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5 Things to Look For in a Mobile App Development Partner

Whether you think you have an incredible idea for a new mobile app or you want to develop one to expand your business and market reach, building a mobile application is a huge project to take on alone. From choosing which platforms to build for, to the many different stages of testing and quality assurance reviews, to  ensuring you’re building accessible and secure features, there is no shortage of complexity when it comes to mobile app development.

If you’re in the early stages of your mobile app development journey and need guidance on how to choose a partner that can help you build a successful app, look no further: We’ve put together a comprehensive checklist of the five most important traits you should look for when choosing a mobile app development company that will help bring your vision to life. 

1. Ensure your mobile app development team is Agile

What does being Agile have to do with building your mobile app? You might be surprised. Agile development creates multiple business benefits, including more project flexibility, higher quality products, and increased team morale. By design, Agile teams are smaller in size and cross-functional, which gives them the ability to work across product, QA, backend, and design teams to complete development phases faster.

Being Agile also increases transparency and improves communication, since developers must work with a myriad of tools to stay organized and keep projects on track. Agile teams with the right skills can also build entire mobile apps on their own, or easily integrate with your existing teams to develop the sections in which you need extra help. 

2. Choose a team that can work with you from end to end

You need to build a mobile app that is scalable, functional, fully-tested, and future-proofed. To do so, you’ll need to focus on more than just the development part of the process, meaning you’ll need a partner that can help you from start to finish. 

When selecting a mobile development partner, you’ll need to ensure they provide services including:

• Design thinking & MVP creation

• Software architecture design

• API development and continuous integration

• UI/UX design

• Automated and manual testing

• Accessibility & security

• Quality assurance

• Deployment across different platforms

3. Your mobile development partner should have established experience building across platforms

With so many moving parts throughout the development process, it’s key to choose a team that has years (or even decades) of experience under their belt to guide you easily. Veteran developers will be able to help you choose the best framework in which to build your app based on your goals and target audience. 

A great partner will help you pick between native iOS/Android and cross-platform approaches (like Flutter, React Native, Xamarin, and more). An experienced mobile app developer will also know how to develop for the ever-growing number of platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Android, Android TV/Fire TV, and Roku – and understand the intricate design guidelines for each of them. 

4. Select a partner that uses a security-first building approach

Over 53 million individuals were affected by data compromises in the first half of 2022 alone. Even apps as huge as Uber have been affected by hackers and breaches recently, making it clear that no company or app is safe from attacks. That’s why it’s critical to consider a development partner who takes a security-first approach when building your app, creating features that will protect the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of your enterprise data. This will reduce cyber threat risks and the fines, business disruptions, and loss of reputation that can result from an attack. This approach will also improve how your mobile app achieves compliance with commercial, contractual, and legal requirements, including with HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and others. 

Some key things to ask your potential mobile dev partner include:

• Do they have experience implementing accessibility features such as dynamic type, VoiceOver/TalkBack?

• Do they have experience automating unit tests?

• Do they have experience with automated UI testing using tools like XCUITest or Roboelectric?

• Do they have experience securely storing data using APIs such as Keychain Services and communicating with backends using HTTPS?

• Do they have experience implementing session handling?

5. Look for a partner who can manage the deployment process from start to finish

When creating a mobile app, it’s not only the development process you need to think about, but also the deployment process. Before deploying your app, your development team must be able to run several rounds of internal testing, beta testing, and production. This requires the ability to work with testing and deployment tools including Fastlane, Bitrise, Firebase App Distribution, AppCenter, TestFlight, Google Play Beta, App Store, Play Store, and more. 

You should also make sure you’re not choosing a partner who will disappear after deployment. A great development team will continue to help you scale and improve features even after the initial deployment finishes.

 

Need a great mobile app development partner? See how Gorilla Logic does mobile development in this case study.

And don’t just take our word for it: See why we were named a Top Mobile App Development Company by Digital.com.

Ready to be Unstoppable? Partner with Gorilla Logic, and you can be.

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