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.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Yes, There Is an App for That, contains some important questions to ask yourself, such as: Why are you building the app and for whom? The chapter explains how Lean startup can help.

Chapter 2, Lean Startup Primer, explains the business model canvas, what customer development is, and what a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is.

Chapter 3, Challenges in Applying Lean to Building Mobile Apps, elaborates on the market place workflow and the discoverability of your app.

Chapter 4, An Agile Workflow in a Nutshell, talks about time-boxed programming, trusting on third-party solutions, and how you can make temporary shorts.

Chapter 5, A Pragmatic Approach, explains in a pragmatic way what an agile workflow, Kanban, and Scrum is and how you can implement it in your workflow.

Chapter 6, MVP is Always More Minimal Than You Think, investigates what features should go into a minimal viable product and how these features can help to prove your hypotheses.

Chapter 7, Minimal Viable Product Case Studies, contains some real-world examples of MVP implementations.

Chapter 8, Cloud Solutions for App Experiments, talks about your strategy for the backend of your app. What third-party services are available and do you need a backend developer at all?

Chapter 9, Native, Hybrid, or Cross-Platform, explains which platform (Android or iOS) to start with and what the possibilities are when you want to do both at once.

Chapter 10, There Is an API for That!, inspires you to combine existing data and services. It comes with an example combining movie information, maps and Uber integration. Finally, we will see how you can build an MVP and prove hypotheses using IFTT.

Chapter 11, Onboarding and Registration, talks about the onboarding and conversion of your users. It explains how you can lower the barrier and it comes with an Android example for signing up with Twitter or with a phone number.

Chapter 12, Do Things That Do Not Scale, instructs you to focus on proving hypotheses instead of focusing on automation. Try to find out what is working and what is not, with minimal amount of effort.

Chapter 13, Play Store and App Store Hacks, contains a first introduction to split testing and how you can apply it to the Play Store or App Store.

Chapter 14, A/B Testing Your App, tells you why split testing your app is important and how you can set up an A/B test for your app. It comes with an example using Android and the Firebase options Remote Config and Analytics.

Chapter 15, Growing Traction and Improving Retention, informs you what traction and retention is, why it matters and what you can do to gain more traction. It also discusses the importance of push notifications in order to increase retention (returning users).

Chapter 16, Scaling Strategies, inspires you to think about a scaling strategy. It may sound like a luxury problem, but if your app becomes a success your backend has to scale up. Cloud services have made this process a very easy one. Do not scale yet, but make your solution scalable.

Chapter 17, Monetization and Pricing Strategy, talks about the many monetization options for your app. If, for example, you choose for in-app purchases, you also need a good pricing strategy.

Chapter 18, Continuous Deployment, discusses a Git workflow and CI/CD tools, such as TeamCity and Jenkins. If you have a good testing strategy these tools can help you delivery often and fast.

Chapter 19, Building an Unfair Advantage, makes you think on how to build a 'moat' that makes your business defensible from new upstarts.

Chapter 20, The Flyng Case Study, talks about a case study of an existing social media app.

Appendix, Reading List and Web References, covers a list of a must-read books and websites worth visiting.