A 12-Step Guide to Building Your Very First Mobile App: Part 2

Designing and building your very first mobile app can be quite challenging. To help give you a general overview of the process, I’ve put together this 12-step introductory guide. This article is Part 2, covering steps 7 through 12. Make sure you read A 12-Step Guide to Building Your Very First Mobile App: Part 1 first to review steps 1 through 6.

Let’s summarize first: You’ve had an idea, sketched it out on paper, and created a testable wireframe prototype. Although it feels as if most of the work has already been done, the truth is that the actual process is just about to start!

This infographic provides a nice overview of the development of an Android or iOS app. It has been created from a survey of 100 developers and put into place based on their feedback (Note: You will find the wireframing process in this graphic near the end, whereas many developers will do their wireframes at the beginning of the project.)

How long does it take to make a mobile app?

From: Kinvey Backend as a Service

Step 7: Build the Back End of Your App

Now that your app has been defined pretty clearly, it is time to get started on the back end of your system. Your developer will have to set up servers, databases, APIs, and storage solutions.

Another important thing on your to-do list at this stage is signing up for developer accounts at the app marketplaces you are developing for. Getting your account approved may take several days (depending on the platform) and shouldn’t be left to the last minute.



Step 8: Design the App “Skins”

“Skins” are what designers/developers call the individual screens needed for the app. Your designer’s job is now to come up with high-resolution versions of what were previously your wireframes.

In this step it is crucial to include all comments from your prototype testers (see Step 6). After all, you are trying to build an app your target audience is actually going to use, therefore their feedback should guide you toward to the perfect UI-User Interface.

Step 9: Test Again (Yes, Again)

Once your designer has completed the design skins, you’re up for another round of testing. Don’t think that you are all set with what you’ve done so far. For the first time you have your actual app concept completely in place, all the graphics inserted, and all text as it should be. Which means you can finally test your app in the way it will really look and feel.

To test your app, two great testing apps come to mind: Solidify and Framer. These apps allow you to import your app designs and add links where needed to test the flow from screen to screen.

Don’t confuse this stage with Step 6 (wireframing). At first it was about creating the basic look and feel of the app. Here you’ve implemented the actual design and made it clickable.





Step 10: Revise and Continue to Build

Once you’ve given your design a test drive and collected more feedback from future users, you should use these new ideas to polish your app idea. You can still ask your designer to change the layout, and you can still tell your developer to change something on the back end.

Step 11: Refine Each Detail

As you continue to build you will want to have a constant look at your new app. On Android, for example, it is easy to install your app file on a device to test its functionality in a live environment. iOS is different. There you will require a platform like TestFlight to download and test your app as it proceeds.

This step is the last step in the app development process. You can monitor your app all the way until your product is complete.



Step 12: Release Time!

App marketplaces have very different policies when it comes to publishing a new app. Android, for example, does not review newly submitted apps right away. They’ll pass by at some point and check it out but you are able to instantly add your app to Google Play.

iOS, once again, is different here. Apple reserves the right to review and approve your app before it can go live. There is no set timeframe for this, but you can expect at least a week before you hear back from them.

To overcome this hold there is something else you can do: submit your app to PreApps. As you can probably guess from its name, PreApps is an app marketplace that gives developers the opportunity to reach early adopters (a.k.a. “lead users” — people who like to be first at trying out new inventions) and receive some of the very earliest feedback on your masterpiece.



Once you’ve gotten your app listed on the app stores of choice, it is time to market your app and get it seen, but that’s a topic for a whole other future article!

By Melanie Haselmayr

A 12-Step Guide to Building Your Very First Mobile App: Part 2

12-Step Guide to Building Your Very First Mobile App: Part 1

Did you wake up this morning with a creative idea for the perfect mobile app? One that nobody else has thought of before, and that you are certain will be very popular?

The only problem is, you don’t know how to even begin designing and building an app! Never fear — read this brief guide on the 12 key steps to bring your mobile app idea from your imagination to smartphone screens everywhere.

Step 1: Define Your Goal

Having a great idea is the starting point into every new project. Before you go straight into detailing though, you must clearly define the purpose and mission of your mobile app. What is it going to do? What is its core appeal? What concrete problem is it going to solve, or what part of life is it going to make better?

Defining a clear goal for the app is also going to help you get there faster.

Step 2: Start Sketching

By developing sketches you are laying the foundation for your future interface. In this step you visually conceptualize the main features and the approximate layout and structure of your application.



Having a first rough sketch of your app helps everyone on your team understand the mission. These sketches should be used as reference for the next phase of the project.

Step 3: Research

This research has four main purposes:

1. Find out whether there are other apps doing the same thing
2. Find design inspiration for your app
3. Find information on the technical requirements for your app
4. Find out how you can market and monetize your app

While you may think that you have a revolutionary idea, you may get your hopes crushed very quickly. There are more than 1 million apps for Android and iOS, so building something that hasn’t been done before is nearly impossible. Nonetheless you must not get discouraged by those who may playing in the same arena. It is imperative that you focus on your own project and your user acquisition. Learn from the key features and mistakes of your competitors, and drop all other thoughts about them.

