How to Make an App Easily As a Beginner
Apps are the essential part of life nowadays. From buying food to medicine, Booking, and travelling, Shopping, and selling, creating art or searching jobs, everything is a click away from your fingertips. The continually developing market for applications and their demand makes it a good business plan and a modern-day solution for everything. You can execute your ideas if you know how to make an app. The purpose is to create a successful app running on different devices and making life a bit easier.
9 Steps to Make an App
The number of apps available in the App Store and play store is increasing every day. With a developing market like this, you come up with unique ideas and know-how to make an app to launch any app of yours. By following these ten steps, an individual without expertise or a beginner can quickly create an app:
Step 1. Sketch an Idea:
There is an Idea behind every successful story. An idea can be big or small, but what matters is its relevance to execute the plan. Every app starts by making a rough idea of it. Remember, it's just a rough idea, so you do not need any unique tool. Writing it down on the paper works too.
To start with, you can make a list of the features you want to see through your App's User Interface. You can sort the elements into two categories: necessary features under 'Must have', and not so essential functions under 'Nice to have'. It is vital to make a sleek and minimal design, only focusing on the primary purpose of what matters most of the goal. It is known as the Minimum Viable Product or MVP, the simplest version of your app.
Time - It can take a few hours or a few days.
Cost - It's free (takes nothing but a pen and paper)
Step 2. Do Market Research:
Research comes next to the idea as one must understand the feasibility of the concept as in the future of the app. Doing research and finding insights is often underestimated, but it's an important step to understand the business model before launching the application. You can make an idea of demand in the market, potential competitors of similar apps, and the user desires by doing market research.
While doing research, you can focus on two things, like -
- The mistakes made by the potential competitors in the marketplace, obviously you don't want to repeat them.
- b) Find out what people are looking for in some app like yours. Understanding their desires and demands will help you create a higher user base in the future.
Time - It can take a few days
Cost - It's free to do some research on the internet. However, you use some paid pro tools like Google trend and Keyword planner to measure the demand for your app.
Step 3. Create Mockup and Wireframes
It's a crucial step to create mockups for your app before developing it. Mockups are the rough sketches and layouts for the user interface of your app. Mockups don't include any exceptional grained elements, complex color schemes, or high-end graphic designs. It's more of a basic idea of how your app will look like. It shows the functional details of interaction with users and its flow.
In case you are wondering how to make an app for free, Wondershare Mockitt is recommended for everyone, whether you are a beginner or individual with expertise.
By following these few steps, one can easily create a mockup for apps through this tool:
- Choose "Create > Project" to start prototyping after successfully logging in
- Start with a new project and choose the correct device type and name to proceed.
- One can choose from the templates to see examples of work on it.
Choose the correct size for canvas. It can always be changed from the "..." or "Settings" to its right devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and webpage/television.
- There are assets on both sides of the canvas. On the left side, there are "Fast Widgets" and on the right, there are "Build-in Widgets", "My Widgets" and "Icons".
- All the widgets can be used by merely double-clicking on it or can drag it to the canvas from the panels.
- To edit a widget, one has to click on it and select its properties from the inspector panel.
- The edited widgets can be saved for future use by dragging to "My Widgets" or by right-clicking it to "Add to Widgets". This creates a library for all the custom widgets made by the user.
- Select a widget and choose "New link" from the right panel to set a gesture, action of animation to it.
- Or one can simply drag the icon to the left panel of the target screen to ads those links.
- There are numerous widgets and icons in the asset library for the user and even build-in templates as a demo.
- Dynamic widgets help add interacting animation and manage screen state by changing the shape, size, and color of an image component present on the screen.
Audio, video, and spreadsheets can be added to the process of mockup by putting its URL link for the particular file and publish it.
- After being done with the designs, it is important to preview the prototype through your device to see its outcome.
- If it is good to go, hand off your mockup to the developers and see your work getting life in no time.
