Five of the Best Places to Find a Freelance Android Mobile App Developer

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The industry for freelance Android mobile app developer is vast. It is hard to identify the right resources that can convert your idea into a speedy, user-friendly app. Here are five of the best places to find a freelance mobile developer.

1. Gun.io

Gun.io helps organizations expand their existing teams in a short period. On average, it can connect you with a reliable developer within 48 hours. The platform sources, vets, and compares the credentials and skills of numerous applicants for your team. It is an ideal platform for North American companies because 90% of its freelance community lives in the U.S. This means that you don’t have to worry about the common time zone issues associated with other platforms. You may have to pay somewhere around $75 and $150 per hour to an Android developer on Gun.io.

2. Hired

Hired is a job marketplace where employers compete fiercely to hire mobile developers. Due to the strict vetting process of the platform, only the top 5% freelancers managed to get hired. The platform saves a great amount of time for companies. It matches the skills and talent of developers with the job description. You can find several senior mobile developers with sufficient experience and expertise. Additionally, it provides freelancers for project-based, contractual, and full-time work. Overall, hiring is quite efficient and saves close to 50 hours for a job role. Additionally, you get to work with professionals who are well-versed in meeting deadlines.

3. Toptal

Toptal stands for Top Talent, and it allows only the top 3% of aspirants, who apply as freelancers, to join the platform. If you need the best developers, you can reach out to a pool of professionals who can deliver premium-quality work. Usually, Toptal is known to provide value for money—at times, you get more than what you paid for. There are two fronts for which Toptal has received positive feedback. Firstly, the platform is highly transparent, whether it is the fees or any other aspect of the platform. Secondly, it stands out due to its exemplary customer-oriented model. For example, a Toptal representative is always on the lookout to track the progress of your app. For part-time app developers, you need to pay $1000-$1500 per week while mobile app developers might ask for $2000-3000 per week.

4. Fiverr Pro

Fiverr is a well-known platform for developers looking for freelance work. It connects vetted software engineers with companies. Freelance Android mobile developers with the topmost ratings are given the ‘Pro’ status. This means that only 1% of candidates go on to achieve Pro status. Typically, employers post jobs worth $1,400 or more on this platform.

5. X-Team

On X-Team, you can find both Android and iPhone application developers for your projects. It screens programmers based on coding quality and performance, especially how fast they execute projects. Also, it evaluates if these professionals can tackle a wide variety of problems. This way, you can use the platform to form a talented and agile team. Moreover, with developers available for eight different time zones, the platform can serve organizations all over the world.

How to Boost User Acquisition and Retention for Your Mobile App

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In 2018, only 0.01% of all released apps were financially successful. Mobile apps don’t get popular based on their performance and user experience alone. You need a strong marketing plan to join the elite list of successful app developers. Here is how you can increase user acquisition and retention for your mobile app.

1. Optimize App Store

App Store optimization is all about updating your app keywords, icon, title, description, preview videos, and screenshots so they always appear fresh and continue to attract new users. For instance, you can use the holiday season to your advantage, such as adding a new discount in the Christmas season.

2. Invest in Paid Advertising

With paid ads, you can increase your reach to a large audience while at the same time; you can build extra touchpoints to connect with the existing user base.

  • Create multiple CTAs and ads. Pay attention to users across different funnel stages to make them download and purchase your app.
  • Leverage audience targeting and utilize interests, demographics, and behaviors to design personalized ads. However, avoid going too specific and target at least an audience of 100K.
  • Focus on designing a series of landing pages for your mobile app. Include the features and a meaty value proposition for conversions.

3. Focus on Reviews and Ratings

A significant chunk of users assesses the reviews of an app to decide whether it is worth downloading. Reviews show users what they are missing out, encouraging them to download the app. Therefore, it is important to get as many positive reviews and ratings as you can to increase your user acquisition. Also, add a feedback section so users can contribute and let you know about their opinions. Here are some tricks to get positive reviews.

  • Use push notifications to ask for feedback.
  • Incentivize positive reviews.
  • Share your app on multiple review platforms.