There is a great marketplace for designers called Dribbble. Designers use Dribbble to showcase their work to others for feedback and to get inspiration from fellow artists. It is probably my favorite place to look for ideas about design and implementation.



This is also the right time to look into the technical aspects of your mobile app. Find out what your requirements are and get a clear picture of whether your idea is truly feasible or not from a technical standpoint. In most cases there will be an alternative solution to proceed on a slightly different route. This research extends into legal restrictions like copyright and privacy questions, giving you a complete understanding of your situation.

If you have connections in the industry, get an expert opinion on your idea right from the start.

Two other important points are marketing and monetization. Now that you have confirmed the feasibility of your app, you should think about your strategy of getting it out onto the market. Determine your niche — know exactly how you can reach your target user and how you need to approach him to make him see the value and use the app.

Another important consideration is figuring out how your app is going to generate money. Will you charge your user to download it? Or will you offer the app for free but run ads on it? This model would require a large user base, so think about that as well.

There are various ways to monetize an app and it is up to you to decide on the channel you want to use.

Step 4: Create a Wireframe and Storyboard

In this phase your ideas and features fuse into a clearer picture. Wireframing is the process of creating a mockup or prototype of your app. You can find a number of prototyping tools online. The most popular ones are Balsamiq, Moqups, and HotGloo, which allows you to not only drag and drop all your placeholders and representative graphics into place, but also add button functionality so that you can click through your app in review mode.



While you are working on your wireframes you should also create a storyboard for your app. The idea is to build a roadmap that will help you understand the connection between each screen and how the user can navigate through your app.

Step 5: Define the Back End of Your Mobile App

Your wireframes and storyboard now become the foundation of your back-end structure. Draw a sketch of your servers, APIs, and data diagrams. This will be a helpful reference for the developer, and as more people join the project you will have a (mostly) self-explanatory diagram for them to study.

Modify your wireframes and storyboard according to technical limitations, if there are any.

Step 6: Test Your Prototype

Revert to your wireframes and ask friends, family, colleagues, and experts to help you review your prototype. Grant them access to the wireframe and have them give your app a test run. Ask them for their honest feedback and to identify flaws and dead-end links. If possible, invite them to your studio and have them try out the prototype in front of you. Monitor how they use the app, taking note of their actions and adapting your UI/UX to them.

The goal is to concretize your app concept before it goes into the design process! Once you start designing it is much harder to change things around, so the clearer the prototype from the start, the better.

By Melanie Haselmayr

12-Step Guide to Building Your Very First Mobile App: Part 1

How Long Does it Take to Build a Mobile App?

“How long does it take to build a mobile app?” While the question isn’t as timeless as “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” (spoiler alert: 3481), it is one that’s very dear to our community of mobile app developers. And now we’ve got an answer. 18 weeks.

Click image for full sized version

If you’d like to embed this infographic on your own site or blog, here’s the embed code: </p><div style="width:600px;background-color:#fff;padding:10px 20px 20px;font:14px/21px HelveticaNeue-Light, Helvetica Neue Light, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><h3 style="color:#da5024;clear:both;">How long does it take to make a mobile app?</h3><p><a href="http://www.kinvey.com/blog/2086/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-mobile-app"><img alt="Kinvey Backend as a Service" src="https://i2.wp.com/www.kinvey.com/blog/images/2013/01/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-an-app-kinvey.jpg" width="600" /></a></p><div style="width:100%;text-align:center;margin-top:5px;">From: <a style="text-decoration:none;color:#da5024;" href="http://www.kinvey.com/blog/2086/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-mobile-app">Kinvey Backend as a Service</a></div></div><p>

In collaboration with research firm AYTM, we surveyed 100 mobile designers to discover how long they expected it would take to build core front- and backend components of an Android or iOS app.  We averaged the responses and then teamed with the designers at Visual.ly to visualize the time required to develop each component of an MVP-quality native app.

For fun, we put app development time in context. Who knew you could drill three 3000-foot oil wells in the time it takes to launch the first version of your “drill for oil” iOS game?

Of course, there’s a subtext to this graphic. Specifically, it doesn’t have to take 18 weeks to build v1 of your app. It can take a lot less time. The backend alone is estimated to require 10 weeks, but a backend as a service like Kinvey can dramatically reduce that time. And our SDK partners, like Adobe PhoneGap, BrightCove and Trigger.io, can all help accelerate your frontend development efforts as well.

So, how long would it take you to develop a native app MVP?

Kelly Rice

How Long Does it Take to Build a Mobile App?

Ninth Planet May Exist Beyond Pluto, Scientists Report

 There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all, and it is not Pluto.

Two astronomers reported on Wednesday that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away — something that would satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short.

“We are pretty sure there’s one out there,” said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to start revising mnemonics of the planets.

In a paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed — a half-dozen small bodies in distant elliptical orbits.

What is striking, the scientists said, is that the orbits of all six loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system and are tilted at about the same angle. The odds of that happening by chance are about 1 in 14,000, Dr. Batygin said.

