3 Ways To Drive Down Your Mobile App Development Costs

Mobile application development in the digital age has become mainstream for every business to thrive. However, designing and developing a unique, thriving mobile app can be an expensive undertaking.  The hidden costs, additional designs, and tools can cost you a hefty price. To avoid these pricey factors, take a look at the three essential tips below that will help you reduce the mobile app development costs.

Design first, develop later:

Before writing the code, you must have a good understanding of your mobile app strategy. Sketch out your mobile app’s interface and workflows early in the design phase. Sketching your app is an incredibly easy and cheap way to create an app’s initial design and lay down its requirements.

You can produce as many sketches as required and look through the various design options with the app stakeholders as a part of the interactive process. It will expect you to incur a few upfront app development costs. However, ensure you precisely define the directions and dead ends for your app. You can also make use of device template that provides a structure to sketch your app designs.

 

Focus on what’s important:

Developers who are naïve to the concept of mobile app development mimic the desktop software or load their application with features they think are appealing but have little to do with your app’s primary goals. While developing your mobile app, it is essential that you minimize its functionality and add only those features that are in line with your app’s primary objectives. The less complicated your app, the less overall app development costs. Hence, it is essential to building an app with a clean, minimalistic design and fewer features versus one with a plethora of features that will drive the end users away.

Also, consider the (MVP) minimum viable product approach for your app project. MVP product involves limited functionality with enough features and elements to meet your application’s primary objectives. Your developers can include more features in subsequent releases if required. By doing so, the time to market your product reduces, saving your time, effort and money along the way.

 

Go cross-platform:

A successful mobile app should be able to work on multiple mobile platforms and device types while reducing the development effort required for implementing the different versions. It will need you first to identify the devices you want your app to support – Android, iOS, or Windows Phone – then figure out whether you should build a native hybrid or an HTML5 web-based app.

You can hire a professional cross-platform mobile development company to determine which option yields the best performance. Apart from just making your app cross-platform, ensure that you incorporate a responsive design. Though a majority of cross-platform frameworks are associated with only hybrid app development, some others such as Xamarin also support native application development.

 

The tips mentioned above will help you perform a careful cost analysis before you decide on any development technology. The right tools and techniques will help drive down the app development cost significantly. What are the other ways to reduce mobile app development costs? Share your tips and ideas with us using the comment box below.

Various Phases Of The Mobile App Development Lifecycle

Just like Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), there is mobile app development lifecycle and adhering to the lifecycle and its various processes improve the overall quality of the app.  There are five main phases involved in mobile development:  planning, designing, coding, testing and deployment. Before commencing development work, businesses and developers should create a foolproof strategy to make the app development lifecycle efficient and lay the groundwork.

Right from selecting a unique app concept to successful execution – a mobile development company needs to understand the latest trends, technology, tools and influences that will make the app stand out from the rest. Let’s take a look at all the phases and what they entail:
Pre-development research and planning
The research phase is most crucial because this is where you decide the goal of the app, its target audience, the primary platform, whether it will be a native app or a cross-platform app. If it is a cross-platform app that you intend to develop then you need to identify the framework – that is Xamarin, PhoneGap etc. You will need to find a professional Xamarin mobile development firm with expertise in your app category.

The research phase is also important to analyze the competition and evaluate the features they offer. Read their app reviews to understand user pain points and ensure your app fills the gaps and offers the missing features. Now create an estimated timeline and budget for the app with contingency planning.

Designing
You need to create a detailed scope of work and prototypes once you have finalized the research and budget. Begin by doing a mental prototyping of your app and draw the initial ideas in the form of sketches on a whiteboard. This helps you identify usability issues easily.

Take feedback from relevant authorities to get their views on your idea. Discussion and brainstorming on the prototypes are valuable and helps you find the loopholes in the early phase allowing you to fix things proactively.

Prototype and Coding
Once designs are finalized, you must undertake a feasibility exercise to check if your back-end and front-end are compatible. The UX designer can then design the interaction architecture of the various elements whereas the UI designer creates the final look and feel. This is a process involving multiple steps and results in the visual direction and blueprint that govern the entire product.

For mobile app development, the Agile methodology is quite popular because it allows you to make incremental changes as you go and is a nimble approach to development. With agile, you can keep adding new features as you go and testing happens parallelly to support the concept of continuous development.

UAT Testing
User experience testing is when you finally get your mobile app beta tested and vetted by development experts to find UAT bugs or other usability issues that can hamper the user’s overall journey. The feedback from beta users helps you decide if the app works as desired in the real environment.

