Backend as a Service Blog best-practices

Welcome to our fourth installment of our “Marketing Your App” blog series. This series is a compilation of tips for marketing your app, both before and after it is launched.

You don’t need an Apple-like budget to create an Apple-like launch. You need a great product, a multi-channel mindset, and a bit of moxie. You also need to think as creatively about marketing as you did for the app itself.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Facebook’s Mobile Dev Con in New York City. This event was for developers of mobile apps integrated with Facebook. The conference was a great opportunity to talk to Facebook engineers and get a peek inside Facebook’s process, including where they are going with their new APIs. Here are five things I took away from the presentations.

Typically,  user experience (UX) problems result from the accumulation of seemingly minor issues — compounding imperfections that ultimately cause users to quit the app and never come back.

Many of these small mistakes emerge early on in the process, long before the visual design is even considered. Early decisions, like the initial feature set and how your backend system will work, can have a dramatic impact on the UX of the entire project. Here’s 4 mistakes to avoid.

Keeping the app as simple as possible (especially in version 1) is the best way to avoid pitfalls. Most successful apps (indeed, most successful consumer tech products) are based on what is called an MVP, or minimum viable product. It’s the product with the smallest feature set that can deliver the core function without any distracting “bells and whistles.”

User experience (UX) decisions determine the app’s look and feel. They answer questions such as: What does the app look like? What screens does it have? In the app world, onscreen objects like buttons, sliders, and fill-in boxes are called widgets. So you need to decide which types of widgets will reside on which screens. What actions will occur as a result of the user interacting with those widgets?

It’s never been easier or quicker to build and distribute an application to millions of devices and get paid for it. But sometimes, the hardest part of a project is the first step. Here’s an excerpt from our eBook, titled, “How Make an App: Android Edition” with a tip about how to get started.

If there’s one aspect of app development that’s too-often overlooked (other than testing), it’s Privacy. At this point in the mobile app lifecycle, I think we’ve gotten a pretty good understanding about writing code, visual design, and marketing. However it seems like Privacy is often relegated to a dark corner of an “about” page.

One of our software engineers, Ryan Kahn, uses personal experience to give detailed advice for finishing a project during a hackathon.

Kinvey’s CEO, Sravish Sridhar gives 5 tips for developing a mobile strategy.