4. Develop a Website

Build a website that serves as the guide for your mobile app. Post videos showing the importance of your app and demonstrate how it works. Furthermore, you can take advantage of tools like smart banners to connect your site to the app store and upload screenshots. Taking your website traffic to your mobile is a productive method to boost native app users. An effective website is also an excellent channel for brand awareness.

5. Formulate an Incentivization Program

You should provide your users with incentives to increase retention. This is done via mobile-specific rewards, special offers, coupons, and specialized content access. Usually, the nature of the app dictates your incentivization model. For instance, if your app supports in-app purchasing, you can implement time-sensitive discounts. On the contrary, freemium apps can benefit their users and boost retention by offering usage-based rewards. For example, take a look at the Starbucks App. Users are rewarded with loyalty points every time they buy a cup of coffee.

6. Integrate Push Notifications

Push notifications can increase user retention from 56% to 180% improvement. Users who approve of them are known to have a higher engagement rate with apps. This strategy is used for essential and particular functions. With the right implementation, you can ensure greater app usage by utilizing behavior data and preferences with targeted messaging on your push notifications. If your app offers extremely specific use and is unlikely to be used daily, you can compel users to return with push notifications via a promotion or discount on a service or product.

Consider These 4 Things Before Using an Offshore Team for Mobile App Development

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The landscape of mobile applications and the cost of apps are growing at an astronomic rate. This development has sparked the creation of an extensive list of mobile apps all around the world. Every company is looking to develop a mobile app to connect better with its customer base.

Many businesses rely on offshore teams to create an app. The biggest reason behind the use of an offshore mobile development team is a steep reduction in the cost of an app. Although offshore software developers can turn out to be cost-effective, it is important to remain cautious of the pitfalls too.

1. Talent

One of the most common risks with offshore mobile app development is the uncertainty with talent levels. At times, you do get in touch with a coding genius, but in other cases, the developer might not turn out to be a klutz. Therefore, it is tricky to determine the talent of a mobile app developer residing in another country.

You may even come across a developer who recently went to a coding boot camp. Online learning is an excellent source of knowledge, but an app developer is not worth hiring if they lack sufficient experience in the field.

2. Schedules

The difference in time zones might occur as a minor hiccup in the beginning, but it can affect the project deadline in the long run. An overlap of work hours between offshore and onshore teams can range from two to four hours.

When offshore developers fail to contact with the onshore team, it does not bode well for the project. All teams require the opportunity to get to know each other and ask relevant questions. If schedules are not aligned properly, the focus is lost and teams stray towards bad communication.

3. Poor Communication

When offshore developers cannot communicate effectively online or on the phone due to linguistic barriers, it can severely diminish the chances of your app’s success. Make sure that, before you hire any offshore mobile app developers, you have a lot of conversations with them on different topics over the email, phone, and direct messaging.

4. Control

Frustrations are likely to run amok when you work with offshore mobile developers. It is hard to bring the customer and the offshore team on the same page. Deadlines, demands, and expectations are often set incorrectly. The onshore team might identify an issue with an offshore developer, but the offshore team may have reservations against such decisions. As a result, a developer might succeed in staying on the project even if the project owner is against them.

Moreover, legal action is a leading challenge. Laws and regulations might work differently in the country of your offshore developers when compared to the laws of your country. Therefore, in case of legal action, you can be at a disadvantage. Hence, certain risks are inherent offshore mobile developers who live in a separate jurisdiction.

Final Thoughts

Hiring offshore mobile developers is not as easy as some people think it is. There are many factors that you need to take into consideration. Although there are some triumphant cases too, they are few and far between. Therefore, it is recommended to have your app designed via a US-based development team. As such, you can send us a message to develop the next big app.

What Are the Best Practices for Enterprise Mobile App Development?

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Enterprise mobile app development ranks as one of the most competitive spaces around the world. The increase of tablet and smartphone penetration has led businesses to recognize mobile apps as a powerful channel for marketing. Numerous apps are released in the app store daily as companies compete to create faster, lighter, and more intuitive mobile applications. Here are some of the best enterprise mobile app development practices worth mentioning.

