App Development Stages: 6 Phases to Build Mobile Application

The mobile app market is booming. With system application revenues and in-app advertising revenues soaring to incredible heights, the market presents a one-of-a-kind business opportunity. Over the last two observations, the revenue is forecast to significantly increase in all segments. As part of the positive trend, the indicator reaches the maximum value for all 21 different segments at the end of the comparison period. Particularly noteworthy is the segment Games, which has the highest value of $249.9 billion.

While most businesses are not slow to catch this wave of the digital era, having an awesome idea is just the beginning. A well-established application development process is the key to creating a successful and profitable app. Without a well-established flow, the best ideas can go awry in a crowded marketplace.

This article will take you through the six key steps involved in the mobile app development process. Mastering these app development stages will equip you with the building blocks you need to not only join the market but thrive within it. Let’s examine the stages of app development that take a thought and turn it into a worthwhile and successful app.

What is Mobile App Development?

Mobile app development is the act of creating programs to run on mobile phones, as well as tablets. It is a complicated process that needs more than just coding. It’s a long process that turns an idea into a complete app in users’ hands. The app development process entails a wide range of activities, from market research, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, coding, testing, and deployment.

The benefits of mobile apps in 2025 are huge and obvious. The developers build the apps entirely for specific operating systems, like iOS or Android (native apps), or create apps that support multiple platforms (cross-platform or hybrid apps).

The Importance of the Application Development Life Cycle

A structured approach to app development stages is not only convenient, but success relies on it. The application development life cycle is a map that traces the entire process from beginning to after-launch support. Each segment takes a different benefit:

• Improved planning and clarity. The life cycle provides a clear-cut framework, with everyone from the developers to the testers on board having a clear concept of the project’s goals, schedule, and deliverables. This helps for smooth development.
• Improved project management. By breaking down the complex process of development into manageable stages, the life cycle improves the project’s management.
• Increased efficiency and reduced costs. A well-defined process eliminates rework and costly errors. By identifying and fixing potential problems early in the life cycle, development is minimized. Time and money are saved.
• Scalability and future development. A systematic app development process builds clean, well-documented code. This makes it much simpler to improve the app with new features.

Your vision deserves a development partner who is as passionate about your success as you are. Contact us today for a free consultation, and let’s start the journey of building your app together.

6 App Development Phases

While the specifics will vary depending on the complexity of the project, the general framework of mobile app development is typically organized into discrete stages. Each stage is based on the last.

Stage 1: Strategy and Discovery

The foundation of any trending mobile application is a good strategy. The initial step is an essential process in the mobile app lifecycle, transforming a raw idea into a concrete project. It’s all about defining the core mission of the app and ensuring that it aligns with broader business objectives.

During this stage, your team will:

• Define the target audience. Create in-depth user personas to determine who is going to be using the app, what their wants and needs are. 
• Conduct competitive analysis. Research currently available apps within your space. Identify their strengths and weaknesses, and the holes in the market that your app can fill.
• Define goals and objectives. Clearly declare what the app will accomplish.
• Select the platform. Decide whether to launch on iOS, Android, or both. This will influence your technology stack, development duration, and expense.

There are no more important stages of application development than this one. Why? It defines all your further actions and decisions.

Stage 2: Analysis and Planning

With a solid plan in place, the app concept becomes a solid project plan. This step is purely about determining the app’s functionality and creating a comprehensive development plan.

First, you will create use cases and define the functional requirements of the app. Here is where you detail all the features and how people will be using them. Once the requirements are defined, you create a product roadmap. That is the breakdown of the project into viable milestones.

If you’re working on limited schedules or budgets, this is where you can define a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP contains only the essential features to solve a core issue for your initial users.

Planning means securing the right people too. iOS vs Android development both require different stacks of technology (e.g., Swift/Objective-C for iOS, Kotlin/Java for Android). You will need to acquire developers with the exact skills you want for your desired platforms. 

Finally, you have to choose a popular and memorable name for your app. Carefully go through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store to ensure your desired name is not taken.

We also recommend you read our article Custom Software Development Budget: What Shapes It Cost?

Stage 3: UI/UX Design

Poor user experience is a top reason that apps are abandoned. Over 75% of users will delete an app within a week if they find it difficult or worthless. So, this design phase is a multi-step process:

Information Architecture & Workflows

This is the blueprint for the app’s structure. For complex apps with many user roles (e.g., admins, normal users), workflow diagrams are sketched to map out each possible interaction and offer a sensible user path.

