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If you are looking to drive efficiency, streamline processes, and engage employees, enterprise mobile application development is your way to go. This comprehensive guide to enterprise mobile app development tells everything you need to know about enterprise app development to get started with it.
As digitization continues to rise and competition between businesses is ever-increasing, organizations are primarily focusing more on enhancing efficiency and productivity. That said, enterprise app development has become imperative to achieve these indispensable goals.
Having said that, the mobile enterprise application market size increased to $98 billion in 2021 (as yet) at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.24% from 2016 to 2021.
Seeing the ever-growing demand for enterprise applications, more and more businesses are turning towards enterprise app development. Mobile enterprise application enables organizations to mobilize their business processes and extend their brands for greater interaction with employees and clients.
All in all, enterprise mobile apps optimize the operational functioning of enterprises and enhance the performance of the workforce. By streamlining and automating business processes, companies can save time and reduce production costs tremendously.
Through this guide, we will walk you through all the crucial aspects of enterprise app development, from the basics of enterprise app development, its types, core benefits, the ideal process to popular tools to leverage, enterprise app development cost, and much more. So without any further ado, let’s get started with it.
Ready to dive into the world of enterprise app development? Perfect! Let’s dive in!
What Is Enterprise Mobile Application Development?
In layman’s terms, enterprise mobile development is a sophisticated approach to building a mobile app for an enterprise to streamline its business operations, workflow optimization, stakeholder engagement, and much more. It is developed with the primary goal of improving business efficiency and productivity.
The main strategy behind building an enterprise app is to improve efficiency, streamline data, or prevent data mishandling. With that being said, combining an enterprise mobile application development with a cloud-based enterprise system offers benefits like reduced operational cost and better control over the business.
Types of Enterprise Mobile Applications
- Employee Level – These are employee-focused apps designed only for internal use and are packed with limited features. These apps keep an eye on employee workflow and help executives track employees’ progress.
- Department Level – These types of applications aim to facilitate the internal workflow of specific departments such as HR, finance, sales, marketing, and others. These apps incorporate department-level features and enable monitoring subordinates’ productivity.
- Enterprise Level – These apps connect various departments of an enterprise and bring the enterprise under a single umbrella. These apps enable employees from different departments to connect and communicate with higher-level executives.
7 Core Benefits of Enterprise App Development
Streamlined Business Processes
Enterprise apps can streamline your business processes and fix your key company challenges effortlessly. An enterprise app can automate most of your business operations, such as common, low-value tasks. This allows employees to focus more on revenue-generating activities rather than indulging in no-productive actions. So this is one of the significant benefits of enterprise mobile development for your business.
Increased Productivity
Attaining higher productivity is every business’s dream. And enterprise application helps them accomplish that goal. The enterprise app plays a vital role in establishing seamless communication across various departments and between companies and customers. Therefore, an enterprise app can increase productivity, ensuring 24/7 communications.
Time and Effort Saving
Another noteworthy benefit of enterprise mobile app development is that it can save a lot of time and effort for the overall business. With enterprise mobile development, it becomes easy to perform daily tasks and address customers’ queries using the feature-rich enterprise app. All in all, enterprise apps can save all your precious time and effort and significantly ease your tasks.
Reduced Operational Costs
Every company strives to save money, irrespective of the size and niche. Having said that, when you integrate advancements of emerging technologies such as AI, ML, blockchain, AR/VR, and others into your enterprise app, you will add value to your business. Therefore, an enterprise app designed to bring automation can save a lot of bucks over the period and enable you to invest more wisely in other areas.
Bringing Automation
When employees are asked to do repetitive and mundane tasks, employees become less efficient, resulting in decreased productivity. And then, they simply start avoiding those tasks or do them unwillingly. With that being said, an enterprise application can bring automation to such tasks and free employees from mundane, regular, uninteresting tasks. That will lead them to focus on other core and productive tasks.
Organized and Structured Activity
It’s been observed that the data generated by overall company activity is not well structured and organized. This sometimes appears confusing, resulting in poor impact. However, an enterprise mobile app enables management to easily and rapidly access databases and archives for performing routine tasks. Data obtained from such software involves a high level of standardization.
Monitoring Business Goals
One of the benefits of developing enterprise mobile apps is monitoring employees’ performance and overall business productivity. That said, it would also help you manage and use your time wisely. It would be great if you incorporate specific analytics tools to increase the overall company’s efficiency and take it to a whole new level.
7 Things to Keep in Mind While Developing an Enterprise App
Know About Your Users’ Needs
The best thing to do is, empathize. Keep yourself in your users’ shoes, and then consider enterprise mobile development. This will help you understand the expectations and pain points of your users. So think from your users’ perspective before you begin designing or coding your enterprise app. Once you create a user-centric mindset, your enterprise app will grow for sure.
Make User-Centric Design
Design is the very first thing that can make or break your app’s reputation. Therefore, it becomes imperative for you to create a visually appealing app design for your enterprise mobile application. Having said that, your enterprise mobile app should be user-centric; hence, you need to make the design user-centric as well so that they can relate better with your enterprise app and gravitate more towards it.