Deployment
Once you have fixed the minor/major issues found during UAT Testing, your app is now ready to be deployed. That is, it is ready for app store submission. There are several criteria for getting approval and ensure you study those in-depth before you ship your apps to the App stores.

Conclusion
Deployment doesn’t signal the end of your application development; mobile apps evolve continuously and you need to keep updating the apps and adding new features or fixing user problems. Have you built a mobile app recently? Do share your experience regarding the various phases of app development in the comments area below.

A Quick Rundown On Platform Independent Development Using Microsoft .NET

Platform independent applications usually run under Windows, Linux, and Mac. There are exceptions, for instance, when it is required to communicate with specific hardware drivers, a third party library or any other components that are not available on all platforms. Despite that these parts are isolated into interchangeable modules which can either be operated in a simulated mode or with the real thing.

The simulated modes are basically platform independent. Developers can work on the source code by using their favorite operating system. And certainly, the code has to be tested on the target platform(s) that the application will work on in the end.

Platform independent development is a matter of technology choices and programming best practices. When it comes to choosing the technology, the ecosystem based on Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a preferred choice for platform independent development. There are several projects developed using Java and other Java Virtual Machine based languages. Those developers who are polyglots are more competent in developing software with a wide array of programming languages.

The Microsoft .NET Ecosystem: Up until recently, the .NET software development framework was mainly known to be an ecosystem based on Microsoft Windows. The Mono project was initiated by non-Microsoft developers to provide an open source implementation of .NET framework for other operating systems. It never had a similar status as Microsoft’s official .NET on Windows.

However, Microsoft has recently changed the course. The company open sourced its .NET platform implementation and is porting it to other platforms. It even acquired Xamarin, a cross-platform app development framework. Xamarin is the company behind the Mono project which now releases developer tools such as integrated development environment (IDEs) for non-Windows platforms.

Integrated Development Platforms for non-Windows platforms: If you are planning to build a project with .NET on a platform other than Windows, there are several new choices available for an IDE which includes:

• Xamarin Studio on Mac and Windows or MonoDevelop on Linux.
• Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac. This IDE is based on Xamarin Studio and currently offers a preview version for developers.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code for Mac, Linux, and Windows. This IDE is basically a more powerful code editor than a full IDE.
• JetBrains Rider (EAP) on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

These are the most popular integrated development environment tools for developing a .NET based application. If you have used other JetBrains products earlier, you will find the user interface of JetBrains Rider (EAP) IDE quite familiar. Xamarin Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, MonoDevelop and JetBrains Rider – all these IDEs support project file format and solution of the original Visual Studio for Windows. So, you can use any of these IDEs to create a .NET project.

Conclusion:
Development of Microsoft .NET web or mobile application is no longer restricted to the Windows platform. Microsoft is actively open sourcing its development platforms and projects for other operating systems. What are your views on platform independent application development with Microsoft .NET? Please share your thoughts with us using the comment box below.

Xamarin Evolve 2016 – What’s New For Xamarin Developers?

In the past few years, the pressure on web developers to iterate and deliver quality applications faster has increased incredibly. But the continuous advancement of technological integration and automation is helping them to cope up with the rising demands.

Not long time ago the famous tech titans, Microsoft and Xamarin, joined to focus on and help developers improve DevOps efficiency vigorously. Recently at the Xamarin Evolve 2016, the world’s largest cross-platform mobile development conference in Orlando, the company open-sourced Xamarin software development kit (SDK).

Every developer dreams of building apps faster that delivers high-quality experience using Xamarin. And, Microsoft and Xamarin has just shared some new ways to modernize mobile DevOps and make app development faster than ever. Let us take a closer look at the ways introduced by the company at the Xamarin Evolve 2016.

Xamarin Test Recorder For Faster Automation:  Delivering a high-quality mobile experience is challenging, especially for the robust and complex apps that need to run smoothly on numerous device configurations. The test automation empowers a Xamarin app developer to move fast and know if the things are done right while proving the challenge. But at times, it is sacrificed when there is a shortage of time or personnel. For this reason, the test recorder was announced which helps to generate automated scripts by launching your application on a device or simulator. It allows you to integrate with it just the way your users do. You can use the script as is or alter any of the stored values prior to exporting the test authored in Xamarin.UITest. The Xamarin Test Recorded is available as a Visual Studio plugin.

Test Cloud Live To Cut Debug Times: The automated tests are powerful tools for defending the integrity of a mobile app. But sometimes it is important to reproduce a test failure manually and test the state of the application and device closely to understand the main cause and how to fix it. The company released Test cloud Live to introduce the power of real-time debugging on several device configurations to the workstation of every developer. With Test Cloud Live users can manipulate a real device within the browser. It also provides an extra level of detail which is sometimes required to debug a complex issue.

