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Sep
26

Initial Questions for a New Mobile App Project

  • Posted By : LunarLincoln/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : App Advice, Business

It can be daunting to know the first place to start after you know you want to build a mobile app. We are here to help. We can help you focus in your project goals on what makes sense.

Ultimately only you will be able to provide the core vision for what you need. As you ask the questions below, think through the lens of what needs to be in front of users first.

Let’s Build a Minimum Viable Product

Minimum Viable Product

Source: Kunal Naik

Since building technology costs money, having priorities will save you money. So what are the priorities? As we explore this question, keep in mind that it’s always smart to build a minimum viable product (MVP) first. Rather than having a little of everything that works ok, focus on building one aspect of your vision well so that it’s a great foundation. That may mean focusing on one platform before doing both iOS and Android. It may mean we should focus on core functionality before adding extra features.

Have an idea of what’s a must-have versus things that aren’t crucial. This will help you know what you should invest in first. It’s always better to get a smaller, great product in front of users, rather than an app that has more, but doesn’t work great. Having an MVP also helps you get to market faster, which has huge advantages. If you keep launching major updates to your app every 6 months, you’ll be learning what works and what doesn’t. This saves you money since you know which ways you need to pivot your thinking. It often doesn’t make sense to work on a large app for years, without getting feedback from users along the way.

That’s the critical piece of advice I’d give any of my friends who are involved in getting an app built. Keep in mind you’re building a MVP, and not the kitchen sink when considering the questions below. Here are some common questions we get when people reach out for a quote. This should help prepare you for a conversation with us.

Let’s Play Common Questions Bingo

If we wanted to build a Bingo board with the common questions that come up during a conversation about building an app, we’d be winning lots of Bingo. If you don’t know how to answer the questions below, spend some time thinking it over and reach out if you’re stuck. We can point you in the right direction.

You want to know: “How much will it cost?”

We need to know the answer to some of the questions below before we’re able to answer this one for you. In general apps are expensive to build, and zeros are involved. Thankfully a round number can get more focused as we learn more.

So what will we ask to get to the answer for that question?

What’s the big idea?

What makes this app unique and different? What will compel people to use it? What is that one thing that absolutely needs to come across when someone uses this thing?

What kind of features are you envisioning?

What are the core thing someone can do with your app? It can be helpful to see if you can distill your app in 2-3 user stories. A user story is a high-level description of one of the things a user can do with your app. Here are few examples:

  • As a car driver I can swipe my app while paying for gas to earn rewards.
  • At the gas station, I can show my app to redeem rewards at the counter and get a free Coke.
  • As a beer enthusiast I can scan a beer’s barcode to see details about a beer.
  • As a movie buff, I can search for a movie and mark it as watched.

Does this need to be an app?

Hang with me. Sometimes people will have an app idea that may not lend itself to the app format. If you want to build an app for writers that helps them build up their typing speed, it may work better as a website or desktop app, where people are more likely to have a keyboard when using it. What’s the advantage to people having this product on the go?

Who is this app for?

What’s your target demographic? Who will be using this app? This can help decide how the user interface works.

How do you plan to make money with this app?

This may sound a big harsh, but what’s the business plan? If you haven’t considered the longterm plan for how the app makes you money or meets your goal, you may be missing a core feature that needs to be in the app.

What’s the play? Should users be able to subscribe monthly to the app? Are there in-app purchases? Are there ads or messages from you or partners? How does a user give you valuable information such as their email address so you can reach out and tell them about your next rally for saving the rainforest? Does your app help you reach your goals?

Do you have a specific timeline in mind?

Do you have time pressures tied to your app? For instance, are you building an app that helps you create custom emojis that you’d like to release on the same week that the next Emoji Movie releases? Or do you have investors or stakeholders with expectations on when the app will be rolled out?

Based on the timeline, we may recommend what would be doable within your desired time window.

What other apps are your competition?

This question helps in a couple ways. Are you building an app that already exists? If so, what is your competitive advantage? If you’re building something different or better than someone else, how will that inform the features you’re wanting?

If you do have competition, what do they do that you also want to do? One advantage to not being the first on the scene, is that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. You can likely glean from others what is already working in your space.

How fleshed out is the design?

Do you need a designer? Or is everything already mocked up? If you need some help with the ideation phase, we can help figure out a plan. Knowing how far along you are in this step will inform how long the process may take.

What devices will be able to run your app?

On what devices will your app be able to run? Can it only run on iPhones? Or just on Android phones? Both? What about tablets? Should the app look different for users using larger screen sizes? The answers to these questions greatly impact what needs to be built.

What other technology will accompany the app?

  • Do you also need a website?
  • Does an API need be built so that the app can access the data it needs?
  • Do you need an interface that allows you to edit or see user details?
  • Do you need analytics about the app so you can see reports of how people are using it?

Bingo!

If you have the answer to 5 of these you’re off to a great start. Keep going. If you don’t have all the answers, that’s totally fine. We can help you think through all of the questions above. These are just some introductory questions we often cover so we can start to figure out the size of your project.