Focus on Performance, Not Features
Most businesses think that developing a feature-packed enterprise app will win everyone’s heart. However, it’s not the features that win users’ hearts; it’s always performance. That’s why your enterprise mobile application should focus on performance first and features later. Remember, the functionality of a mobile app is the prime factor that influences end users. So strive to create an app with easy operation and smooth navigation.
Make Your USPs More Appealing
Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) are not dead and can never be outdated. USPs are something that differentiates your app from others. If you aim to build an enterprise mobile app with some unique angle and put some greatest USPs while building the app, you can make your app stand out amid today’s clutter and noise. Also, incorporating USPs can be a great way to draw users’ attention towards your app.
Emphasize MVP
Rather than aiming for incorporating too many features all at once, try making the app MVP-centric. An effective app is never loaded with too many features; it always follows the MVP path. What is MVP? It’s a minimum viable product, which means having enough features to attract early adopters. Later on, adding the features based on the users’ feedback and recommendations. Aiming for MVP app development is always a lucrative move.
Map the Business Objectives
Before you begin your enterprise app development, you must map your business objective. What number of target audiences do you want to reach? What will be the overall app development cost? What’s your budget? What features can improve customer retention and adoption? You need to find answers to these questions to know about the objective of the business and ensure high popularity.
Create Robust Security
No one wants to access an application that can compromise their security, especially in today’s time when you hear the news of data breaching every other day. Having said that, you need to develop an enterprise mobile app that can keep intruders and hackers far away. To do so, you can leverage security measures like SSL encryption, X-frame options, security testing, and more.
Ideal Process for Enterprise Application Development: 8 Easy Steps to Follow
Outline Your Ideas and Specification
It’s an undeniable reality that every successful app starts with a promising idea, and enterprise app development is no different at all. It’s essential to explore the aim and goals more deeply and frame the strategies accordingly for better outcomes. So in this step, you must identify the requirements and pain points of your app audience and outline the idea and specification considering that only.
Choosing the Platform(s)
It’s one of the daunting yet crucial steps in any and every mobile app development. Well, to make the process easier, be where your users are. That means choosing the platform based on your users. However, experts suggest having an enterprise mobile app on both iOS and Android platforms to succeed. Why? Because they’re leading OS with more than 99% of market share (combined), dominating the market right now.
Deciding the Functionality
In this step, you need to determine the core functionality you would want to have in your enterprise mobile application. You can think of integrating all the core features depending on your users and goals. Based on the functionality, the app developing company will shape the entire app that will appear completely irresistible to your users. As a result, you will gain more downloads and ultimately more ROI.
Prototyping and Design
Once you decide the goal, platform, and functionality, the very next step is prototyping and designing. Based on your functionality, the app design firm will create a prototype and then begin the overall UI/UX designing process. Prototyping and designing will help you know the features and aesthetics of your enterprise mobile application. UI/UX app designers will focus on creating more intuitive, attractive, and user-friendly app designs.
App Development
This is one of the most crucial aspects of the enterprise mobile app development process. In this step, your hired app development company codes the app based on prepared designs. They work on the front-end and back-end app development, integrating the right set of features and ensuring that the back-end is entirely secured. Also, it can go a long way in ensuring the app’s sustainability and scalability. All in all, they turn your design into a full-fledged working app.
App Testing
This is one of the most imperative steps in enterprise app development; however, it’s also the most overlooked aspect. You need to ensure that your enterprise mobile app is tested thoroughly for any sort of bugs, glitches, errors, or so. For that, you must hire a reliable mobile app testing company that can perform meticulous testing and deliver a flawless, reliable, and user-ready enterprise mobile application.
App Launch
Once everything is ready, it’s time to market your enterprise mobile app. This can be considered the final chapter of your enterprise app development process. So if you have targeted both iOS and Android, your app will be deployed to App Store and Play Store accordingly. That said, once you meet their guidelines, your app will be launched. What will be the next step after that? Also, for a better launching strategy, you can opt for greater mobile app launch services.
Post Launch Maintenance
Post-launch maintenance and support matter a lot in keeping your enterprise app up and running. To ensure that, you need a lot of ongoing app management, maintenance, and support. Also, as an application gets in the hands of app users, feedback will pour in, and for future versions of the app, you will need to incorporate that as an app update. So it’s crucial to hire a renowned mobile app maintenance company that can handle all your post-launch maintenance job effortlessly.
How Much Does Enterprise App Development Cost?
How much does mobile app development cost? This is one of the most common questions all mobile app development companies get. However, this is one of the simplest questions to ask but the hardest to answer.
Why?
Because there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this million-dollar question; there can never be actually. It can vary from purpose to purpose and business objectives to business objectives. There can be an estimate, but no one can tell you an exact figure for your enterprise app development cost.
That said, depending on your enterprise app types, goals, features, functionalities, design, budget, and more, you can figure out the estimated enterprise mobile app development cost. Your app features, development timescales, the platform you choose, development iterations, and others are the biggest cost drivers in enterprise app development costs.
Concluding Thoughts
Whether you’re looking to engage your employees, streamline your internal business processes, or increase your overall business efficiency, an enterprise app is needed. We hope this comprehensive guide to enterprise mobile app development gave you an in-depth breakdown of everything you need to know to get started with it.
So are you all set to develop an enterprise mobile app backed with automation techniques and quality features that can contribute to your overall company’s success? Get started towards development right now, then! Good Luck.
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