Time- This can take a week or two depending on how complex is your app
Cost - If you are using Wondershare Mockitt, you can access it freely for individual use or beginner (primary). However, there are different pricing and conditions for advanced use and enterprise.
Step 4: Make App's UI and Graphic Design
Handing off your mockups to the professional graphic designers will give your app that aesthetic approach. With pixel-perfect details, designs, image assets, animation, and motion, an app reaches a whole new level. A professional can provide you the best result if you properly outsource your work to work efficiently.
However, if you are looking forward to doing it alone, it's better to choose from build-in sketches and templates. This is easy and convenient but might reach your expectation.
Time - It can take a few days or a few weeks
Cost - Templates are usually free or cheap to avail. However, if you are hiring a professional, you should ask for a quote.
Step 5: Make the App with Xcode and Swift:
Now that all the groundworks and little bit of marketing is done, it's time to start developing. There are plenty of professional tools and developers to help you out with this. You can start building iOS apps with the help of 'Xcode' and 'Swift'. Xcode has everything that you need to make an iOS app.
It includes code editor, project manager, debugging tools, built-in documentation, and a smooth UI builder. On the other hand, Swift is the dominant programming language for making iOS, iPad, MacOS, and others. It is highly recommended for beginners who are searching for How do I make an app and are learning iOS app development. For all those people searching for how to make an app for beginners, this is the best answer for your question.
The app development process is crucial and critical which can be categorized into two ends, like-
- Front end - This includes layout, design, UI, graphics and animation, and everything you can see.
- Back end - This provides data handling and storage, user management, networking, database, and everything behind the app that can't be seen.
Their process of coding is robust. But with the help of commercial development tools, libraries, and frameworks, you don't have to do all the coding all alone.
Time - Can take weeks or months to complete an app
Cost - It's free to do it yourself through some of the professional tools that are paid. If you are hiring a developer, ask for a quote.
Step 6: Test your App before Launching:
Testing is essential to give the final touch to your app. You don't want your app the crash or begin bug, which will create a negative impression among the users. So before launching, it is important to check yourself. You can also take the help of any beta testing tool.
Step 7: Launch your App on App Store:
Now that your app is fully developed, it's time to launch it through the App Store and commercialize it. The process of starting or publishing it is pretty straight forward:
- Register to Apple Developer Account
- With App Store connect the app's title and metadata should be prepared
- The latest app build should be uploaded to App Store with Xcode
- Let Apple review your app with given guidelines
- The app will be published and ready to install when it's approved.
You should try to promote your app after launching it and sometimes even before it for early access. Social media, blogs, and PR can be helpful for this.
Time - Publishing takes most likely half of a day
Cost - It takes $99 per year to publish in the App Store
Step 8: Market your app to Reach Right People
Marketing helps create good connections, empathy, and trust with the people or potential users. Your app might be helpful, but not to all. To reach the right people, you can start by asking yourself - What solutions your app give and to whom mostly? Understanding what can be beneficial for people will make your product even better. Help people more to discover your app and make realize the difference. This will help you grow a huge user base for your app.
Time - Spend as much as time you want in the initial phase
Cost - An excellent marketing mind is priceless
Step 9:. Improve your App with User Feedback
Feedback is one of the essential parts of an app's ongoing development process. Keeping track of user experience or feedbacks and communicating with them will help you understand what changes you can make to the app for even better performance. You would have to do the analysis and fix the problems as soon as possible.
Time - It can take a day or more
Cost - Communicating with the customers is free; however, there are some paid testing tools.
Summary: Every problem that comes to our mind can be solved with the help of an app. In these days of application-dependent life, it's good to learn how to make an app for free and if you have an idea to proceed with, you should start already. Thanks to the prototyping software like Wondershare Mockitt for helping out millions of users, including expert individuals, non-expert individuals, or beginners for free. With the knowledge of how to make a mobile app, one can create wonders by keeping a connection between the virtual and reality. Create an app of your own and help people lead a better Lifestyle. This is how do you make an app for free.
