Mobile App Development Challenges in 2023

According to Statista, mobile apps in 2025 are going to earn over $600 billion for businesses across various segments in the US alone. It is no surprise, therefore, why businesses are so keen on app development. Mobile applications provide an avenue for interacting closely with customers, building profiles, and giving personalized offerings to them. A successful app can minimize costs for a business while increasing selling opportunities and improving loyalty.

The thought of the amount of success that an app can bring to a business is always very appealing. However, the amount of work needed to ensure that success is underappreciated. Working with a world-class development company such as NS804 is helpful because they can anticipate such challenges and put in the right measures to avoid or mitigate their effects.

The problems typically revolve around resource constraints, development work, feature changes, legal constraints, and marketing. We will explore some of these in brief detail.

Quantifying the Scope of Work

When you entrust your app development project to a team, they need to spend sufficient time detailing what you have asked of them. You should work with them to cover details such as who your target market is, the expected number of users, the budget, your promotion strategy, and how to generate content for the app.

Failure to specify the scope can result in resources being wasted on unimportant features. You may end up with a fancy app with no real utility. The scope of work also helps the development team to give a realistic and justifiable quotation for the development work. Therefore, before writing the first line of code, ensure that both parties to the contract know what to expect from the other in detail.

Determining Features for the MVP

Successful projects should be built with clear instructions on what constitutes the MVP (minimum viable product). These are features that the target customer will find useful and which if present, the product can go to market. The MVP is a stripped-down version of the app, and most of the budget should be directed toward it.

A lot of development projects find themselves unable to filter out features in order to come up with a lean and clean MVP. The correct approach would be to come up with a product roadmap so that there are features held back and launched in subsequent versions of the app, once customers have had a taste of the first iteration.

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Cross Platform Building

When implementing projects, companies have to choose between building a native app or taking a cross-platform development approach. The major advantage of a native app is that it feels quite intuitive and faster to use. Native apps are also more stable and work well with inbuilt features of a device (such as cameras). However, cross-platform development is often faster and cheaper. Cross-platform development can be quite appealing when working with a strained budget.

When working with a professional app development company, they are able to provide advice on the right approach. Depending on the nature of use, it may be better to build separate native apps. Native apps may also be necessary when target users are evenly split between Android and iOS platforms.  When most of the users are on one platform, you might consider building a product on that platform and then adding support for the other.

Building Responsive Apps

Mobile app development projects must take into consideration the fact that users will want to access their app using multiple hardware devices. Ensuring device compatibility is a major problem when developing apps. The development team must make decisions on the UI of the app so that it feels natural and seamless even users move from a mobile phone to a tablet for instance. Ensuring device compatibility requires complex technical design skills and will lengthen the development process.

Testing Phase

The testing phase is a critical part of the app development tests. In fact, nowadays, the development team needs to write tests as code to test various aspects of the app’s performance and reliability. This takes time and the company must have sufficient resources to ensure comprehensive tests are done.  There needs to be patience on the part of the client to allow the development team to deal with bugs and failures that the tests reveal.

Other tests should focus on how the app consumes memory and battery life. Because of the tens of different apps on users’ devices, a good app should take as little of these resources as possible. This poses a challenge to the team to write clean code and to put in memory management capabilities.

Maintenance

The app maintenance and improvement process is a challenge to a lot of businesses. While the initial development may have been done following industry best practices, the business must ensure that all work that follows is done up to those standards. The code quality and documentation need to be immaculate for continuity reasons. The company must subject all code to similar quality checks. Therefore, the business has to commit a significant budget annually towards maintenance. In many cases, this needs to be at least 10% of the initial development budget.

Ensuring Security

Unsecure apps pose a risk not only to users’ data but also to a company’s reputation. In fact, a security breach may result in legal woes for a company.

Security is always a major priority in any app development project. The team must seal any loopholes that cyber attackers may want to exploit including data transmission and the preferred cloud storage service. Data should be stored in an encrypted format while user accounts need multi-factor authentication. The company has to dedicate resources to continually test the app for the robustness of its security. Most world-class apps get security updates every few weeks to guard against emerging threats and address any vulnerabilities discovered.

Marketing Strategy

For an app meant to be accessed by mass market users via app stores, companies need a comprehensive strategy to create a buzz around the app. A lot of companies will have a landing page for the app that directs users to stores where they can download the app. Before the launch, users can sign up to be notified via email once the app is ready.

The company may also need to have a blog and a community forum to host discussions around app features and any challenges users might be experiencing. Companies should also use their social media handles to increase visibility for the app.

While these are organic ways to promote an app, it’s also possible to use paid marketing channels to promote the app. You could pay for publicity pieces on mainstream media, and you could also pay influencers to access their audiences. The challenge lies in being able to create and surgically execute a marketing strategy while taking stock of the results.

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Working with an App Development Partner

An app development partner who offers comprehensive service, including drawing up a marketing and content strategy for your app is a great find. At NS804, we work with clients right from the inception phase to the launch of the app in various stores. From years of experience, we can anticipate and deal with challenges likely to arise along the way. We endeavor to deliver the project within the budget and the set timeframe. To learn more about our app development process, schedule a call with us here.