Building a mobile app for your business: a guide to getting started

A mobile app can change your relationship with your customers: direct access from their home screen, notifications, offline use. But it’s also a bigger commitment than a website, with its own rules — Apple’s and Google’s. Before diving in, a few questions help avoid false good ideas and build an app people will actually use.

App or mobile website: the first question

Not every project needs an app. A fast, well-designed mobile website covers most needs for information, contact or bookings, with nothing to install and at a much lower cost. An app is worth it when at least one of these conditions applies:

• Regular use: your users come back often, weekly or daily.
• Offline use: the app has to work without a signal — at sea, in the mountains, on the move.
• Useful notifications: reminders, alerts, order tracking.
• The phone’s features: location, camera, sensors, compass.

If none of these applies, start with an excellent website: it will be found on Google, which an app can’t offer.

Native or cross-platform

A native app is developed separately for iPhone (Swift) and Android (Kotlin): two codebases, two teams, two lots of maintenance. Cross-platform technologies such as React Native or Flutter now let you publish on both stores from a single codebase, with an experience very close to native. For the vast majority of business apps, that’s the most sensible choice: lower costs, and new features released on both platforms at once.

It’s the approach we chose for 6 Milles, our revision app for the French coastal boating licence: React Native and Expo, one codebase for iOS and Android, and content fixes shipped without waiting for a new store release.

The stages of an app project

1. Define the need. Who will use the app, to do what, and when? A first version should focus on the main use, not every idea at once.
2. Design the screens. Mock-ups, user flows, tests with a few users: this is where ease of use is decided, long before the code.
3. Develop. Interface, business logic, data storage, and possibly a server if the app shares information between users.
4. Test on real devices. The stores offer test releases (TestFlight at Apple, internal testing at Google) so people can try the app before launch.
5. Publish. App Store and Google Play listings, screenshots, description, privacy policy, then review by Apple and Google.
6. Keep the app alive. Fixes, new features, compatibility with new versions of iOS and Android: an app needs maintaining, just like a website.

What the app stores require

Publishing an app means accepting Apple’s and Google’s rules. You need a developer account: a yearly subscription at Apple (€99 a year in France) and a one-off $25 registration fee at Google. Every version is reviewed before release and can be rejected if it breaks the rules — on content, privacy or payments.

In-app purchases must go through the stores’ payment systems, which take a commission: 15% for small publishers, more above a certain revenue. Finally, the listing has to declare precisely what data the app collects. The less an app collects, the simpler this step: 6 Milles, for instance, needs no account and keeps progress on the phone.

The store listing: search rankings for apps

An app nobody can find doesn’t exist. On both the App Store and Google Play, the name, subtitle, keywords and screenshot captions decide where the app appears in search results: that’s ASO, the app equivalent of SEO. For 6 Milles, every field was chosen from what licence candidates actually search for, just as we would for a website’s SEO.

The most common mistakes

• Trying to do everything in the first version. Better an app that does one thing perfectly, then grows.
• Neglecting the business model. Free, one-off purchase, subscription, ads: this choice shapes the design from the start.
• Collecting more data than needed. It means more work, more obligations and less trust from users.
• Forgetting maintenance. Every year, new versions of iOS and Android call for adjustments.

Where to start?

An app project starts with a conversation: your idea, your users, what the app should bring them. Read the 6 Milles case study to see how we ran a project end to end, then get in touch to talk about yours. If an app isn’t the right answer, we’ll tell you that too.