How Mobile App Development Is Critical to Business Resilience

“There’s an app for that”. What was a marketing slogan for Apple’s App store in 2009 has now become universal 11 years later. Mobile applications have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. We use them to communicate with our friends, consume media, play video games, shop, and book transportation. The list is endless. This “app explosion,” as some people have taken to calling this trend, has virtually made having an app (or apps) essential for businesses to remain competitive. Consequently, investing in app development has become critical to business resilience.

Apps amidst disruptions

In order to be resilient, organizations must be able to adapt to business disruptions while ensuring continuous operations. For businesses to thrive, products need to be developed and shipped, sales need to continue and possibly increase, and customers need to be serviced even in the face of interruptions to daily business workflows. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted businesses on a massive scale. Companies that provide products and services either were required to close or allowed to operate in a limited capacity. Restaurants and bars were mandated to close as well. Work-from-home setups for employees were suddenly a necessity. These disruptions can severely affect a business.

A survey of small businesses in the US conducted by PNAS notes that only 38 percent of their owners think they would remain operational by the end of 2020 due to losses incurred during the pandemic. Apps tailored to a business’s needs may allow a business to survive major disruptions like these and avoid the dire forecasts of the survey.

A mobile application may provide an alternative to businesses that were disrupted by developments such as quarantines imposed to reduce infection. Online ordering and payment for goods and services can help  struggling businesses remain operational. Apps can even support businesses that did not close, like groceries or pharmacies, since customers have become wary to leave their homes.  Restaurants can benefit from online ordering and payment in the same way. A study by the data company Technomic reports that for the first quarter of 2020, restaurant orders from apps and websites amounted to 17 percent of total orders compared to the 5 percent reported in the previous quarter the year before.

A company may get by with using third-party apps to support their business, but having its own app development team allows a company to tailor it to its requirements and customer needs in a way that might not be feasible by partnering with a provider. Therefore, investing in app development may provide a better, albeit potentially more expensive solution.

App development phases

Having an idea is just the start, a lot of work goes into creating a mobile application. A company interested in having their own app will need to invest time and money into app development, regardless of whether the company does the actual development in-house, or outsources the work to a third-party developer. MLSDev, an app development agency provides these estimates for the time and cost of app development:

• Minimum app development cost is between $5,000 USD to $10,000 
• Median app development cost is $171,450 
• 80 percent of apps will take 3 months or more to develop

App development will take the initial idea for an app and create it for the ready downloading into smartphones and tablets of a business’ customers. 

The company’s app developer gathers all the requirements and performs the necessary analysis of the list of requirements for the app that is to be built. Market research is highly recommended to answer questions like the kind of services that the customers are looking for in that particular app, as well as user experience features that will make them keep coming back. 

A company will also have to decide what platform they want their app to run on. Going by market share, there are virtually only 2 platforms: iOS and Android.

Then, during the design stage, the company will then nail down how the user interface will look like. A more crucial decision will determine the strategy used in developing the app:  native or development using platform-specific development tools or hybrid which means development using cross-platform tools. 

Once the requirements and design have been set, coding and testing will be done.

The app will be uploaded to the digital distribution platforms, ready to be downloaded and used by customers.

The last step is maintaining the application to ensure that the app is always functioning properly. This step may require fixing software bugs and monitoring applications and user experience in real-time. 

App development and business resilience

Investing in app development may provide a mobile application that a business may lean on in hard times. Whether it is a method to complete business transactions with customers or an application that may aid an employee working remotely, a solid app can be the difference between operations halting completely and business thriving in trying times. Furthermore, an app may help a business find new revenue streams that can be used to supplement existing ones or replace them altogether. This can positively impact a business, and throw it away to sustain itself during a crisis.