How to write and publish your next successful Android app

A step by step guide

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

How often have you been in the situation where you had an amazing idea but lacked the necessary guidance on how to develop and market your next app.

Sure enough, it should be pretty straightforward:

1. Have an idea
2. Build the app
3. Market the app
4. Profit

Unfortunately in this modern day and age there are a myriad of ways to create an android application not to mention the way you could market it so that user actually find out about it.

This article will be a high level overview on how to start and finish creating your next big Android app.

1. Create an application development canvas (ADC)
2. Check out the competition
3. Create wireframes for your future app
4. Create a Trello board and organize your backlog
5. Create a landing page with teaser
6. Start developing the app
7. Create app assets
8. Create the app store assets
9. How do people find out about my app?

Create an application development canvas (ADC)

Example for an application development canvas

It’s very hard to keep everything in one’s head while you’re working on a new app project. You should care about the problem the apps tackles, target demographic, app discovery channels, core features, revenue streams and many more. Often there is a strong risk of missing important information simply because there is o much of it.

There is an easy way to create and see the big picture. Create and maintain an application development canvas.

It will help create an overview of your idea and help you cover all the important aspects as you start developing your app.

Download it free from here.

Check out the competition

During the filling out of the ADC you will need to already have some information about your competitors on the market.

Use this tool to filter by number of downloads and ratings: https://playsearch.kaki87.net/. Sort the results by picking the top 5 apps based on the number of downloads and begin investigating by:

1. Downloading the app
2. Testing the main features
3. Read the reviews both positive and negative

Create wireframes for your future app

Based on the reviews gathered from the last step sketch out the basic screens of your app. If you want to feel more fancy you can use a vector graphic tool like Inkscape to create them.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The main idea is to stick to the MVP (minimum viable product) principle and not overcomplicate things. Try to envision your happy path use case for using the app and transform these ideas into graphical representations.

Create a Trello board and organize your backlog

After creating the mockups/wireframes for your app create and organize a new board in Trello with the steps needed to move forward.

Example of a template Trello board

On the far left create a list with all the unlabeled items you want to work on.

The ‘later’ list should contain items taken from the inbox and included in the current sprint iteration.

The ‘next’ list should contain items you plan on starting work on either the same day or the next.

The ‘++IN PROGRESS++’ list contains all the tasks you are currently working on.

The ‘done’ list contains all the finished tasks.

Stay tuned for a detailed article about creating a Trello board and working with labels and other nice Trello components.

Create a landing page with teaser

Creating a landing page is good to provide user information on who you are and what problem your product is solving. Create your landing page here with Mailchimp.

Create a landing page with Mailchimp

Start developing the app

To start developing the app you need an IDE (integrated development environment). Android Studio is a best bet that will offer you the best features to start coding right away. You can create an Android project using Android Studio from scratch or you can use a starter project free from here. The language used is Kotlin and the architecture MVVM using ViewModels and LiveData.

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

The starter project contains all necessary boilerplate code and systems to start focusing on the core business logic of the app without having to spend time developing that. For example:

• The code is sorted in appropriate directories based on what their responsibilities are (dialog popups, model, repository).
• Dialog templates for showing hints or simple information.
• Eventbus implementation for easy communication in all parts of the app.
• Monetization flow: Remove ads and purchase PRO flow.
• Rate app dialog logic
• Predefined menu with share app, write feedback, about app.
• Admob integration to show a banner in the lower part of the screen for monetization.

Simply clone the project, rename the package name to you app name and start adding your awesome features.

If you need any help or information please drop me a message or even a PR and will get back to you as soon as possible.

Create app assets

You can use the free software Inkscape to create the necessary assets for your mobile app. The main assets you will need are:

• Splash screen
• Icons

For icons there is a simple way to add them if you just want to stick to the material icons Android Studio has to offer.

On the drawable folder right click and choose new -> Image Asset

How to add a new Image Asset in Android Studio

Here is a step by step instruction article:

Add icons to the android application from Android Studio IDE

Create the app store assets

To launch the android app on Google Play or any app store you need to create the assets necessary to launch the app.

You will need:

• Optimized text for the app store description. Use Google Trends and Appanie to find appropriate keywords.
• App screenshots for both mobile and tablet layouts.
• Feature graphic which that will be shown on the app store.
• High resolution app icon.

Note that the above assets need to be created for each language you are supporting so if you are supporting English, French and Spanish you will need to create 3 app store descriptions, 3 app screenshots and so on.

These assets can be easily created in Inkscape as vector graphics that can be exported.

How do people find out about my app?

After publishing your Android app you should start making your app known.

Some marketing activities that you can do include:

• Create a medium article about the app and share it on Facebook.
• If your app is generating content each day create a Facebook app page and share it with your friends and family.
• Search on Facebook for Android app pages and post there.
• Go on Reddit and search for all relevant Subreddits (for example r/androidapps). Post a nice and descriptive message saying that you developed the app and would like an honest feedback.
• Ask your friends to install the app and leave a review.
• Try to write to android app sites (android authority for example) to include your app and write an article about it.
• Go on Quora and search for the appropriate topic and post a message there linking to your medium article.
• Release your new app on Product Hunt. This platform is a great way to jumpstart your mobile app.

Writing and deploying your new android app is not so complicated if you have all the necessary guidance and step by step instructions.

Happy building!

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