Focus on User Experience

User experience is the most crucial factor to consider, whether you want to create an app for your employees or customers. Due to the different mobility technologies, screen sizes, OS, and hardware restrictions, building and maintaining high-quality user experience can be a tough nut to crack. By implementing the best UX design practices, you can ensure that your app is more engaging, fun, and interactive than your competitor’s. For instance, a user might have two free hands in a restaurant, but they might be clutching a pole in public transit. Making sure your apps have a user-friendly interface in such circumstances is the job of your UX experts. By integrating AR/VR, you can enjoy even more benefits.

Align the App with Business Strategy

Having a solid mobile app development strategy is not good enough to boost the online presence of your organization. You have to keep your business objectives in mind. Entrepreneurs need to make sure that their app aligns with the short-term and long-term goals of their organization. This also includes assessing the strengths of your competitors and your current position in the market. Mobile app developers should receive information on these areas and design an app that ticks all the boxes of their organizational business strategy.

Consider App Sizes

You have to ensure that the size of your app is optimized. It should not be too large and should not take a lot of space on the device of your user. If your employees use several apps at once, it is important to stop them from eating all of the memory of their mobiles via an app. You can do this by providing the necessary functions only.

Make Use of Sensors and Form Factor

Most modern devices come with 3G/4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, camera, and NFC sensors. Therefore, it is best to include these connectivity options in your enterprise mobile app development. Sensors can help with optimizing the app performance. This way, you can improve the efficiency of your features.

Apply Iterative Design

It should come as no surprise that mobile app developers prefer an agile development process. This is a major advantage in enterprise mobile development as it empowers the management to review the user feedback and update the app continuously in a short period. Rather than rolling out bulkier changes in a single deployment, you can improve your app to fulfill the requirements of users without sacrificing performance and speed.

Secure the App

An enterprise mobile app will store and process sensitive data, be it the personally-identifiable information of all employees or the company’s financial records. Encourage users to use security features like authentication, encryption, and handling of their private information to protect themselves.

Final Thoughts

These days, companies are heavily reliant on enterprise mobile apps. These apps streamline and automate processes, simplify workloads, and improve communication seamlessly. Send us a message to create an enterprise mobile app for your organization to boost your productivity in a short period.

Where to Find the Early Adopters for Your MVP?

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So you’ve recently designed an MVP, but what’s the next step? What should you do next? Now is the time to look for early adopters or your first groups of loyal users. However, most users don’t embrace innovations easily. Early adopters, also known as lighthouse customers, only make up 13% of the total user base. They offer valuable feedback that helps entrepreneurs refine and improve their apps in various aspects. Here are a few ideas on where to find the early adopters for your MVP.

1. Landing Pages

People who visit your webpage or connect with you through another online channel are often directed to your landing page. You can leverage this marketing strategy to explain the features of your products and compel your target audience to sign up. This way, you can use them to test your MVP.

Traditionally, landing pages get a bad rap. In many cases, marketers merely utilize them as email capture pages. On the contrary, when appropriately designed, they carry the potential to test your MVP thoroughly. For example, you can use them to find out which of your features are more popular between the two and how do your users view your pricing plans.

Kate Rutter, the Co-Founder of Luxr, believes that landing pages are an excellent means to “sell first, build later.” Although there are many promising analytics tools, Google Analytics is a smart choice. Use this tool to collect the visitor metrics of your landing pages.

Afterward, you can perform A/B tests to monitor the changes in your product. Observe how users react to your product specifics, such as when you add a specific feature.

2. Fundraising

Not many people are aware that Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and other crowdfunding websites are terrific platforms to attract prospective customers to your MVP. Many users determine the market response of an MVP by measuring how much funds did the company raise.

Pro-tip: Successful fundraising campaigns often involve rewarding people with incentives.

3. Explainer Videos

The correct use of text and images work wonders, but modern-day digital consumption is highly biased towards videos. According to HubSpot, 81% of companies use videos for marketing. Seek inspiration from the cloud storage giant Dropbox. Dropbox generated a lot of buzz when it sold its MVP via an explainer video. The 3-minute video demonstrated the functionality of Dropbox with easy-to-understand content. As a result, it spread across 70,000 viewers overnight. What made Dropbox’s MVP standout from the rest was that its video was more of a step-by-step guide than a marketing gimmick. As a result, user engagement soared.

