Book Image

Lean Mobile App Development

By : Mike van Drongelen, Aravind Krishnaswamy
Book Image

Lean Mobile App Development

By: Mike van Drongelen, Aravind Krishnaswamy

Overview of this book

Lean is the ultimate methodology for creating a startup that succeeds. Sounds great from a theoretical point of view, but what does that mean for you as an a technical co-founder or mobile developer? By applying the Lean Start-up methodology to your mobile App development, it will become so much easier to build apps that take Google Play or the App Store by storm. This book shows you how to bring together smarter business processes with technical know-how. It makes no sense to develop a brilliant app for six months or longer only to find out later that nobody is interested in it. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first. Validate your hypotheses early and often. Discover effective product development strategies that let you put Facebook's famous axiom "move fast and break things" into practice. A great app without visibility and marketing clout is nothing, so use this book to market your app, making use of effective metrics that help you track and iterate all aspects of project performance.

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Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
Yes, There Is an App for That
Yes, There Is an App for That
The app ecosystem
An introduction to the Lean Startup methodology
Getting your users hooked on your app
Summary
2
Lean Startup Primer
Lean Startup Primer
The Business Model Canvas
Example BMC - mobile marketplace app
Lean Canvas
Agile development and customer development
The MVP
Summary
3
Challenges in Applying Lean to Building Mobile Apps
Challenges in Applying Lean to Building Mobile Apps
Higher design bar
Apple's App Store submission cycles
Inability to dynamically load libraries
Cross-platform releases
Getting users to download an app
Summary
4
An Agile Workflow in a Nutshell
An Agile Workflow in a Nutshell
An Agile workflow
Epic, Stories, and Tasks
Tools that you can use
Summary
5
A Pragmatic Approach
A Pragmatic Approach
Timeboxed programming
How do you get started with nothing?
How to keep things well structured
Are there any shortcuts?
Mash-up
Summary
6
MVP is Always More Minimal Than You Think
MVP is Always More Minimal Than You Think
What is MVP?
How to define your MVP
Fail fast – validate everything
10 essential UX testing methods
Iterate and evolve - from viable to lovable
Summary
7
Minimal Viable Product Case Studies
Minimal Viable Product Case Studies
Fun with Charades - Initial vision
8
Cloud Solutions for App Experiments
Cloud Solutions for App Experiments
Do you need to create a backend yourself?
The story of Parse
Canvapp - an Android MVP app using Firebase
Sign up for Firebase
Firebase dashboard
Summary
9
Native, Hybrid, or Cross-Platform
Native, Hybrid, or Cross-Platform
Who is your audience?
What are your technical requirements?
Native versus hybrid - the strengths and weaknesses
The ugly truth - a little hybrid doesn't hurt when you have clear goals
Making the final decision - factors to consider
Leveraging cross-platform development tools
How to choose the right tool
Summary
10
There Is an API for That!
There Is an API for That!
Succeed or fail fast
Available APIs
Summary
11
Onboarding and Registration
Onboarding and Registration
What is user onboarding all about?
Pirate metrics (AARRR)
Show us what you have got
Continuous onboarding - complete the user profile later
Tell a story - an example onboarding app
Implementation
Summary
12
Do Things That Do Not Scale
Do Things That Do Not Scale
What we mean by "things that do not scale"
How to acquire early adopters and establish a small-scale laboratory
How to transition from an unscalable MVP to scalable code
Summary
13
Play Store and App Store Hacks
Play Store and App Store Hacks
What is an experiment?
How do users find apps in the first place?
Summary
14
A/B Testing Your App
A/B Testing Your App
Why do statistics matter?
About actionable metrics
Conversions and pirate metrics
Get to know your audience
Split testing can help us to improve our apps
Summary
15
Growing Traction and Improving Retention
Growing Traction and Improving Retention
Traction
Notifications
Handling an incoming notification
Sending a notification
Summary
16
Scaling Strategies
Scaling Strategies
Make it scalable but do not scale it right away
Auto-scaling
Summary
17
Monetization and Pricing Strategy
Monetization and Pricing Strategy
Monetization strategies
Pricing strategy
See how in-app purchases can be implemented
Applying a pricing strategy to your store listing
Summary
18
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment = Continuous Integration and Delivery
Repository and Git workflow
Automated tests
An example of a continuous workflow for an Android app
Building variants
The Gradle way
productFlavors
sourceSets
buildTypes
signingConfigs
Using TeamCity as build agent
Automated deploy and delivery
Self hosted
HockeyApp or Fabric beta
Fastlane, alpha/beta Play Store, and iTunes beta
Summary
19
Building an Unfair Advantage
Building an Unfair Advantage
Introduction - it's not just about your app
Protecting your work with IP laws
The network effect and platforms
Making use of vertical markets
Good customer support
Summary
20
The Flyng Case Study
The Flyng Case Study
That sounds awesome, but what is Flyng?
The team
The MVP
Summary
Appendix
Appendix
Reading list and references

Using TeamCity as build agent

A build server, such as TeamCity or Jenkins, can be used to automate these processes. We will use TeamCity in our examples and you can download it for free at https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/download/. If you prefer Jenkins, you can get it at https://jenkins.io.

Download, install, and configure TeamCity on a server or, if just for testing purposes, on your development machine. After installing TeamCity, you can start the build server. On OS X, open a Terminal window, locate the bin folder of the teamcity folder (for example, /Users/mike/Dev/teamcity/bin), and type the following command:

m010:bin mike$ sh runall.sh start

Start a browser and point it to http://localhost:8111. Wait until the setup of TeamCity has completed and then create a new project, shown as follows:

Now that we know how to use Gradle to build different variants, the picture...

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