Deliver, Monitor, And Iterate: Conducting beta test for your apps gives an additional layer of valuable feedback which helps you figure out device-specific edge cases and user paths the automated tests might have missed. This crucial knowledge gives you the opportunity to address issues well before they hit the core audience. New enhancements are announced to Xamarin Forms features and Xamarin Studio IDE and its part of all what’s now open-sourced.

Microsoft and Xamarin have delivered products and services that developers always love. And these announcements are said to increase developer productivity enabling seamless experience on all mobile and server platforms.

Want to learn more about Xamarin Evolve 2016? Watch some of its keynotes and sessions and share your thought about the announcements with us in the comments below.

How To Integrate PayPal Within Zen Cart to Achieve e-Store Success

No matter how beautiful your eCommerce store may look and function, its success largely depends on how well you sell the products to your customers. This first requires you to win the trust of your site visitors. Studies say that online stores using popular payment gateway tools like PayPal get more traffic. It helps to reassure the visitors of the trustworthiness of your eCommerce store.

According to statistics about global eCommerce, “In 2013, global e-retail sales amounted to 839.8 billion U.S. dollars and projections show a growth of up to 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars by 2018.” This rapid increase in online transactions will make payment gateway integration to eCommerce stores a necessity. Nevertheless, Zen Cart offers all-in-one solutions to online merchants. It enables easy inventory management and quick order processing for your online store. It also provides support for various online payment methods and allows your customer to process payments using their PayPal accounts.

PayPal, being the most popular and trusted online payment service, accepts both debit and credit card payments. The reason why PayPal is a choice of payment gateway among retailers is that it doesn’t include any setup, gateway or monthly fees. It only charges a nominal transition fee upon a sale that too when a customer uses a credit card to process the payment. The transition fee amounts to 3.4% of the total sale plus a small flat rate of $0.30. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial that helps you to integrate your PayPal account within Zen Cart payment modules.

How To Integrate PayPal With Zen Cart:

Prerequisites: A verified business PayPal account and a Zen Cart eCommerce application development platform installed on your system.

Step 1 – First login to the Admin page of Zen Cart, select Modules and click on Payment.

Step 2  – Now, select PayPal Payments Standard module from the Payment Modules listing, and click on the Install button appearing on the right.

Step 3 – Follow the below-listed instructions to update your PayPal account:

• Enable the PayPal Module and set as ‘True’
• In Business ID, enter the PayPal email address for your business
• Obtain the PDT Token (Payment Data Transfer) from your PayPal account profile
• Set Detailed Line Items in Cart to ‘Yes’
• Keep the default URL for Mode for PayPal web services as it is
• Now click on ‘Update’.

By now you must have realized that integrating PayPal to Zen Cart platform is not only easy but a great way to provide a more robust and secure online purchasing experience to the customers. So, start setting up a successful online store with PayPal and Zen Cart integration.

Have you implemented PayPal as the payment gateway for your Zen Cart based e-store? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.

Responsive Websites vs. Web Apps – Which One Does Your Brand Require?

Spend a minute on mobile and you’ll realize that things on the web are moving at a lightning speed. This makes it daunting for small business owners to cope up with the prevailing market competition. Previously, businesses just needed to have a simple informative website to mark their presence and make good money. But, today, concepts such as mobile marketing is giving more importance to interactive device-specific designs.

As a result, every marketer is putting in concentrated efforts towards mobile apps development that not only includes out-of-the-box features but also captivating user interfaces (UI). This results in providing engaging consumer experience while helping businesses monetize.

According to Cisco’s report, “By 2020, there will be 8.2 billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and the global mobile data traffic will increase nearly tenfold between 2015 and 2020.” Reckoning this mobile growth, many businesses are embracing “Mobile-first” strategy. While there a number of approaches for a mobile web presence, responsive websites, and web apps are the two current popular choices. Let’s consider taking a closer look at each before moving onto its comparison.

Responsive Websites:
A responsive website is an approach aimed at designing websites to work on any platform. The CSS stylesheet is customized in order to make the website look appealing on any device. So, whether you access the website from desktop, iPhone, Android device or tablet, it will fit in perfectly.

Benefits of Responsive Website:

• Responsive website can flexibly adapt to any given device screen.
• It cuts down on the extra effort of creating multiple versions of your website for different devices.
• The URL structure in Responsive website remains constant for all devices.
• The conversion rates along with mobile sales tend to increase if your customers are purchasing your products/services via different devices.
• It provides a seamless user experience (UX) to your potential customers.

