Archive for the ‘Mobile App Development’

When you’re ready to expand your brand’s reach, it may be time to consider developing a custom Android app.

The most difficult part is trying to condense your brand into an engaging Android app that’s useful to your desired audience. It’s important to ensure the app still reflects the best parts of your brand without seeming too bulky.

From determining features to thinking about the user experience, a branded app should be carefully planned out. Do it right and it could be one of the best ways to build even more brand loyalty.

• Think About Your User’s Needs, Not The Brand’s

  Odds are, you want to develop an Android app that focuses more on making your brand more profitable. This might involve a lot of hard selling. While that’s a great goal for your brand, it won’t draw people to your app. Instead, focus on what your potential app users love most about your brand.

  Consult customer feedback, look at your loyal fans interact with your brand online and think about what they enjoy doing. You want your app to be useful and engaging. For instance, a fashion brand wants to sell more clothes, but their app might focus more on a virtual dressing room feature or let them scan in their current clothing to better coordinate outfits. Users could still buy from the app, but the app would focus more on their needs outside of shopping.

  One of the best ways to do this effectively is to create user personas. These help you better relate to your end users. Amplitude showcases step-by-step how they create their user personas, if you want to see the process in action.

• Stay True To Your Brand

  While an Android app doesn’t have near as much room for branding elements as a website, it’s still a reflection of your brand and should be consistent with your branding everywhere else. For instance, if your central colors are red and green, these should be your main colors in your app. Suddenly changing to orange and purple will confuse users and won’t make your brand jump to mind while they’re using the app.

  Along with colors, you should keep other major branding elements consistent too, such as:

1. Logo
2. Typography
3. Personality/Tone (if your brand is fun, keep the app fun)
4. Types of illustrations/imagery
5. Message (stay true to your brand’s message and values, which are what loyal fans love about you)

• Limit To The Most Important Aspects

  According to a study by Localytics, app retention rates aren’t high. In fact, only 29% of users stick with an app past 90 days. Even if someone installs your app, the study shows that 21% of users only open a new app once. This leads us to wonder, why aren’t users sticking with the apps they install?

  Some of the most common reasons include:

  • Glitches in the app
  • Doesn’t meet expectations
  • Loads slowly
  • Difficult to use
  • Rarely needed features

  If you try to put everything about your brand, you’ll push users away. You have a website and social media presence if users want to find out more about your brand. Think of your Android app as a teaser. For anyone new to your brand, it’s a great introduction. For loyal followers, it’s a welcome addition.

  Limit the features to just the most important aspects of your brand. Stay true in style and tone, but keep your feature set to things a user might need on the go. Keep it simple, yet useful. This prevents it from becoming a bulky, complicated app.

• Create An Extension Of Your Brand

  As we’ve already covered, you don’t need to condense your entire brand into your Android app. Instead, you want just the most important parts. However, this shouldn’t just be a rehashed version of your website. For instance, if your app just includes some contact info or your latest blog posts.

  Make your app a useful extension of your brand. If you’re a retail business, make it easy to shop via the app. For restaurants, offer mobile ordering or reservations.

  Maybe you’re a lifestyle blogger branching out into an Android app. While adding your latest blog posts works in this instance, you need something more. For example, if you focus on a healthy lifestyle, your app might include a way to search for and save recipes or guided fitness routines. Create one or a few highly useful and engaging features.

  The only real exceptions to this rule are brands where a mobile app condenses the functionality of the website, such as with Facebook or Amazon. However, most brands will need something unique to stand out among the crowded Play Store.

• Make It Interactive And Current

  Condensing your brand into an engaging Android app means creating interactive elements to help users engage with your brand. And, just like your website, you want to keep the app updated with current content and features. Think of it like a mobile game. Games that update with new content regularly continue to build a larger following. Those with limited levels and content fade away quickly.

  The best part of adding an app to your branding strategy is you’re able to consistently improve the app. Listen to the feedback. Ask users to offer suggestions on what they want. You should even ask your brand’s followers what they’d love to see in an app to help you determine the perfect way to give your users the app they’ll love.

  Plan out your app carefully and it will become the perfect extension of your brand while helping build your customer base.

  **In Collaboration with WPS Office.

Closures are self-contained blocks of functionality that can be passed around and used in your code. Closure expressions are a way to write inline closures in a brief, focused syntax. Closure expression gives some syntax optimizations in a shortened form without loss of any clarity or intent. Swift’s closures are similar to blocks in C and Objective-C. Closures are able to capture and store references to any constants and variables from the context in which they are defined.

Google released Android Studio version 2.3 in March and 2.4 Canary version in April, still in May 2017, in I/O developer conference, Google announced the latest version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Android Studio 3.0 with unleashing the coming of new Android 8.0 namely -Android O.

Apple always succeeded to accomplish the expectations of users and developers with every iOS update. Updates in iOS 8 to iOS 10 surely resulted in fruitful results. Apart from the extended updates in Apple Pay, Maps, iTunes, etc., Apple came up with the outstanding open platform for the developers called APP EXTENSION.

Talk Page Messages were just the generalized basic form of notification, where the user used to get an alert message written: “You have New Message from XYZ”. While mobile technologies are getting more interactive, then why not the notifications?

With upcoming of Push Notifications, there is a huge revolution in the trends of notification in mobile technology. Now, the notifications are not at all the boring sustained messages. Push Notifications are pop-up messages on the device. The pop-ups can be either any exclusive offers or sports score or a message notification and many else beyond imagination and expectation. They are alike SMS text messages or mobile alerts, but they are more interactive and demonstrative than that.

As the smart phone has become the major device for business communications, it has become equally important for developers to determine some of the methodologies that could be used to develop mobile applications. Such methods include the agile methodology and other methods as well.

The smart phone is quickly becoming the main device used for business communications. The technology enables businesses to reach potential and existing clientele in an innovative and new way. The same as other business, mobile app development has technological enhancements and innovations that make a trend for as long as there is something better in place. In mobile app development, clearly, the agile development methodologies are getting more popular compared to the traditional waterfall development method.

The future of mobile app development is certainly bright and full of interesting prospects. Mobile apps have become vital parts of people’s lives and thus are set to be more innovative.

With the explosion of smartphone sales, they are becoming more affordable and the number of persons on the web has exponentially increased. The growth in the volume resulted in making the mobile application industry very huge. By the end of this year, it is expected that there will be more than 10 billion devices on the internet. There are several things that a developer has to know about the future of mobile app development and be updated on the current trends.

The usage of mobile apps has become an increasingly popular method in business to allow the employees to access the task any time and any place. To streamline the business process, IT leaders decide a workplace strategy to start moving in the digital world. Adoption of mobile app strategy requires a mindset which can develop a perfect app catering the business demands. There is an emerging need to develop a customer-centric business app that actually keep them engaged.