Mobile applications have already become an integral part of our routines. Global mobile app downloads are projected to surpass 200 billion by 2026. However, despite this impressive growth, only 0.5% of apps achieve commercial success, and the majority will fail. The key factor in this is the poor development process.
Most businesses make the same 5 mistakes during the development process. That’s why we are here to teach you how to optimize apps to ensure you will create a great mobile app with high and stable monetization.
How a Single Mistake During Application Development Can Derail an Entire Project
Mobile app development is a complex process; even the tiniest mistake may have far-reaching consequences for the entire project. For instance, poor user experience or critical bugs can drive users away, regardless of how unique or valuable your app’s proposition might be.
Research from AppsFlyer reveals that over 50% of apps are uninstalled within 30 days of downloading. These unpleasant statistics show the importance of application maintenance.
If your app fails to engage with target users, they are unlikely to stick around. It will negatively affect the entire project. Critical code or app architecture bugs can lead to system crashes, data loss, or cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Fixing them post-launch is significantly more expensive than addressing them during development.
A poorly executed app can damage your brand’s reputation and hinder growth opportunities. Moreover, these issues can even lead you to potential legal and financial risks.
Snapchat’s redesign in 2018 is an example of how one wrong update can ruin the app’s reputation. They were at their peak in early 2018 until they decided to fully redesign the app. Users found the new interface confusing and counterintuitive, so they simply migrated to Instagram, which just released a Stories feature mimicking Snapchat.
Proactive Measures to Mitigate Risks
To minimize the risk of critical mistakes, you need to become proactive during every stage of the development. The only way to reduce mobile app development mistakes is to implement the following strategies:
- Focus on UX/UI design: Provide the most user-friendly experience you can give to your users.
- Invest in thorough testing: Prioritize rigorous mobile app testing throughout the development to early identify and resolve potential issues.
- Adopt a robust architecture: Your app should be easy to scale, even if you have an extra-limited budget.
- Gather user feedback: Engage early adopters during the beta phase to identify pain points and make improvements before the official launch.
A successful app requires more than innovative features or a compelling value proposition. It demands a strong commitment to quality and user experience.
5 Critical Challenges in App Development and How to Overcome Them
Launching a mobile app isn’t just about coding; it’s about making the correct choices at the proper time. Unfortunately, even the best teams aren’t prone to potential errors. To save you time, we’ve gathered the 5 biggest mobile app development challenges you should overcome to increase your chances of success. Once you solve them, you unlock a myriad of new capabilities.
Here are 5 mobile app development mistakes to avoid:
- Undefined target audience
- The absence of MVP
- Neglecting UX/UI design
- Choosing the wrong technologies
- Lack of continuous maintenance.
Undefined Target Audience
One of the most common app development mistakes is launching an app without clearly understanding its target audience. This lack of focus often results in a situation where a product fails to address user needs or resonate with its intended audience. You’ll see low user acquisition rates, high uninstall rates, and wasted marketing budgets with little ROI.
It’s unpleasant but fixable! Without identifying the core users and their needs, a product that tries to cater to everyone but satisfies no one. This lack of alignment leads to inefficient resource allocation and a poor product-market fit.
To avoid this during application development, conduct comprehensive audience research at every stage of designing your application:
- Use analytics platforms to determine different users’ personas and their behavior.
- Create detailed user personas that outline your target groups’ needs, challenges, and expectations.
- Try gathering as much feedback as possible by incentivizing users who share their experience.
Early Instagram is a great example of this rule. At first, it wanted to become an all-in-one app with photo, video, sharing, and video chat features. However, after the first few months, it found that these many features overwhelmed users, and most of them used only photo sharing.
So, they refocused their vision on photo enthusiasts. Later, they implemented their original vision. However, for the first few years, they stuck with the photo-sharing essence, which helped them gain the first billion people in the audience.
The absence of an MVP
Many businesses fall into the trap of launching a full-fledged service from the early days. Some may see it as “We still need to develop the solution, so let’s do as much as we can.” However, it leads to lengthy development and bloated budgets. Moreover, hidden bugs can hinder app performance, so users will leave the app as soon as possible. Developing a complete app without validating its core functionality exposes you to several risks:
- Overcomplicated Development: Building and managing a bloated feature set increases the likelihood of technical debt.
- Costly Revisions: The later you find the bug, the more work you may conduct to fix it.
So, we recommend you start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and slowly add new features. Gather user feedback to identify potential issues and prioritize future improvements.
Don’t forget about platform compatibility, since during the MVP e, you can easily achieve compatibility with most platforms. However, once you develop an iOS app that heavily relies on exclusive iPhone features, it will be hard to create the Android version and vice versa.
Spotify’s journey confirms our words. The company launched with a simple feature: streaming music for free. Instead of overloading the platform, they refined a core.
Over time, Spotify introduced personalized playlists and social integrations, but they gathered their key audience as simple and free streaming.
