Biggest Mobile App Development Challenges in 2023

These days, businesses are trying to keep up with market trends to develop the best possible digital products. Pretty much the same is happening with mobile app development. From startups to established businesses, they are all striving to build a market-leading app based on the latest trends and industry best practices.

Since the number of app downloads, paid subscriptions and in-app purchases rises annually, this is not surprising. The figure was as high as $421 billion worldwide in 2022, and this is only expected to increase this year. Designing and developing a mobile app is definitely remunerative.

Mobile apps have increasingly become an integral part of our daily lives. The demand for Android and iOS apps is booming, with secure and high-performance applications regarded as the most lucrative in the current business landscape.

However, you’ll already find millions of apps in the App Store and Play Store. It’s therefore difficult to standout amidst the huge and constant competition. So, creating the most functional and feature-packed applications for businesses has become one of the major app development challenges today.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at 5 mobile application development challenges and best practices that you’ll have to deal with as you design and build your next big project for your business venture.

Finding a Reliable App Development Team

Finding a reliable and reputable app development team is not easy. There are a lot of them out there because of the huge demand, so it may be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. The first thing to do is find a team with experience and expertise in crafting an app that will meet your business needs and objectives.

They must have what it takes to develop apps using the latest technologies and then ensure that your app will work on different platforms, devices and operating systems. Aside from their technical skills, you must determine how good they are at communication, designing intuitive user interfaces, and effectively marketing your app.

A wrong decision right from the get go can be disastrous and will cost you a lot.

Designing an Appealing User Interface

Majority of popular and successful apps have one thing in common – they have a simple and uncomplicated UI. As with other things, first impressions last, and for a mobile app this is determined by its design principles and user-friendly features. With a visually appealing and straightforward UI, the end users can easily understand page navigation and how to use the app’s features.

Businesses often ask developers to include a ton of features to their mobile apps, thinking this would make them all-inclusive. Overdevelopment happens and the apps become over-packed with so many extraneous features and functionalities. This tends to annoy and confuse their users, resulting in reduced engagement. In fact, a recent study showed that 52% of users claimed that poor mobile app experience makes them lose interest and are less likely to engage with a business or organization.

That being the case, poor UI of an app leads to a low retention rate, low conversion rate, and high abandonment rate. In order to design a compelling UI for your mobile app, conduct some research about applications that are similar to yours. Note their strong points and streamline your ideas. This will help you convey important information as well as your ideas to your developer as to how you’d want the UI to look.

Lastly, bear in mind that any mobile app must be built using basic UI design principles along with the latest UI design trends. Stiff competition in the app development market motivates app developers to stay abreast with the latest UI trends and implement them.

Choosing the Right Tech Stack

This represents one of the most crucial early decisions in creating your mobile app. It will determine the success of the design, development, and maintenance process. It defines everything in the app architecture, as well as the timeframe and the money you’d invest to see the project to completion. The appropriate mobile tech has a direct effect on minimizing development costs, making your mobile app easily maintainable and scalable for expansion.

There are currently a number of frameworks and technologies in the market that offer extensive functionalities to incorporate into your app to meet user expectations and boost efficiency by streamlining the entire development process.

Hence, choosing the right tech stack has become one of the major challenges of Android app development and iOS app development. To address this issue, developers must be aware of the specific requirements of the project and stay updated with the latest versions of the different technologies so they can choose which one suits your app best.

A wide range of potential consequences rely on the selection of the tech stack. The combination of frameworks and technologies that you’ll choose will have a huge impact on how robust your mobile app will be or how well it can scale to other platforms and OS. Any wrong decision will negatively affect your app’s overall performance and growth prospects.

Keeping Abreast with the Latest OS Versions

As new innovations are being introduced on a regular basis, this has become one of the major mobile app development challenges as developers strive to keep up with the latest industry standards. Major players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft introduce 2-3 new OS versions every year and announce regular updates beyond that. Consequently, many companies can’t keep up.

In order to ensure a successful launch, developers must see to it that the app they painstakingly built support the latest operating systems (OS). With every release of a new version, app developers must ensure that an existing app or the app that they’re working on supports the latest version.

While new releases tend to bring excitement and anticipation, they can also raise some concerns. Will it affect the functionality of an app built on a previous OS? The safe answer is that it might.

With every release of a new OS, it’s advisable to review the existing code to make sure that it will work in the same way that it did when it was first written. Here are some implications of an operating system update to an app’s existing code: changes in compatibility, changes to SDKs and changes to user interface (UI) conventions.

This partly explains why those who aspire to have their app ideas brought to life now prefer to go for app development services that offer automatic updates as this allows them to choose new features, security patches, and bug fixes as soon as the latest OS is released.

Getting the App Approved

Another significant problem is getting your mobile app approved by the App Store, Google Play and other app marketplaces. It could take several weeks to gain approval, and even then, your app may get rejected for some inexplicable reasons. See to it that you have a plan to test your app and attract a sizeable audience before launch.
To help you out, here are the common reasons why mobile apps get rejected:

• It is a rip-off of another app
• Inappropriate content - apps with sensitive or undesirable content such as gambling or obscenity get automatically rejected
• There is no privacy policy
• Hardware and software incompatibility
• Your app code includes secret API calls
• Crashes or severe faults during the review process
• Unusually long load times
• Incomplete or inaccurate metadata
• Poor UI that falls short of industry standards

Final Thoughts

Mobile app development has become extremely popular among businesses and various organizations. However, to claim that designing and developing a mobile app is a walk in the park would be gravely misleading. With a lot of factors to consider, it’s no surprise that some give up on their project before gaining traction.

We compiled 5 of the biggest challenges that mobile app development is facing today so you get a heads up and plan on how to overcome them. With dedication and hard work, success is achievable. There is nothing like excellent results as a reward. You will be able to build a robust app that will deliver maximum value to your target users.