4. Blogs

Blogs are one of the most popular tools to validate ideas of your MVP. You can flesh out your ideas and earn support from a community of readers and followers. This participation can help you gain further momentum and obtain customer feedback on your MVP development.

5. Digital Prototypes

Today, you can design prototypes, mockups, and wireframes on the web to showcase your MVP’s intended functionality. Make a dummy app and share it on your digital marketing channels. This tactic can allow your target audience to know what your MVP is all about.

Final Thoughts

The process of building an MVP is an intensive one due to its iterative nature, and it requires a great deal of energy and time. Therefore, it is essential to avoid getting bogged down because of irrelevant details and maintain your attention to create a high-quality MVP. Once you develop it, the methods mentioned above can allow you to acquire your first adopters.

What Will Make the Users Happy? Five Key Elements of Great UX Design

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As a mobile app developer, your goal, like everybody else, is to create the best app without spending too much of your time, effort, and money. The same goes for users who expect their apps to be responsive, quick, and efficient.

Thanks to the free market, competition has soared. The increasingly cutthroat market is unforgiving to companies that churn out boring and shoddy apps. To keep your head above the water, you need to pass the bare minimum requirements. One of these is having a highly responsive UX or user interface.

An intuitive UX is the backbone of any app. It focuses on structuring an app’s components and elements appropriately to enhance the user flow. If your app doesn’t prioritize the end-user experience, it won’t last for long.

The problem is that user needs and expectations have drastically changed during the past decade. The need of the hour is for app designers to anticipate these changes to stay ahead of the curve. Let’s cover the five basic elements that make up great UX design.

1. Simplify the User Journey

Users engage withmobile apps with a specific goal in mind, which they want to achieve in the shortest time possible. Apps that have a good UX simplify a user’s journey by saving their time.

Here’s the rule of thumb: if it can be simplified, then it should. The idea is to reduce the number of steps users must take to perform their intended action.

Apps with a good UX do this by presenting information in a clutter-free dashboard that provides a smooth navigational flow. Some of the key things to keep in mind include:

  • Linear design: Linear design gives users an idea about the time it will take to complete their task. It gives users the ability to complete one action at a time, which is important for consistency.
  • Progressive disclosure: This strategy manages the complexity of user information by only showing the vital pieces of information to users when they need it. The idea is to reduce the overflow of information on their screens.
  • Anticipatory design: This fairly new UX pattern seeks to create a delightful user experience by eliminating needless choices and responding to user needs one step before they express those needs.
  • Visually-rich content: Visually-rich content can captivate users, simplify navigation, and inspire users to explore further.

2. Organize Content

Try to organize the content so that it appeals to users. Your goal should be to ensure that nothing gets in the way of the user’s exposure to your app’s content. This means eliminating unnecessary distractions and any visual clutter, shining the spotlight on the essence of the message you want to convey. Visual cues such as contrasting colors for CTA links are good at guiding users from point A to point B.

Try to eliminate irrelevant information that only seems to get in the way. This allows users to effortlessly pick up on useful information.

3. Personalize the App

Personalizing an app can be a time-consuming task that is also overwhelming, but one that ultimately pays off. Recent trends are shifting from generic experiences to personalized experiences because the latter save time and get more user attention. Researchers from McKinsey found that businesses that deliver personalized experiences can boost their sales by more than 10%.

Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning make this a walk in the park. Most companies do this by asking their customers to take style quizzes so they can obtain more information about their lifestyle and preferences.

4. Biometric Authentication

Many mobile apps are adopting biometric authentication because it minimizes the risk of getting hacked and makes it convenient for users to verify their identity. Moreover, biometric technology is becoming increasingly available because devices can recognize a person’s identity based on particular characteristics.

Instead of having a laundry list of passwords for different apps, biometrics allows users to verify their identity with fingerprints and even voice or facial recognition.