Web Apps:
People often confuse web apps with mobile apps. A web app is a software app which runs in a web browser. Some common web app examples include webmail, wikis, instant messaging services, etc. You can even store the web app data in your browser to access it offline.

Benefits of Web Apps:

• Web apps unlike traditional apps are accessible anytime anywhere.
• The user interface (UI) of web-based apps is easily customizable.
• As the web app only needs to be developed on a single operating system it makes development and troubleshooting easier and cost effective.
• Installing and maintaining web apps is less complicated as users can directly upgrade to a newer version installed on the host server.
• It is easy to increase the processor capacity without affecting the overall performance of the web app.

Responsive Website vs Web Apps:
While a responsive website features everything in an easy-to-access format, the web apps are majorly used for developing a mobile version of a non-mobile ready web page. But you can consider finding out which mobile OS is often used to access your website and match your features with your chosen mobile OS. This will help you determine how to approach the mobile market with your brand.

Responsive website or Web Application – which one would you prefer to represent your brand? Let us know in the comments below.

5 OpenCart Advantages that Rocks your eStore

As eCommerce sector witness new heights each day, more retailers are coming forward to utilize the power of eCommerce platform. The sudden surge in the use of mobile technologies has enlightened retailers to believe how important eCommerce is for achieving business success. But in this process, they are presented with an immediate challenge of selecting an appropriate eCommerce platform for developing their online store.

As there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in eCommerce, the right way to select a platform from the abundant options is to analyze the essential business needs and identify which platform offers a professional look at an affordable cost.

If you are a newly minted business then OpenCart can be a perfect solution for your eStore development. Checkout the below infographic to know what benefits OpenCart platform brings in for your store.

 

 

 

 

 

5 Ways To Boost Your eCommerce Sales With Facebook

The evolution of social networking era has created a profound impact our daily lives. Not only has it transformed the way we communicate but also the way we trade. Businesses are taking help of social media to reach out to and interact with the customers directly. And, Facebook is the most preferred platform as it currently has 1.59 billion globally active users.

Facebook has turned into a behemoth from when it first started back in 2004, from a small dorm room. Today, nearly everyone we know around us has some presence on Facebook. This poses a massive opportunity for e-retailers to find new customers on this platform.

According to a survey, 80% of all mobile users spend their time on Facebook. This coupled with the analysis by Morgan Stanley that by 2016, 85 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising will go to either Facebook or Google. This makes it imperative for e-retailers to have a marketing strategy for Facebook.

Many eCommerce brands consider Facebook as the leading social media platform in terms of driving the highest traffic to build fans and customers. This majorly holds true for businesses with lifestyle products who create compellable and shareable content. In fact, if you’re using OpenCart eCommerce development services, there’s a Facebook extension they have introduced to help retailers integrate their product store with the social media channels quickly and easily.

Now let us see how exactly you can drive more eCommerce sales using Facebook.

5 Ways To Increase eCommerce Sales With Facebook

Use High-Quality Images: Building an audience and creating customer engagement is what you first need to do to generate more sales on Facebook. Research shows that images on Facebook garner higher engagement compared to the other average posts. But, all images created aren’t similar. Buffer says that the self-explanatory images gain higher engagement than the ones that require additional explanation.  Also, if you’re updating product images, add a few words to your image that provides more context. Take a look at the below example from HiDesign.

Sell Lifestyle around the Products: This is another essential strategy for retailers. While selling the product they must understand that they’re not selling just the products but the lifestyle around the products. Putting it the other way, post your product images in a way that displays your ideal customer for your product making sense to your brand and target specifications. Micheal Korr’s image below is a perfect example to inspire the brand followers while promoting the luxurious lifestyle and its products.

Create Theme-based Product Packages: Who likes to see the same product post over and over? This over a period of time can fade away the customer’s interest in you. Try to create an interesting collage of products. You can mix products based on similar themes that are visually appealing. You can also apply the same strategy while offering quick tips or note-sized style guides on what other products can match with yours. To understand this, see Macy’s picture below.

Run a Contest and Offer Discounts: Research shows that 42% of customers like a brand on Facebook while expecting to get discounts or coupons. So, you should start offering great deals to your fans on Facebook. Contests are one of the best ways to give out special deals and discounts which in a way engages your Facebook fans and drives new customers to your website or mobile app. The below example from Amazon is another way to attract customers to your store.

The list doesn’t end here. You can get more creative to sell your stuff with Facebook and convert more visitors into customers. You can also use the social media extensions or plugins from many eCommerce solutions to speed up your selling on Facebook. So, get your products on Facebook now and catch hold of customers who are Facebooking all day long.