Wireframes

Wireframes are low-fidelity digital plans of the app. Think of them as the skeleton. They’re only focused on structure, layout, and function, and exclude color, graphics, or branding. It’s vital to create wireframes for many device sizes (e.g., iPhone, iPad, various Android devices) to build a consistent and optimized experience everywhere.

Style Guide

A style guide or design system is a governing document that defines the visual identity of the app. It ensures brand consistency and facilitates the development process by many orders of magnitude. The style guide dictates:

• Color palette;
• Typography (fonts, font sizes, line spacing);
• How buttons, icons, and menus need to be designed;
• How the visual design of the app represents the company brand.

Adherence to platform-specific style guides, such as Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS and Google’s Material Design for Android, is also a crucial step in this process.

Mockups

Mockups are high-fidelity designs that bring the visual identity of the app to life. They are created from the wireframes by implementing the color schemes, typography, and brand elements defined in the style guide. Created in programs like Adobe Photoshop or Sketch, mockups are static representations of what the finished app will look like. 

Prototypes

Prototypes turn static mockups into working simulations of the finished app. With solid tools like Figma, InVision, or Adobe XD, designers link screens in a manner that simulates real user flows and interactions. Prototypes are invaluable for user testing and obtaining stakeholder feedback before even writing code.

This early testing is a gigantic money-saver. Industry figures repeatedly show that it is 100 times cheaper to fix a design error or bug during the design process than fixing it after the app is already developed and rolled out.

Stage 4: App Development

Before you begin writing your codes, make sure you’ve done this:

• Specify the product backlog
• Select a technology stack
• Set application’s building goals

A standard mobile application project consists of three major components:

• Back-end/server technology
• API(s)
• Mobile app front-end

Let’s discuss them separately.

Back-End/Server Technology

The back-end/server technology section contains the database and server-side components required for a mobile application’s features. If you’re using a legacy back-end framework, you may need to make some changes to accommodate the required mobile features.

Now, for the backend, one can use practically any web programming language and cloud storage. For designing mobile applications, you must select a tech framework that is compatible with any mobile operating system platform. To make iOS apps, you can make use of Objective-C as the framework, or better still, consider using Swift. While the most prevalent programming language used to construct Android applications is Java, another efficient one that may be considered is Kotlin.

We also recommend you read our article All You Need To Know About Modernizing Legacy Software.

API

API, an acronym for Application Programming Interface is a way an application communicates with a back-end server or cloud storage. To develop a mobile application, there are a variety of codes and approaches to choose from. The key is to select the technology platform that is most appropriate for your application.

Mobile App Front-End

Applications front-end are the graphical parts of software that users interact with. It’s normally on the device, or at the very least, the app’s icon is pinned to the device’s applications directory or displayed on the home screen. If you want to create a cross-platform mobile app, choose Flutter.

Every development stage is sent over to the software testing unit for review and approval.

Stage 5: Testing

Quality assurance (QA) is a crucial element of the mobile app development stages since it ensures the application’s stability, performance, and security. To confirm that your program has been completely assessed, you must write test cases that cover every area of checking the developed application.

Test cases, like use cases, help to develop and test smartphone apps. Test samples are used to assess software quality by executing the testing process, monitoring repairs, and documenting test results. Involving the quality management team during the development and setup is an excellent practice.

To get a great result, your application should pass through the different types of QA testing.

User Experience Evaluation

The actual result has no alternative but to mirror the user experience specified by the application development team, which is a significant move in smartphone application testing. The application’s visual effects, function, and interactivity form a first impression on the end-user.

User adoption is significantly influenced by whether or not your software adheres to the original design ideas.

Functionality Evaluation

A well-developed application works efficiently to be successful. It is tough to foresee the user journeys.

To encompass as many assessment scenarios as feasible, the program should be evaluated by as many users as possible. If two different users try to perform the same function but get different results, you may discover a problem that can come as a surprise. Two users may fill out the same form and end up submitting varied data that can bring about malfunctions.

The motive of operating tests is to verify that your application is working properly for clients. It is then divided into system tests and modular tests.

When creating mobile applications for iOS and Android, the function examination should involve a functionality comparison between the two application versions.