A ninth planet could be gravitationally herding them into these orbits.

For the calculations to work, the planet would be at least an equal to Earth, and most likely much bigger — perhaps a mini-Neptune with a mass about 10 times that of Earth. That would be 4,500 times the mass of Pluto.

Pluto, at its most distant, is 4.6 billion miles from the sun. The potential ninth planet, at its closest, would be about 20 billion miles away; at its farthest, it could be 100 billion miles away. One trip around the sun would take 10,000 to 20,000 years.

“We have pretty good constraints on its orbit,” Dr. Brown said. “What we don’t know is where it is in its orbit, which is too bad.”

Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, an expert in dynamics of the solar system, said he was convinced. “I think the chase is now on to find this planet,” he said.

This would be the second time that Dr. Brown has upended the map of the solar system. In January 2005, he discovered a Pluto-size object, now known as Eris, in the Kuiper belt, the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune.

The next year, the International Astronomical Union placed Pluto in a new category, “dwarf planet,” because in its view, a full-fledged planet must be the gravitational bully of its orbit, and Pluto was not.

The first indication of a hidden planet beyond Pluto had come a couple of years earlier. The Kuiper belt extends outward from Neptune’s orbit, about 2.8 billion miles from the sun, to a bit less than twice Neptune’s orbit, about five billion miles.

Astronomers expected that beyond lay mostly empty space.

Thus they were surprised when Dr. Brown and two colleagues spotted a 600-mile-wide icy world at a distance of eight billion miles that remained well outside the Kuiper belt even at the closest point in its orbit.

No one could convincingly explain how the object, which Dr. Brown named Sedna, got there, and the hope was that the discovery of more Sedna-like worlds would provide enlightening clues.

Instead, astronomers looked and found nothing, deepening the mystery.

Finally, in 2014, Chadwick Trujillo, who had worked with Dr. Brown on the Sedna discovery, and Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, reported a smaller object in a Sedna-like orbit, always remaining beyond the Kuiper belt.

Dr. Trujillo and Dr. Sheppard noted that several Kuiper belt objects had similar orbital characteristics, and they laid out the possibility of a planet disturbing the orbits of these objects. “It was the best explanation we could come up with,” Dr. Trujillo said.

But the particulars of their proposed planet did not explain what was in the sky, Dr. Brown said.

“The theorists didn’t really take it seriously,” he said. “They figured it was all some observational effect. The observers didn’t take it seriously, because they figured it was all some theoretical thing they couldn’t understand.”

Still, the peculiarities of the orbits appeared genuine.

Dr. Brown said he and Dr. Batygin “sat down and beat our heads against the wall for the last two years.”

First, they focused on the six objects in stable orbits and disregarded others that had been recently flung out by Neptune.

That made the picture clearer.

“They all point into the same overall direction,” Dr. Batygin said. “This is in stark contrast with the rest of the Kuiper belt.”

Besides the long odds of this alignment being coincidental, Dr. Batygin said, this pattern would disperse over time.

That argued for the force of some unseen body guiding Sedna and the others.

Dr. Batygin, a theorist, tried placing a planet among them, which scattered some Kuiper belt objects, but the orbits were not sufficiently eccentric.

Then he examined what would happen if a ninth planet were looping outward in the opposite direction. That, Dr. Batygin said, gave “a beautiful match to the real data.”

The computer simulations showed that the planet swept up the Kuiper belt objects and placed them only temporarily in the elliptical orbits. Come back in half a billion years, Dr. Brown said, and Sedna will be back in the Kuiper belt, while other Kuiper belt objects will have been pushed into elliptical orbits.

Another strange result in the simulations: A few Kuiper belt objects were knocked into orbits perpendicular to those of the planets. Dr. Brown remembered that five objects had been found in perpendicular orbits.

“They’re exactly where we predicted them to be,” he said. “That’s when my jaw hit my floor. I think this is actually right.”

Dr. Morbidelli said a possible ninth planet could be the core of a gas giant that started forming during the infancy of the solar system; a close pass to Jupiter could have ejected it. Back then, the sun resided in a dense cluster of stars, and the gravitational jostling could have prevented the planet from escaping to interstellar space.

“I think they’re onto something real,” he said. “I would bet money. I would bet 10,000 bucks.”

CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY
25
COMMENTS
Dr. Brown said he began searching for the planet a year ago, and he thought he would be able to find it within five years. Other astronomers will most likely also scan that swath of the night sky.

If the planet exists, it would easily meet the definition of planet, Dr. Brown said.

“There are some truly dominant bodies in the solar system and they are pushing around everything else,” Dr. Brown said. “This is what we mean when we say planet.”

Correction: January 20, 2016
An earlier version of an animation accompanying this article carried an incorrect credit. It was made by Michael E. Brown, not Michael E. Clark.

An artist’s impression of a possible ninth planet. It would be quite large — at least as big as Earth — with a thick atmosphere around a rocky core. CreditCalifornia Institute of Techonology

By KENNETH CHANG

Ninth Planet May Exist Beyond Pluto, Scientists Report