5. Minimize Data Input

Another important area of app UX is to minimize the amount of user input required. Most users have an attention span of less than 8 seconds, which leaves a very short window for designers. The more data a person must enter into an app, the more likely they are to abandon the app and move on.

It’s no big deal to fill out a form with three or four fields on a desktop, but expecting the same on a mobile app turns users away. Most apps do this by giving users the option to use one of their existing accounts (such as a Google, Twitter, or Facebook account) instead of signing up from scratch. The only thing users now must do is to tap on authorize access for a new registration.

Do keep in mind that some users are a little skeptical about linking their accounts and would rather take the time to fill out the form.

Are you ready to develop your app? We offer UX/UI design and development services with expertise in native apps for Android and iOS. Reach out to us on our website here!

How to Achieve a Good Product-Market Fit

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So you think you’ve got an idea for an enterprise app that addresses your client’s pain points? But have you determined how bad the problem is for clients to buy your product?  Is it just a mild inconvenience or something that triggers a fit of rage?

To ensure your enterprise app survives and thrives in the marketplace, you need to find the right product-market fit.

Is there a demand for the enterprise app?

When it comes to consumer apps, or even low-cost, low-effort projects like the Flappy Bird, your risks are inherently low. You can go back to the drawing board and start over. There’s an element of flexibility for you and your team.

When enterprise apps fail, however, you can’t mitigate your losses in a jiffy. Starting over requires another round of highly dilutive venture capital, more research, and lots of surveys.  Many companies fail because they haven’t achieved a good product-market fit before getting into app development.

Enterprises move at a snail’s pace, and they hardly, if ever, change their course. This is because every tiny change involves lots of hours and money spent not only on the product, but integrating it into their software ecosystem and training personnel. Getting enterprises to adopt your app is a fool’s errand, unless, they’re actively searching for a solution.

Finding the Right Product-Market Fit

Before you pour manpower, time, and money into your new enterprise app, you have to determine whether you have a market for it. The last thing you want to do is build an appthat nobody asked for.

Although there is very little consensus on how to measure the product-market fit for enterprise apps, experts posit the following three questions as a baseline to help you with research:

  1. What is the problem the client faces?
    2. Is the problem large enough for people to search for a solution?
    3. Does the proposed app solve this problem?

If the answer to all these questions is ‘yes,’ you can then start a more thorough, in-depth research.

A good way to start would be to conduct surveys. To get a measure of the product-market fit, you want to find out the percentage of users who would be disappointed if they could no longer use your product. This famous method, hypothesized by Sean Ellis, states that the ideal product-market fit is when you have at least 40% of disappointed users if they could no longer use your product.

Below is a sample of what a product-market survey should look like.

 

If you’re a new business and don’t have a long list of clients, it can be a bit difficult to get responses to surveys. But even if some people respond with ‘very disappointed’ when they could no longer use your product, you’re getting somewhere.

This is when you should double down and learn everything there is to know about the people who think your product is this useful.

Other questions in your survey should help you understand why they consider your product to be a must-have, the key benefit they will receive from your app, and more. This information can help you improveyour app to make it more useful to the end-user.

Don’t Make These Mistakes When Establishing a Clear Product-Market Fit

There are many horror stories of enterprise apps failing despite extensive user surveys. Sometimes, what the client says isn’t a good indication of whether they are prepared to spend on the app when it is finally released.

Here are a few of the most common mistakes you should try to avoid when before measuring the app’s product-market fit.

1. You haven’t spent enough time talking to the user.

Product owners and internal stakeholders are not the people you should be surveying. Talk to the end-user who will be using the app.

2. The need is there, but it’s not overwhelming enough.

Companies and clients have other priorities that need solving. Your solution is probably too niche. In this case, move on to the next big problem and start over.

3. Your enterprise app looks identical to what is already out there in the market.

If this is the case, your problem just got worse – you’ve got competition. Consider undercutting it to attract new buyers, and you’ve still got a chance here.

Once you’ve understood what it is that you’re selling and who you’re selling to, you’re good to go.

If you’ve got ideas for enterprise apps, NS804 has got the right team to help you develop it. Get in touch with us today to learn more.