Performance Evaluation

To examine the operation of your app, you can try a variety of quantitative parameters:

• How does your program successfully respond to user requests?
• How fast does the program display load?
• Is the software causing a memory leak or a low battery?
• Is your software making the most of your network bandwidth?
• Is your program taking up more space than you think?

Even if your program meets basic performance criteria, check the utilization of your program, APIs, and servers by simulating the maximum number of concurrent users. Even when used quickly, the program should withstand the load and function well.

Security Testing

Security is critical for mobile applications. An attack can be caused by any possible vulnerability. Many businesses hire outside firms to conduct rigorous security tests on their software. Quality and development teams take many actions to make your software secure.

If a user is required to log in, both the device and the server must keep track of such sessions. If a user’s session has been inactive for a long time, the system should terminate it (typically within 10 minutes for mobile applications). Make sure you’re using reliable storage if your app saves user credentials.

Data entry formats in mobile applications should be carefully examined to avoid the loss of confidential information.

Gadget and Platform Evaluation

Now and then, fresh mobile gadgets with modern equipment, firmware, and techniques are listed. Mobile OS is remodeled every few months.

HTC, Xiaomi, Samsung, and Motorola are some mobile gadget manufacturers adopting the Android program. They set up their own OS versions because Android operates as an open-source platform. These gadgets are in numerous scopes and structures.

As for Apple, it owns the hardware and the operating system, so there are not so many OS versions as in the case of Android. However, you can use a wide variety of iPhone and iPad (Apple iOS) devices.

Testing while developing a mobile application differs from testing while developing a web-based application. You can only examine web applications on Windows with the Chrome browser. However, to ensure that your mobile application operates smoothly for all users, you need to test it on multiple mobile machines or device simulators.

Testing is critical to the long-term performance of a program and is an integral part of the entire mobile application development process. Building a high-quality mobile application requires careful planning of mobile tests.

Stage 6: Deployment & Support

Before launching a successfully built application, it must be proposed and accepted by the application stores such as Google Play Store & App Store for Android & iOS, respectively. Before a newly built mobile application can be released for public use, a developer account for the previously mentioned application stores is required.

The metadata for an application’s publication in the store must include:

• Unique application title;
• Personalized application description;
• Category the app belongs;
• Keywords for easy search of the app;
• Icon for starting the program;
• Screenshots from the Application Store;

When an iOS application is uploaded to the Apple App Store, it goes through an evaluation phase that can take anywhere between a few days to several weeks, based on the value of the application and how well it adheres to Apple’s iOS software guidelines. You must provide a trial user profile to Apple as part of the review process especially if your program employs users to log in.

Applications for Android do not pass through an evaluation phase. The publishing to the Android mobile application market is done within a few hours of being submitted.

What To Do After You Have Published Your Mobile App?

Publishing your mobile app is an important app development milestone. Next, monitor your app’s usage with mobile analytics systems and measure KPIs to determine its success once it’s released in the app stores. Check crash reports or other user-reported concerns regularly.

Encourage clients to drop comments and improvement ideas about your application. To maintain the interests of your application users, assistance plus frequent app updates with features will be crucial. Contrary to web applications, which can make patch releases available to app users instantaneously, mobile application updates must follow the same submission and review procedure just like the original submission.

Furthermore, you must keep up with technological growth and remodel your application regularly to support new mobile gadgets and operating systems.

We also recommend you read our article Software Development Methodologies Comparison with Pros and Cons.

Let’s Develop Your App Together!

Choosing the ideal partner to bring your app idea to life is the most crucial decision you will ever make. Our team of experienced pros adds depth to your own team, dedicated to becoming part of your vision and bringing it to reality in a way that astonishes and amazes you. Here’s what sets us apart:

• Record of success demonstrated
• Expertise for all platforms
• User-centered philosophy of design
• Clean and flexible process
• Dedicated post-launch support

Your vision is worth a development partner who is as dedicated to your success as you are. Contact us today for a free consultation, and let’s begin the journey toward building your app.

Final thoughts

The application development lifecycle is a continuous process that will continue even after the initial release, as user input is collected and new features are added. Hopefully, this post has provided you with a better understanding of the mobile app development stages, which range from selecting a partnership and conducting Product Discovery to app delivery and upkeep.

Every mobile application that’s been created follows the same app development lifecycle. When developing enterprise mobile applications, follow our thoughtful approach and you will succeed.