So, going digital seems to be no big deal nowadays for any business, be it a local florist or a retail major. Your potential clientele wants and expects the virtual presence of your brand. Rightly so! That leaves you with no choice, but to develop the wonderful android application for your company.

When you decide to hire a mobile app development company in India, you will need to ensure that the final app is quite set to give you the business that you need. After all, you are spending all the money and efforts for business growth. An app that looks good but doesn’t translate into money is of little use, isn’t it?

You need to get out to planning and approving the design and approach. It will be start when you hire an Android app developer or maybe even before that. Be mindful of what can hit right with your users. You don’t want to get lost in the millions of apps floating on AppStore, would you? Take a cue or two from below:

Nothing fanciful, really!

Simplicity touches and connects in unbeatable ways – always. A simple app design is what grabs the attention. Complex and lots of technical mumbo-jumbo looks good on paper, but remember your users may not be that tech-savvy! Check out by wearing the shoes of the users. Simple. Intuitive. Direct. Period.

Buzz it up, create an aura!

You need to have a trend and make your users ask for more. Easier said than done. Tease a little, give a few features first like a trailer. Give your audience a sneak peek, scratch their curiosity buds, and then draw them towards your new versions with more!

Is it really what they want?

One of the first things you will need to check is what the market wants. Is your USP ‘good’ enough? This is what will make or break your work. So, get it right before you start. You need to scour the entire virtual zone, look for competitors’ offerings from around the globe. The world has shrunk a lot after all, hasn’t it? If you can, get insight about trends and what can be expected to come soon. Make lists, brainstorm, and redo it all over again – and yet again. This exercise will make your app design lean and fit!

Dip in hot water!

Take a dip in boiling water, just a bit! Not, really! The parallel drawn in the app development world means that you need to release your app idea or prototype to a small section of your target users. There is nothing that works better than live feedback. Let it be a freely flowing feedback. Encourage direct and honest opinion. Time spent now is huge money saved later.

Close the loop. Start from the drawing board, go to the user. Then, go back to the beginning with the inputs from the field. Involve UX/UI experts, strategists, marketers, business users, advisors – et all! Be transparent, welcome tangent ideas and criticism. At this stage, this is the litmus test that your app needs.

When you burnt the midnight oil, bask in the aroma! The new age oil is all flavoured to smell right and intoxicate after all. Your app will have that aromatic edge and do the wonders that you seek.

The mobile app development market is jostling for space with too many entrants in this field. In countries that have technical tilt to their advantage, such as India, this results in a number of confusing options for those looking for Android app development in India.

Yet, the cost may vary as much as the range between the cost of diamonds and stones. So, what does the cost of Android app development depend on? Of course, the Android applications rely heavily on underlying platforms, technologies, and the actual features of the apps. Also, the type of devices that the app would run on affects the total cost. Some other factors include the timeline, as cost equates with time in today’s world and will also guide the number of resources used to develop it in the agreed timeframe. The profile and preferences of the users targeted by your app will guide its features and this will also impact cost.

How can you validate the perfect Android app development services for your business?

It helps to look for cost-benefit analysis across the following factors:

1. Enhanced brand recognition
2. Increased value proposition
3. Opens up new avenues of sales and marketing
4. Improves productivity and efficiency
5. Reduces manual errors
6. Promotes accessibility and outreach
7. Improves customer engagement

The steps that a seasoned Android developer will follow comprise of:

• Expansion of the idea

The ideation has to be laid down into a producible piece of software that can be developed as an app.

• Laying out the functionality from the end-user as well as the workflow perspective

This will clearly lay down the functionality as it caters to the end-users and mas it backwards to the features. Your inputs are valuable to make it more receptive in the market.

• Design

This divides the design across various modules, back-end, front-end, and connecting subsystems. The interfaces are clearly listed down here.

• Development and testing

The actual development of the product takes place as per approved design and expected functionality. Testing at various stages for positive as well as exceptional scenarios and at various integration stages gives confidence on the stability and the functionality of the app.

• Go-live

Based on the testing result, the plan to go live is chalked out and followed.

• Feedback collation and brainstorming for improvement

This is an important phase to validate the app and the idea from actual feedback collation from the users. This is where many companies fail to focus on and it can actually wash away all the expected benefits and let the entire efforts of the Android app development go waste if your users do not find the app useful. Therefore, the feedback must be backed by sessions on how to improve the app. This can be planned in various cycles or iterations that use a subset of the steps listed here all over again.

The actual cost cannot be put directly in figures without understanding your business needs. So, be wary of vendors who set out to quote numbers without much deep diving into your requirements. Any reliable Android app development company in Mumbai will place prices on the table after thoroughly understanding your needs, and giving expert advice by fine-tuning the needs as well. Cost should be balanced and weighed against hidden and often-overlooked parameters like flexibility of design, scalability, after deployment maintenance and support and readiness to change and adapt.

So, you have launched a number of apps for various aspects of your business and have been able to expand your user footprint significantly. With this achievement, the volumes of user data and other sensitive information flowing through your systems gets exposed to the threat of unscrupulous hacking. With so many payment gateways, interoperating systems, and outsourced partners, data is perhaps the most vulnerable in the virtual world.

Smartphones have made it mandatory for mobile apps to take in this data to feed backend operations of all sorts of business. Gartner has predicted that 75% of the hacks in 2017 will be due to misconfiguration of apps. It is therefore of utmost importance that those developing Android applications in India consider security as a prime focus area.

There are a few things Android developers need to take care of in order to create secure mobile apps:

1. Secure your code and the data

The app is as secure as its code. Hackers often pick up the code available on public domain and reverse-engineer it to create a splitting image of the original, but it is enthused with malware. Thus, Android programming must use tools and platforms that can lock and secure the source code. An exposed code is highly susceptible to client-side injection by malware. Secure configuration must be done to maintain the code. The API’s are hooks into a software; hence apps must identify the caller of the API and check the permissions before going further.

2. Secure the environment and network connection

Apps pump data relentlessly and unsuspectingly by the user. The device’s underlying security model is prone to jailbreaks. It is important to restrict access to enterprise data by these devices and the apps lying there. Judicious app design elements should take care of picking out only relevant data for the desired functionality. The network connection to cloud-based systems should be secured. VPN, SSL and TLS are some of the standards that can be used by Android applications.

3. Categorise your apps

You may have a number of apps for your enterprise. One cannot always focus on all apps at the same time. Hence, when launching or maintain an app, it is a wise idea to categorise it in priority in terms of security threat levels – high, medium or low, or other such parameters, such that optimum efforts on security aspects of each app can be considered.

4. Invest in robust encryption

Data traveling over interfaces has chances of being intercepted for misuse. Hence, apps must incorporate smart encryption strategy at the very onset of app development. All databases and data files as well as the stored must be encrypted code. In fact, the encryption key management process must be also reviewed and updated regularly for continued cryptographic security.

5. Impactful authorization

Intelligent security layers to authenticate your users is a good way of reducing unauthorised access. This validates the user’s identity in multiple ways and thus controls access. Furthermore, OAuth2 and Open ID are some specific technologies that a person keen to learn Android programming must focus on. Including these in an app will enhance its security. Repeating different types of authorisation at multiple levels within the system and not just at entry level is a better way to ensure authorized access.

Mobility is a boon, but it is also a threat that are a favourite target for malware. An Android app development company in Mumbai that takes care of the above-mentioned points will help you to leverage the benefits of enhanced productivity, far-reach, increased employee satisfaction, with a handle on the security of business-critical data and informational assets.