool to illustrate the idea. The process of turning an idea into a viable product is usually when the fun stops for most people. It requires time, effort, discipline, and unfortunately for most, there is no substitute for this.”

When technology is constantly evolving, how do I know what to build an app on?

“At the end of the day, technology is just a tool and should be treated as such. The technology itself will rarely play a deciding factor in the success of a product. That onus is on the vision and the implementation. If you’re building an application by yourself, use your native language. If you’re building it with a team, play to their strengths. Chances are, if the product is successful, you will have to re-write it in 24-36 months anyway as technology is changing this quickly! ”

What’s a fast-fading trend of apps at the moment?

“2D user interfaces. Once mixed reality applications make their way into our everyday lives, depth and layered user interfaces will be the new norm. As always, we will have to wait until Apple does it before the mass market accepts it, even if Android does it first.”

What is the next big thing for mobile apps that’ll be game-changers for business owners?

“The democratization of payments. Whether it be fiat or cryptocurrency, the landscape for how end-users and businesses make transactions has changed drastically over the last five years. As businesses adopt alternative payment providers to banks, it will relieve them of all the legacy rules guarded by the big financial institutions.”

What’s the first application you ever built?

“It was an interactive Flash-based website of my family’s house in high school for my major project. I went around taking photos inside and stitched them together using frame-by-frame animation. I even added door opening and closing animations. Fortunately, Adobe Flash has reached its end-of-life date, and no one can run this thing.”

Senior Developer, Thomas Nixon at Devika

What things are important to consider before building an app?

“The team and skill set you already have - It’s best to work with what you know. Software development is mostly about people and working with other people's strengths. If you need a particular skill, like app design, there are many resources out there and many companies and services with specialized skills who can help.”

When technology is constantly evolving, how do I know what to build an app on?

“Due diligence doing research and seeing what exists in the market already and what competitors have done. Getting advice and input for an idea is critical to its success as you may learn more.”

What’s a fast-fading trend of apps at the moment?

“Serverless architecture has allowed developers to build highly scalable applications that can reach a global audience easier.”

What is the next big thing for mobile apps that’ll be game-changers for business owners?

“Flutter and react-native have made cross-device apps that are easier to build and maintain. It also means less work for you as they do not need development for Android and ios. Low code has also opened the doors to a lot more people who want to build simple apps.”

What’s the first application you ever built?

“When I was 12, I taught myself how to program by making games and started me on a journey to learn and create more.”

Founder of Devika, Ken Kencevski

What things are important to consider before building an app? And what should I build on?

“Don't build an app. Create a solution to a problem and then use technology to solve and scale it. Our mission has always been to enable people first and then apply the technology needed to scale the idea and the organization's impact. It's equally important to solve a problem you are passionate about because building a business from it is hard enough as it is. If you believe in the cause enough, it’s a lot easier to get through the tough times.”

What’s a fast-fading trend of apps at the moment?

“Apps that don't solve a problem well enough; not sure if there is a technology, feature or function in particular.”

What is the next big thing for mobile apps that’ll be game changers for business owners?

“Voice and augmented reality have huge potential to change the way businesses interact and provide services for their customers. From medicine to architecture and retail, there’s a huge range of possibilities.”

What’s the first application you ever built?

“I built a basic eCommerce website when I was 15 to sell car audio gear from my bedroom 😊”

Ready to start building?

From website apps to mobile apps to hybrid apps and everything in between, our team has experience in not only building these technological products but creating solutions that help your business better connect with customers long term. If you need a hand getting started with this process or want to chat more email us here