Core components of a successful mobile apps – Developer insights

What makes a successful mobile app? The approach and technologies used to build a mobile will have a significant impact on the success of a mobile app.

All successful mobile apps have a number of factors in common. In this article, we will look at the core components of a successful mobile app to ensure your app is built to be lasting and future-proof with insights from one of our Senior Software Developers (Deepa Mhatre), who has been building apps for our clients for almost a decade.

User-friendly with a great UI (User Interface)

For an app to be successful it needs to be easy to use and visually attractive. An app that offers a user-friendly user interface can be game-changing in increasing engagement and retaining the audience/users over a longer period. Every app is unique in its offering and its target audience, therefore understanding your target users, and catering to them is essential. For example, if you are building an app for a younger audience, then you might want to include gamification with bright, attractive colours. Alternatively, if you are building an app for the elderly you might want to ensure you are using bigger and bolder fonts.

Use case: a leading pharmaceutical company required an app to acquire life-changing research and insights into enuresis in children. The Ardent software developers worked in collaboration with the client to create a highly engaging, gamification-driven app which helps the client significantly increase their research to drive their medication creation. Read the full story on changing children’s lives today, for a bright tomorrow with a highly engaging mobile app packed with gamification features.

"For a great user interface, we have definitive checks in place to ensure that the app lay out the user interface in a way that allows users to solve their problems with as little effort as possible. We make sure that the app offers intuitive navigation to allow the users to interact seamlessly with our app.

Additionally, we make sure that the app we build works for all major platforms (android, iOS & windows) to capture a larger user base. For a personalized app experience, we build mobile apps in a way that enables users to experience the app as per their needs and likings. We also make sure that the users can access the app anywhere they go with offline capabilities which in turn ensures the maximum usability of the app".

Deepa Mhatre (Senior Software Developer)

High Performance

High performance is the absolute key for any mobile app to be successful. If a user faces slow performance or app crashes, they will switch to a competitor almost instantly. Therefore, ensuring high performance for your mobile app should be a priority.

The key to ensuring a high-performing app is to continuously monitor and test the app. Testing will enable you to spot bugs and fix them before they cause the app to crash. Additionally, you can leverage technologies to monitor the app and have error reporting in place so you can ensure any issues are resolved quickly and efficiently.

"For high-performing mobile apps, memory consumption is key. To have less memory consumption and improve app performance, we consider the following factors:

1. Reducing app size

2. Resizing, caching, and compressing images

3. Reusing data templates to help the app load faster

4. Avoiding memory leaks by writing memory-efficient codes

5. Creating an offline mode in case network connection drops"

Another way in which we ensure high-performing apps is by syncing data to the data server, this removes the need for a large amount of data to be stored on a device and can help improve performance. This will not work for all kinds of apps, especially those used offline. However, can be a great approach for online apps.”

Deepa Mhatre (Senior Software Developer)

Scalable and future proof

If you are investing time and resources in building an app for your organisation, you want it to be long-lasting, and scalable so it grows with your business and future-proof so it can adapt to changes. A scalable mobile app will enable your app to perform effectively as your user base grows.

The technologies you adopt when building an app play a significant role in the scalability. Here are some key considerations:

Tech stack – every app serves its purpose so there is not one size fits all. If you do not have software for the technology team in-house, consider getting advice from experts.

• Choosing the right programming language such as JS, PHP, C#
• The right database technology such as MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra
• The approach to scaling for example, vertical or horizontal 
• Use of caching to reduce system resource load
• DevOps Automation platforms such as Git, Docker, Jenkins

"In order to build scalable mobile app infrastructure we use the right tech stacks, the best programming languages like JavaScript, Swift and C#, choose the ideal database from the likes of MongoDB, MariaDB and SQL and adopt DevOps automation platforms like Git, Gradle, Jenkins, Docker etc."

Deepa Mhatre (Senior Software Developer)

Highly secure 

Some apps may require a higher level of security compared to others. For example, a financial app may require multiple-factor authentication to ensure robust security as it may hold customer financial data. Other apps may require password protection. When building an app, security should be carefully considered in line with the type of data being stored. Some commonly used security features include:

• Authentication
• Authorization
• Encryption
• Logging In

Coding can also play a role in the security of an app, so developers can code the apps to reduce vulnerabilities.

"We always prioritize mobile app security by following best practices like secure and agile code, penetration tests, secure the Data-in-transit, Authorized APIs usage, High-level Authentication, minimize storage of sensitive data, code signing certificates, constant app testing, regular updates and many more" 

Deepa Mhatre (Senior Software Developer)

Compatible with devices and operating systems

Ensuring your app works well on multiple devices and multiple operating systems is the key to ensuring you are maximising your reach. When it comes to being compatible with operating systems you can take multiple approaches including:

• Native mobile app development – native mobile app development requires apps to be developed specifically for each operating system. This will ensure compatibility but can be more expensive compared to other methods.
• Cross-platform mobile app development – Build apps using technologies such as Xamarin and Flutter for multiple operating systems which is a cost-effective and quicker alternative to Native.

"To make our mobile apps compatible with the devices and operating systems, we not only use the emulators/simulators to simplify and speed up the testing, but we also put more emphasis on testing on real devices. By testing the mobile apps on real devices, we ensure that the application is compatible with the different OSs, screen resolutions and hardware capacities across different mobile devices."

Deepa Mhatre (Senior Software Developer)

Regular updates, maintenance and optimisation

You have built a user-friendly, high-performing, scalable and secure app and it's going great. The work does not end here. For a mobile app to be successful over time it will need regular updates, and maintenance checks and will need to be optimised over time. This is due to several reasons including:

• Operating system updates – operating systems are continuously updated, and these can impact your apps. Therefore, you need to ensure your app is performing optimally without being impacted negatively by these updates.
• Bugs and fixes – Over time your mobile app may face bugs and glitches which will need to be fixed. These may be reported by users, so will need to be resolved quickly.
• Evolving customer expectations – You will need to ensure your app is continuously optimised to meet the evolving customer expectations and requirements, this can be through adding features or making changes as per feedback.

“The success of an app is determined by more than just the number of downloads. Instead, the success of a mobile app is determined by the number of active users. To retain this active user, we follow best practices such as consistently updating the UI to adapt to changing trends, performance monitoring, bug fixes, app support for the latest versions of OS, integrating new features and more.

One of the main technologies we use to monitor and maintain our apps is Microsoft Azure Application Insights, which is brilliant for error logging and for spotting errors that are not cached. It saves our team time and resource and enables us to react quickly and efficiently to resolve errors.”

Deepa Mhatre (Senior Software Developer)

Ardent mobile app development services

There are almost 5 million mobile apps across Google Play and Apple App store, and Ardent have contributed hundreds to that total number. Our highly skilled mobile app developers have developed user-friendly and highly engaging mobile apps for clients across multiple industries. Explore some of our mobile app success stories:

• Automating Warehouse Management with a user-friendly mobile app
• Helping a leading market research firm gain invaluable insights with an engaging mobile survey app

If you are looking for a mobile app development company that helps bring your vision to life and that has a proven track record of success, we can help. Get in touch to find out more to get started on building your app.  

---