Are you selling your products on Facebook? Did it help you drive more sales for your business? Let us know in your comments below.

 

How to Develop Native Mobile App With DrupalGap

Drupal, being a versatile web development tool, has evolved a lot in recent years to cater to the increasing demand for processing mobile content. It has empowered many enterprises to build compelling websites and web portals. Building web application with Drupal also lets you present your content in the best way on the mobile devices.

Moreover, DrupalGap which is an open-source mobile app development kit, uses Drupal, PhoneGap, jDrupal, and jQuery mobile to build Drupal websites. This app development kit can help developers to easily develop and customize a multi-platform Drupal mobile app that communicates with Drupal websites. This kind of mobile apps can be easily installed on Android and iOS devices. And once the installation is done, the app smoothly interacts with the website developed using DrupalGap.

However, native mobile app development with DrupalGap brings two major benefits – distribution via mobile application stores and access to native functionality. The best part of native app development is it offers the ability to use the inbuilt features for various mobile operating system. You can set up such native applications seamlessly to cache data locally. This even makes the applications work effectively when any device is out of range.

The DrupalGap kit includes three major components:

1. DrupalGap Module: It sets up a secure connection between a Drupal website and an application. It uses data source modules that facilitate seamless interaction through JSON.

2. DrupalGap mobile app development kit: This kit allows you to develop custom multi-platform mobile app. It uses jQuery Mobile to create the user interface for mobile applications and PhoneGap helps in compiling the developed mobile app.

3. DrupalGap web app development kit: This kit can help you develop web applications via DrupalGap.

Here is a step-by-step guide for developing a native Android mobile app via DrupalGap.

Step 1: Configure Drupal website

To create an Android mobile app with DrupalGap, the first thing you require is an active site that runs on the latest Drupal version. If you already have a website powered by Drupal, you can move on to Step 2.

Step 2: Enable DrupalGap Module

By enabling the DrupalGap Module, you ensure that the interaction between the website powered by Drupal and the mobile app is convenient.

Step 3: Set Up Mobile App Development Environment

Once you’ve enabled the DrupalGap Module, set up the environment for mobile app development that provides support for the execution of DrupalGap. The environment set up can be similar to the one possessed by PhoneGap.

Step 4: Mobile App is Ready

Congrats! The mobile app is now ready for the execution. Run the mobile app to ensure that the performance is consistent on mobile devices. If it runs smoothly, you can publish the app in the desired app store.

Drupal is a well-known platform leveraged by several enterprises having a global customer base. So, harness the power of DrupalGap to build mobile apps not only for Android platform but also for iOS.

Did you try developing iOS or Android mobile application via DrupalGap? Share you experience with us in the comments below.

Top 3 Benefits of Outsourcing Software Development

Technology is developing at lighting speed, which has evolved the culture of outsourcing the enterprise’s requirements such as software or mobile app development. Today, many organizations have adopted this change. Companies who desire to have their own mobile app, and Android being the top mobile OS, outsource their needs to the company developing Android apps.

While those looking to get a software either for internal business operations or as a product for end user, connect to developers having the required set of skills. Besides, outsourcing software development not only helps a business be cost efficient but also saves their time they would have spent learning the platforms required to develop a software.

Software development is the development of an application or software that ideally includes all the business functions right from the conceptual idea to the actual demonstration of the software. It follows a planned and structured process, which includes extensive research, prototyping, new development, modifications, re-use, re-engineering, maintenance and many enterprise activities that will lead to the creation of final software product.

However, many are cautious of outsourcing their software development process. Given below are the top 3 major benefits that will help you understand why you should outsource software development:

1. Self-managed Team : Developing software with the help of in-house team can prove to be tedious process, especially if the entire project management is in your hands. The outsourcing partner has a dedicated team for software development well versed on the latest technology and tools to help solve your business need. They simplify the development process, right from the conception of software suitable to your needs till its actual deployment. Through outsourcing, you get the most suitable software on the latest technology for your business without shifting your focus on your core business operations.
2. Cost Savings : Outsourcing software development also proves to be a cost efficient solution, as you will not be investing in hiring new staff meeting your new business requirements. It will also help you in saving from additional investments made for your existing staff to get the best results. Your outsourcing partner is much more efficient at catering to your staff as well as your software business needs. Hence, outsourcing your requirement of developing software can be cost efficient.
3. Result oriented : An outsourcing vendor for software development is dependent on the reviews and feedbacks received from its clients. As a result, it motivates them to provide you with the best services meeting your expectations. The result you obtain, in the form of software for your business, is as per your requirement and based on your needs.

Have you outsourced your mobile application or software development projects ever? If yes, what other benefits did it bring in for your business?