Reach out when you’re ready to figure out your app’s next steps!


Native versus Hybrid efficiency graph
Apr
06

Native vs Web Apps

  • Posted By : Patrick Goley/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : App Advice, Coding

When building a software product for mobile, there comes a time early on when you must decide between building a native application or a responsive web app. When making such a decision, it’s very important to understand the implications of going one way or the other. A native app is typically more expensive to build, but the extended capabilities and high speed execution often makes it necessary or at least advantageous for certain products. Today we’ll explore a few benefits of building native apps to help make this decision easier for anyone setting out to build a new mobile product.

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Why go native?

Direct Hardware Access

Icons8One huge advantages of natively built applications is they have direct access to many hardware features that web apps simply do not. While HTML5 has brought easy access to the camera and microphone with the <input> tag, these elements simply output a file and don’t give you access to the media in real-time. If you want to build fun camera filters or do any kind of signal processing, you’re much better off in the native realm.

While web apps have some access to media capturing hardware, they don’t have any access to some of the other sensors on the device. For example, native apps on iOS have full access to all HealthKit data (should you allow them) collected by the motion co-processor and other activity trackers, which are always working whether your app is running or not. Native apps can also use geofences and other location-based triggers to provide context-aware behavior and offline notifications, which can draw your user’s attention back to your app at opportunistic moments.

Blazing Fast Execution

200 (4)Native apps can work more efficiently because they run directly on the hardware, meaning there’s very little overhead to performing computation. This can make a huge difference when doing lots of graphical work or anything that is computationally expensive. While hardware-targeting makes applications less portable, it allows them to really take advantage of the processors they run on, giving you the high resolution and fluid graphics you see in native games and media apps today. Apple’s graphics library Metal is a great example of this, being designed specifically for the GPUs in Apple’s products to achieve maximum performance.

User Experience

There’s usually a clear difference in appearance and quality between native and web-based apps, as web apps lack the responsiveness and familiar UI elements of a native app. While web apps can certainly accomplish a lot, the extra layer of separation brought by running in a browser or web view rather than natively means the app can’t respond as quickly to things like touch events. This accounts for the slight lag you experience when interacting with the UI of web-based mobile apps, which amounts to a less-than-stellar user experience. Also, users may not pick up on custom UI controls from the web when they are used to a consistent experience from native apps on their platform, which can lead to usability problems. If the user feels like they’re swimming upstream to use your app, they probably won’t keep at it for long.

Offline Functionality200 (1)

One clear limitation of web apps is the necessity to download them over the internet each time they are loaded. Since native apps are installed once and can store tons information on the device, they can provide all kinds of functionality without an internet connection. iOS apps can even preemptively load data before the user opens the app through silent push notifications that “wake up” the app to retrieve new data.

Even with an internet connection, the first few seconds of a web app experience often consist of spinners and sluggish stylesheets causing elements on the page to jump around as it loads. This requires a measure of patience from your user, which might be too much to ask from some users especially after navigating through a few pages. With user attention spans getting shorter and shorter, you need to capitalize on every second they spend in your app, creating value for them and not putting them on hold to download and render bloated web pages.

"We're getting really close to ready" – the false dream of hybrid apps pic.twitter.com/xyvXT3qNao

— Bill Morein (@wmorein) May 5, 2015

In short, while native certainly isn’t the right choice for everyone, there are a quite a few cases where it’s necessary or at least beneficial. It’s important to consider these implications not only for the current state of your product but also for it’s future, as it would be unfortunate to commit to a web-based platform only to have to rebuild later when you need native-only features. While historically writing native apps have meant coding for one platform at a time, there have been big developments in native, cross-platform solutions such as Xamarin, now backed by Microsoft, and React Native, brought to you by Facebook. These solutions, while still growing, hope to deliver the fully native experience without limiting you to a single platform which can greatly reduce the cost of certain projects.


Mar
25

Mobile Madness – Round 2 (People and Tools)

  • Posted By : Jennifer Bennett/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Coding

The results are in and the winners from yesterday are: Xcode, Android Studio, Jenkins, and AWS. Here is your updated Bracket.

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We are entering the second round of Mobile Madness 2016. The pairings are getting a bit more interesting as we move towards the finals. Welcome to the sweet 16!

Steve Ballmer vs Steve Jobs

We love so much about both of the tech giants, but only one can win today in the battle of the Steves. Who’s it going to be?

3014155-poster-1920-comparing-apples-and-microsofts

Steve Jobs brought us so many things, and in many ways LunarLincoln wouldn’t exist without the App Store. Forgetting that Jobs was famously against having an App Store, we still owe him credit for so many incredible inventions. Plus, he was a pretty inspirational guy:

[responsive_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc”]

And then we have Steve Ballmer. The man. The legend. I mean, if you can get Bill Gates to dance on stage to celebrate the Windows 95 launch, what can’t you do?

