Building an app, especially if it’s your first time, is kind of like navigating an obstacle course blindfolded. You are going to enter a world full of unknowns, with new terms you’ll need to know (check out our glossary for some help). You will also face different business constraints, crazy edge cases, and logic that “shouldn’t be that complicated.” So for the budding entrepreneur who doesn’t know (yet) how it all works, here are five things you should expect when building an app.
Is App Development Hard?
When you build an app, even the simple things will become complex. Things you don’t even consider to be things will suddenly become mind-boggling, never-ending, unsolvable puzzles. Consider what Steve Jobs once said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Apple got its name because Steve Jobs went to an apple orchard in Oregon, but if we look deeper into the name, there is more than meets the eye. An apple has two main functions, but they’re so elegantly packaged, you would barely notice them. It carries carbohydrates that can be eaten and used as energy and it has seeds that can then germinate and grow into more trees. These two functions seem simple, but if you look closer, there is a lot at play.
For those processes to work, an apple blossom needs to be pollinated by a bee. The pollinated blossom then draws nutrients from the tree, and the tree draws nutrients from the trunk and the roots in the ground. But not just any nutrients – specific nutrients – which are then converted into fructose (giving apples their sweet flavor). An outer peel layer needs to be developed to prevent the apple from drying out in the sun. Once the outer layer is developed and the apple grows to size, it produces hormones that cause it to ripen and fall from the tree.
How does an apple know to do all that? It has been “programmed” into the fruit’s genetics so that certain processes happen at the right times. That’s a lot of complexity for something so simple. The same is true for apps.
Expect Effort
It takes a lot of effort to work through the complexity of simplicity.
Grant Cardone wrote in his book The 10X Principle, that people most often fail by “Severely underestimating what it will take in terms of actions, resources, money, and energy to accomplish the target … [and] Underestimating the amount of adversity [you] will need to overcome in order to actually attain [your] desired goal.”
Don’t be afraid of the app being complex, of putting yourself out there to learn something new, to put yourself in the tech world. All these things will serve to help you grow and get better along with your company.
Expect to Make Mistakes
Building an app is not just about the app itself. You are building an interface that will be used by hundreds, if not thousands of different people. Heck, even your development team will have different brains working together. You need to look at market needs, validate your app, define your user experience, think through the logic, look at the architecture, work on the code, and much more. Mistakes are going to happen. You’ll need to be okay with setbacks, even financial ones.
Your goal is not to avoid mistakes, but to make small mistakes quickly and learn from them rather than making big mistakes that leave you dead in the water. It is called fast failure.
Expect to Tie Up Loose Ends
Developers don’t do well with ambiguity. They program in a world of logic. Think of building a robot. The most advanced robots today have multiple joints to duplicate human movement and function. They have complicated sensors to measure pressure, force, and speed. We don’t think about those things as humans since we move naturally without thinking about it.
Leaving things up to the developers to “figure out” is going to create a lot of confusion, which will require discussion, resolution, and planning. All this takes time. And if you’re paying developers for their time, it will cost you money. That’s why it’s better to invest in definition and design activities like User Story Writing, Requirements Gathering, and UX Design.
Expect to Review a Lot of Details
At some point, while creating your app, you’ll realize some detail that wasn’t addressed earlier now stands in front of you preventing progress with the app, the code, or the content. You’ll need to spend time combing through requirements, user stories, mockups, content, copy, and code, just looking for “all the instances of …” the one thing that somehow got messed up.
Try to find smart ways to address these issues systematically and cheerfully. Your painstaking, tedious detail work won’t last forever. Eventually, you’ll move through those obstacles.
Building an app is not an easy process, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible for you or your business. Now you should have a better idea of what to expect on your app development journey, so go “build apps [and] change the world.”
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