Whether you’re researching mobile development companies for the first time or you’re looking to develop the next version of your iOS and Android apps, you should prepare to answer key questions about app development to give you a better understanding of what’s involved.

This checklist includes questions for various stages of app development, including planning and business strategy, design and development, deployment and maintenance, and app marketing so you can start thinking about the logistics of your mobile project.

1. Planning Your App & Business Strategy

• What are your business objectives?
• How will your brand be perceived as having an app? Does it make sense for your brand to have an app?
• Have you defined your app in a discovery and definition session?
• Have you created a product roadmap? What is the most crucial feature that you need? What are the must-have features? What are the nice-to-have features?
• Have you identified and analyzed your competition?

2. Design & Development

• Do you have any preliminary visual designs? Or are you starting from scratch?
• What user usability testing have you done or have planned on doing?
• Has any existing codebase been analyzed for security risks?
• Has any existing codebase been analyzed for performance risks?
• Do you have an API testing strategy and tools? You need to make sure all the cases are covered with an API testing tools. Some examples include Charles Proxy and Postman.
• How data-driven do you want your app to be? How much data do you want to collect and how responsive do you want to be to that data?
• If you are using an agile methodology, does your app development partner have experience with agile projects?

3. Deployment & Maintenance

• Do you have a dedicated QA team that has experience testing mobile apps on a variety of different platforms? Do you need automated, manual testing or both?
• Do you have defined tests to cover known edge cases for using the app?
• Do you have a vendor that can facilitate detecting and report any app crashes that may occur?
• Do you have a plan for releasing frequent updates to the App Store and Google Play?

4. Marketing Your App

• Have you integrated analytics into your app? For example, are you tracking features that are frequently used and which screens your users are most engaged with? What are the most popular user actions? You should understand user engagement within your app.
• Have you prepared a pre and post-launch plan?
• Have you determined a marketing budget?

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