[responsive_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKVJoBGq-7g”]

So which Steve will take home today’s prize? Answer the twitter poll here

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Jony Ive vs Felix Krause

Up next we’ve got industrial design genius Jony Ive vs newcomer and epic craftsman Felix Krause.


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Jony Ive has brought us so many beautiful pieces of hardware over the years and has been instrumental in the Apple we all know and love today. He also inspired one of our favorite parody videos about the new Macbook One:

[responsive_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZ8ek-6ccc”]

Felix Krause on the other hand has saved us countless hours over the past few months with his amazing suite of Fastlane tools. We used to true through mundane development tasks, but now we can automate all the things. Here he is speaking about Fastlane:

[responsive_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAnHxP5dnuc”]

So who would get your vote? Chamfered edges or developer automation made simple? Answer the twitter poll here

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Xcode vs Android Studio

And here we have a classic showdown. The most popular IDE for iOS vs the most popular IDE for Android. If you’re a mobile developer, odds are you spend almost all of your time working in one or both of these programs. They can be your best friend or your worst enemy.


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Android_Studio_icon.svg


If you’re a mobile developer, you probably have very strong opinions about each of these. Xcode, like most things Apple, tries to make things simple, but as developers we often play the role of power user. We love storyboards, playgrounds, and the speed of deploying a new app to the simulator. On the flip side, using Xcode always feels like you’re one step away from disaster, and frequent crashes and restarts will wear on you after a while. This erratic behavior has even lead some developers to think Xcode is a sentient being. Android Studio provides a great environment to craft your Android masterpieces. Google’s constantly putting out beta versions of new releases so developers have more tools at their disposal as fast as possible. While Android Studio lacks some features like a robust visual layout editor and proper Android simulation (not emulation, which is what Google currently offers, and is terrible), it makes up for it with its great refactoring tools and the ability to create gorgeous layouts with simple XML (I dare you to edit your XIBs in XML!). Plus, Android Studio is an extension of IntelliJ which has tons of great support from its developers and the community. You may use and love both programs, but only one can reign supreme!

If you’re a mobile developer, where would you rather spend your time? Answer the twitter poll here

 

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Jenkins vs AWS


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aws_logo

In our final match of the day we’ve got Jenkins vs AWS.

Though not directly related, both Jenkins and AWS provide invaluable services to developers. Jenkins provides a simple yet extensive interface for continuous integration which keeps dev shops constantly aware that their tests need to be updated (because a failing test clearly means the test is wrong, not the app). Amazon Web Services is perhaps the leading cloud hosting platform and their fame is nothing short of awesome. Developers can deploy directly to their Elastic Beanstalk instances with a single command and integrating your apps with their hosted storage (S3) and database options (RDS, DynamoDB, etc.) is well documented and incredibly useful. It’s hard not to love both of these services for their essential contributions to shops big and small, but you can only vote for one!

Answer the twitter poll here


Mar
21

Mobile Madness – The Brains

  • Posted By : Jennifer Bennett/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Coding

We are going to kick off Mobile Madness 2016 with our first bracket of tech luminaries. We are going to cover some heavy hitters like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as well as some industry innovators like Ray Wenderlich and Felix Krause.

First up: CEOs who inherited empires

Steve Ballmer vs Tim Cook

Ballmer_Cook

In one corner we have Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. Steve is known for his…passion for software as well as his ownership of the LA Clippers.

[responsive_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8M6S8EKbnU”]

In the other corner we have Tim Cook, current CEO of Apple and …fan of Pharell’s Happy

timcook

Apparently we’re not the first to make the comparison:

NYTimes: Why Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer
Forbes: Will Tim Cook be the next Steve Ballmer?
Yahoo: Is Tim Cook the new Steve Ballmer?

However we are the first to pit them head to head. Who will be victorious? Answer the twitter poll here

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Second Bracket: Famous Founders

Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are each half of wonder duos that made modern personal computing what it is today. PC versus Mac. Generous genius versus design-centric demigod?

steve-jobs-vs-bill-gates-mac-vs-pc

Which world do you back? Answer the twitter poll here

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Third Bracket: Mobile CDOs

Jony Ive vs Matias Duarte

The men behind modern UI patterns and design. Jony Ivs has led the Apple Design-Revolution. While Matias Duarte has spearheaded Material Design – Google’s attempt to fold the diverse android platform under one unified design theory.


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Matias

Has Jony Ive lost his magic “intimate” touch with the recent launch cycles? Will Google ever solve their massive design/product fragmentation issues? Who is the better design-guru? Answer the twitter poll here

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Fourth Bracket: Tools and Teaching

Felix Krause and Ray Wenderlich

We snuck these guys in here as innovators each in their own way. Felix Krause is the brain behind the recent Fastlane Tools, which we recently sang the praises of at a local Cocoaheads meeting. Ray Wenderlich is the king of iOS tutorials and guides.


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ray-wenderlich-tutorial-videos

 

Both are contributing to the developer experience without being the head of some mega-corp. (But who is doing it better?) Answer the twitter poll here

 

 


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