The most important and conceited aspect of any competition is that when you follow the buzz around, you will always follow the leaders responsible for the buzz. On the other hand, when you are creating something new to create a buzz, you force others to follow. So, staying ahead of the competitive curve means setting the trends and creating buzz around the latest trend.
Can your mobile app do justice to this principle? If not, you are just tailing every new trend coming to the market, and consequently, you cannot stay ahead of the curve. But how do you build a mobile app that can help you stay ahead of the competition easily? Many respected app developers in India have the uncanny habit of setting new trends simply by adhering to new technology standards.
Below, we will explain some of the proven ways a mobile app can stay ahead of the competitive curve with solid footprints.
Adhere to the Time-Honored Principles
Only some things in mobile app development can be reinvented, as certain principles and practices have stood the test over time. Many of this time-honored development and design principles and practices will help you experiment with new technologies and approaches. So, consider these principles and practices your closest alley. Let’s briefly discuss these principles and practices below.
- Evaluate the app idea against the audience, competitors, and market dynamics.
- Prepare an exhaustive project requirement document to cover every aspect of the app, starting from the idea, design, execution, testing, and deployment.
- Always start with well-articulated design steps such as wireframing, design mock-ups, and dynamic prototyping.
- Make an MVP plan with elementary features and value propositions, and have your further plan of updates open to feedback.
- Choose a hiring and engagement plan that suits your app project best based on your budget.
- Best upon whether you have chosen remote hiring or an in-house model, give extreme importance to project management.
- Always hire new resources following extensive research and best hiring practices.
- Adhere to the most advanced development methodologies such as Agile, Rapid App Development (RAD), etc.
- Give optimum importance to app testing for performance, security, and device-specific optimization.
Focus on Creating a Future-Ready Design
Another key principle that will always put your app ahead of the competitive curve is embracing a future-ready design instead of going for a run-of-the-mill design. Any mobile app’s user interface (UI) is the most crucial attribute in instantly engaging the user audience. Here you have the chance to create something equally attractive and helpful for the audience.
A future-ready UI design will always adhere to the time-tested principle of simplicity. How the users can access the features and the content of the app easily and how effortlessly they move around the app are the key considerations for the UI design. When you have completely ensured these principles, you can further augment the design with some experimental elements that open new ways to allow interactions without interfering with the core design flow.
Choose Features That are not Going to be Outdated Soon
Let’s explain this with an example. You have built a Chatbot for mobile customer support for your Fintech app, and it functions pretty well to address all common queries of the customers. Unfortunately, you are not just alone on this path. There are already multitudes of Fintech apps that are using mobile chatbots for customer support. So, how can you stay ahead of this competitive curve? Well, this will not be easy as you need to venture into cutting-edge technologies such as conversational AI powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and similar ones.
So, the app needs to incorporate something still on its way to becoming big and penetrating the app user experience. Let’s provide some of these era-defining technologies that can help any app stay ahead of the competitive curve in the future.
- Blockchain: This decentralized database technology is already shaping the present and future of many industries. Particularly, it has penetrated major Fintech apps but has still not made its way into the HealthTech, entertainment, eLearning, e-commerce, and other types of apps. So, you have an opportunity lurking there.
- Conversational AI: Yesterday’s rule-based chatbots that used to gurgle out answers to customer queries based upon preconceived decision trees are already becoming obsolete, and we have more advanced conversational AI here. Based upon continuously trained data models, these bot interfaces can continuously learn from user interactions and give replies in natural language. Can you incorporate this technology to give a complete futuristic makeover to your mobile customer support? If you can, you have an opportunity to stay ahead of the competitive curve.
- Data Visualization: Data visualization through reports and dashboards is key to the decision-making processes of enterprises, and hence all enterprise apps of the future will consider this irreplaceable for their reporting and management capabilities. This area needs a new focus by learning tools like PowerBI, Metabase, Apache Superset, Pentaho, and many others. Enterprise app developers can seriously benefit from them.
- Mixed Reality: Both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been there for quite some time, and there have been enough experiments with them in the mobile arena. But the latest trend is using them both for a more immersive experience where one reality surpasses the other in constant succession. This mixed reality is something that is going to hold the future for AR and VR experiments in mobile apps.
Summing It Up
Seasoned app developers India and industry experts have widely talked about everything we have mentioned and explained in this blog. But when it comes to figuring out a comprehensive roadmap for an app to stay ahead of the competitive curve, these principles, practices, and futuristic technologies need to be put into the right context of user benefits and monetization. Ultimately an app by serving its users to fetch revenue.
