If you're thinking of launching a digital startup, be sure to consider building a scalable app or website. This will help you avoid various problems in the future. Moreover, the issue is best addressed at the initial stages of planning, since making changes to an existing project would require much more effort.
Minute aspects of detail go in the process of building an app. From an amazing idea to a marketable product is a long and challenging journey. So when you finally decide to build that app, the last thing you want is for it to hit a dead zone.
A recent research report by the Startup Genome suggested that 74% of startups don't succeed due to premature scaling. It is crucial for a startup to think and plan ahead and this will help to reach their startup to heights of success.
For this it is important to have your base ground strong; to achieve by building a good team, a detailed plan of action, a proper plan for coding and complete tracking of the financial expenses. There is a Gartner report, " The Key Fundamentals Required to Scale Mobile App Development," warns that "By 2020, market demand for mobile app development services will be three times greater than internal IT organizations' capacity to deliver them."
Scaling a spectacular mobile app to support a gamut of users to get access to your mobile app is forever challenging. The best time to manage the scaling of an app is before an issue arises.
What Is Application Scalability?
Application scalability is the potential of an application to grow in time, being able to efficiently handle more and more requests per minute (RPM). It's not just a simple tweak you can turn on/off; it's a long-time process that touches almost every single item in your stack, including both hardware and software sides of the system.
In case of problems, you can keep adding new CPUs or increase memory limits, but by doing so, you're just increasing the throughput, not the application performance. It's not the way you should stick to when you see your application is starting to have efficiency problems. Scaling the application is not an easy thing, and thus you should know your application very well before starting to think about how and when to scale it.
Benefits Of A Scalable App
As it happens, there are many reasons to make the app scalable; we'll list only the most key of them.
- Best mobile app experience. Your customer doesn't care how many people are using your application at this very moment, what the load is, and so on... the only thing he's willing to get is the opportunity to take full advantage of your program, without any interference. He has no desire to deal with a slow-running application. He wants his every action, whether it's a purchase, information search or booking, to be completed as quickly and simply as possible. The rest is of little interest to him. And scalable apps provide your consumers with the most positive user experience.
- Good system performance. If the overall system performance decreases, the above item on our list will obviously not be implemented. Positive user experience and low-power performance are incompatible.
- The ability to cope with any number of users. The existing architecture may work quite satisfactorily, but the rapid growth of user traffic can slow down the program. You must scale a mobile app in time to prevent such a result.
- Persistent business growth. The conditions of modern business are changing so fast that long-term planning is hardly possible. Therefore, the most reasonable is the strategy of gradually increasing the performance of information systems (their scaling).
- Money saving. If you have an unlimited budget, infrastructure capacity building won't be such a problem. However, usually, even the most wealthy businessmen prefer to spend money within reason. And advice for scaling mobile app development efforts would definitely come in handy in this respect. To be precise, what should be done to ensure the growth of the project as efficiently and affordably as possible?
Tips For Scaling Apps
The Gartner report offers the following advice for scaling mobile app development efforts at your organization.
Prioritize App Development So App Quality Is Not Sacrificed for Speed
The report notes that apps are typically built on a first-come-first-served basis. That means that the most important apps often take a back seat because they were late to the queue, even though they should get top priority. The report says, "This lack of value-driven prioritization leads to inefficient use of IT resources and degradation in the quality of apps delivered."
So businesses should factor in two key pieces about each app to be developed: Whether it will be easy or hard to build, and how high or low an impact the app will have on the organization. Based on that, enterprises will be able to be properly prioritize which apps should be built first.
Create an Agile API Layer to Optimize Mobile Integration
Integration is often the most time-consuming and difficult part of building an app. This leads to delays in app development. So Gartner recommends building an API layer to make integrations easier and faster. It recommends several different methods: using enterprise mobile back-end service tools, using API management tools for large-scale deployments, and using a rapid mobile app development (RMAD) tool.
Use RMAD Tools to Deliver More Apps
RMAD tools use a low-code or coding-optional approach, allowing someone with little experience to quickly build a mobile app, yet also let experienced developers add more advanced code, if needed. They're end-to-end tools for building mobile apps, including backend integration and front-end app development. Using them, the report says, can dramatically speed up mobile app development.
Use a Product Management Model to Mobile Agile Development
Companies need to treat mobile apps as products, not just apps, Gartner says. It warns, though, that doing that mean "more than just applying agile development methodologies. It should include best practices for product management in general."
That means making sure product managers in charge of apps are given the proper authority, and ensuring that collaboration among different groups is constant and ongoing.
Alpha Anywhere is one of the most highly rated RMAD tools. InfoWorld named it a top mobile app development leader and enterprises give it a perfect score on Gartner Peer Insights.