Neglecting UX/UI Design
An app with a poorly thought-out or overly complex interface frustrates most users. Unfortunately, many startups undervalue the significance of UX/UI design, treating it as an afterthought. It leads to various pitfalls, such as overloaded interfaces and illogical navigation, where users struggle to find the needed feature, just like you struggle to use the iPhone’s gallery after updating to iOS 18.
When an app is difficult to use or understand, users abandon it. Negative reviews deter potential customers, leading to lower downloads and retention rates.
Over time, poor mobile app performance results in financial losses due to low engagement and declining investor confidence. In the long run, it can lead to a shutdown since the product cannot recover from bad first impressions.
Airbnb is a great example of how good design works. The simple layout and easy navigation let users browse and book properties without a hassle. By keeping things simple, they’ve created an experience that works for all their target groups.
So, you, as the business, should invest in continuous research, professional design that addresses users’ needs, mobile app maintenance, and actual user testing. Not all your users are tech geniuses, so you should implement insights from feedback to make your application friendly and accessible.
Choosing the Wrong Techservice
Selecting unfit technologies can hinder service scalability and performance. Many teams rush to “get the deal done” without considering long-term requirements, guided only by app development trends.
The consequences of this action are dramatic. Your application may struggle to handle even the average traffic or operations that don’t require much hardware. This leads to slow load times and regular crashes, which in turn result in scalability challenges and high maintenance costs.
Friendster is an example of how a great idea may fail due to poor technology management. They were the first social media, launched in 2002, a year earlier than MySpace and 2 years earlier than Facebook. However, as the platform became popular, it started to glitch. So, most users switched to their rivals.
To avoid this fate and achieve the best possible mobile app performance, it’s better to evaluate every detail with extreme caution. The easiest way to achieve this for a startup is to collaborate with an expert team with experience with apps like yours.
Corpsoft Solutions is one of those teams. We are a team of developers with Eastern European roots who create apps in FinTech, HealthTech, e-commerce, EdTech, and many other niches worldwide. Our clients’ geography extends from Australia and Asia to North Europe and both Americas. We help you choose the best technologies for your business.
Lack of a Maintenance and Updates Plan
Many teams focus all their energy on launching their app, overlooking the critical importance of ongoing maintenance and improvement. However, the long-term mobile app success hinges on its power to adapt to neverending new requirements.
Stopping support shortly after launch it’s a secret to a disaster. Bugs remain unfixed, features stagnate, and users simply lose interest. What starts as a small negligence can snowball into full-scale reputational damage, driving even the most loyal users away. If you still want to grow, develop a maintenance plan and regularly use application performance monitoring tools to identify areas for improvement.
Continuously improve functionality and user experience based on feedback. Use real-time analytics to monitor app performance and identify potential bottlenecks. It will be great to prioritize user-requested updates and features since they are your main source of income.
Netflix is a great example of such an app. It began as a DVD rental, yet became a global streaming leader. They make their service available worldwide and continuously update the service with new features.
Wrapping Up
Even the tiniest mistake during development can potentially hinder the project’s success. To avoid setbacks, it’s vital to focus on key aspects, such as defining your target audience, developing an MVP version before the full-scale project, and investing in high-quality design and proper technologies.
You should also have a plan of updates to guarantee that your product remains competitive throughout the years. Don’t forget about rigorous inspections, whether it’s Android or iPhone app testing.
By avoiding common mistakes, you’ll create a disruptive and successful application. Remember that it’s better to spend a bit more time on planning and development than rushing to create something subpar.
In most cases, those extra weeks won’t hinder your competitive edge, even with a groundbreaking product. Facebook launched 2 years later than Friendster, but due to avoiding common pitfalls, Zuckerberg’s creation is currently on top of the social media niche.
Want to become the best in your niche? Contact the Corpsoft Solutions team so we can build software solutions that perfectly suit your business. Book a first free consultation so we can evaluate your needs with no strings attached to you.
FAQ
- How to improve react app performance?
To improve React app performance, use techniques like code splitting with React.lazy, memoization, implement lazy loading components, and optimize state management with hooks like useReducer. Avoid unnecessary re-renders and improve your production build with ReactDOM.render.
- How to measure app performance?
Use tracking tools to determine load time, response time, user interactions, frame rate, memory usage, and network requests. Regularly analyze crash reports, user feedback, and retention rates to identify issues. Compare those indicators with industry benchmarks and your previous results.
- What are the pitfalls concerning cloud application development?
The most common pitfalls of cloud apps are security risks due to shared infrastructure, latency issues, compliance challenges, and scalability mismanagement. If you fail in those areas, you may have a cost overrun, leading to unexpected expenses.
- How to improve app performance in Android?
To improve app performance in Android, try to avoid unnecessary computations and redundant processes. Minimize memory usage by managing resources like bitmaps and caching. Optimize network requests with caching and batching and try to leverage tools like Android Profiler to identify potential bottlenecks.
- How to automate mobile app testing?
If you want to automate mobile app testing, identify potential test cases and simulate them with Appium, Espresso, or XCUITest. Use frameworks to create and manage these test scripts, integrate them into CI/CD pipelines for regular execution, and monitor results to ensure app quality.