1.6 Tips For Starting Your First Mobile App

Is your mobile app a good idea? Will it make money? Will it serve a purpose? Does it already exist in the marketplace? These are all legitimate questions to ask before you even attempt to make your mobile app. Chances are, someone has already thought of your mobile app idea, but that's not a good enough reason to lose interest. Just because a mobile app exists in the marketplace doesn't mean that you can't deploy one that's better and faster and monetize it as well. Do your research and search through the Apple App Store, Google Play, and other mobile app repositories to understand what is out there and whether there is possibly an underserved market. Ultimately, don't lose sight of these important questions, even though none of them matter until you have written, completed, and launched your first mobile app. The experience you will gain along the way is more important at this point.

It is not enough to come up with a great idea for a mobile app. The best way to start building and coding your mobile app is to take a systematic approach and start completely from scratch. As a matter of fact, it is often a good idea to make a mobile app by disregarding programming altogether. You actually won't even need a computer at this point. To do this, many mobile app developers use storyboarding and wireframing to visualize what their app is going to look like and what it's going to do, the same way it's done in the movie industry.

For mobile apps, a storyboard is a graphic manager of images shown in sequence to help you visualize what your app will eventually look like and ultimately how it will work. Wireframing is basically a screen schematic or blueprint that represents the skeletal framework of a mobile app. Wireframes are used to assemble mobile app elements and screens to best accomplish a particular task. The framework laid out in the wireframe eventually becomes the mobile app's user interface. A user interface, often called a graphical user interface (GUI), is the visual system of computer screen designs that let a user interact with your mobile app. It is often said that a user interface is like a joke—if you have to explain it, it's not that good.

With all of the computer-generated imagery (CGI) and special effects in movies, it's easy to imagine that all of the content in movies was born from computers. It wasn't. As a matter of fact, movies and mobile app development share many things in common. A movie starts out as storyboards that are drawn by artists under the direction of the producer. Mobile apps start out in storyboards as well, but there is one big difference: movies are linear and move from one specific scene to another specific scene, whereas mobile apps have scenes that can go to many optional scenes depending on how the user interacts with the app. Movies tell a story the same way every time, whereas a mobile app's story can change every time it's used. With that in mind, it's time to get started.