Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam ✪ on Unsplash

How to create your first App

From Idea, Concept, and Implementation to Publishing your own App

Hi, my name is Izzy and I want to show you different approaches how you can create your own app. Maybe you already have a cool new idea for an app or you are just curious how apps are made, in either case this article gives you some guidance on how to approach your project.

In general most steps are the same no matter what type of app you wanting to create, only when it comes to tools you might want to use different software if you are for example creating a game, but I explain that once we get to that part.

Additionally, this workflow is written for a single person wanting to get into app development. If you have a full team or multiple people, the workflow can be still applied but a lot of the tasks can be split up.

Where to start?

Alright before you dive right in its good to make a little plan. This should include things like:

• What is the purpose of the app
• General structure
• What screens and how to navigate between them

In this stage I normally just take a pen and paper and take some quick notes. This shouldn’t take more then one hour and if you would take those notes to someone and talk them through it, the other person should understand the basic concept of your app and what it does.

Creating a Sketch

Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam ✪ on Unsplash

Now this might seem very basic and close to the previous step but it will help you getting things better organized and ready for coding. The goal here is to literally make sketches of the different app screens. The idea is that once you start coding you don’t have to think about what color something should have or where an UI element is placed on the screen.

Useful Tools

• Sketch (MacOS App, Paid: 99$ / Year)
• Affinity Designer (MacOS, Windows, & iPad, Paid: 45$ One-Time payment)
• Pen & Paper

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Make sure you thought about things like:

1. How will users navigate in the app? Navigation bar, buttons, …
2. Colors: What is the primary & secondary color of the app? Any other colors?
3. Specific UI Elements: Do you want custom UI elements, like buttons?
4. Introduction: Does your app need a small tutorial at the beginning that is shown when the user opens the app for the first time?
5. Settings: What things can the user change in the settings
6. Features: What functionality needs to be in the first version of the app, what could be included in future updates?

Target Platform

After we have all our requirements together and we know how the app should look like we need to get a bit more technical. There are different tools that you can use to create an app and it depends very much on the target platform and what content you are trying to create.

Below graph gives you an idea how to approach the decision. Please not that there are a lot more different tools out there that you can use to create apps. The ones listed below are the most common and are probably the easiest to get started, due to the amount of tutorials.

Decision Tree which tool to use

Note: if you want to create an app for Android and iOS, you technically have to options:

1. Create an app in Flutter for both iOS and Android at the same time
2. Create the iOS app in XCode and the Android app in Android Studio

With the first option the app will look exactly the same on both platforms and not use common elements that you find normally on either system. This means less time coding but can have a negative impact on the user experience.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Start Developing

We know how our app should look and what tools we are going to use to develop it, so its finally time to get our hands dirty and start the actual coding work.

When you work on an app make sure to continuously test it preferably on a actual device instead of a simulator. This will save you a lot of trouble down the line if something doesn’t work.

Make sure to plan in some time for this. A lot of time when you code you will send 10% of your time actually writing code and 90% of the time, looking things up, testing, and fixing bugs.

Publishing

Finally, after a lot of work you have finished your app and can finally publish it. The trouble is, there are a few more things you need to do before you can publish an app.

1. Create a Developer Account (App Store 99$ / Yearly, Google Play Store 25$ / Ont-Time Payment)
2. Create an App Icon, Screenshot, and description: Make sure you take some time for this one, after all users mostly look at the images before downloading an app.
3. Fix issues if your app was rejected: Yes, it is possible that you publish your app and it gets rejected because of some functionality missing. Don’t get discouraged, fix the things mentioned and just upload your app again.

Thank you ❤️

Thank you for reading, I hope this was helpful! If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments.

And if you did enjoy this story please follow me for more stories! 😊