Mobile and Web Development In 2022: 10 Biggest Challenges and Their Solutions

The internet has changed the way we relate to the universe. Beyond browsing websites and tapping on mobile devices, the two- web and mobile apps together represent an entirely new digital lifestyle. Now, lives are facilitated by a myriad of web and mobile applications, all of them transforming the experience into an integrated, cohesive experience, that’s ‘on’ all the time.

The web and mobile app development acting as a glue for all the industry verticals is now enabling the centerpiece of digital convergence. The interactive experiences engineered, and unmet needs met by the digital gateways (web and mobile apps) for the real world have set standards and new expectations for people, which are imperative to fulfill.

The technological progress that’s increasing innovations rapidly to cope with evolving customers’ preferences and changing market trends, is posing challenges for the mobile app development company and web application development company.

Filling the void in the physical world through mobile and web app development is not so rosy. When mobile or web app ideas start taking shape, a variety of app development challenges arise at various stages from planning to final delivery.

The web and mobile app development challenges would vary for organizations depending on the app’s niche, complexity, and others. In this blog, we will discuss the challenges that cannot be ignored by the web and mobile app development services and solutions to cope with them separately.

What are the challenges coming up during mobile app development?

• Choosing the right development approach

Before partnering with mobile app development, the entrepreneur must be sure about the app development technology to leverage. This development approach decision- native app development, cross-platform development, and hybrid development must be taken at the early stage. It’s challenging for businesses to decide at the earliest.

Solution: knowing the pros and cons of the development approaches and then matching them with your business needs helps in making the right selection. Native development involves developing an app for a specific platform, say Android or iOS. The native apps perform better, are reliable, and are considered safe to use. However, building the app for different platforms doubles the effort, time, and money investment.  

Cross-platform development is a perfect fit to build and launch the app on multiple platforms at the cost of one app development. This approach increases the reliance on cross-platform frameworks, so you need to match the functionalities offered by them to meet the business needs or not. You need to be very choosy when it comes to the framework section. The time-savvy and inexpensive approach sometimes make you compromise on app quality and lack of features as well.

Hybrid app development renders high performance as opposed to a cross-platform development approach due to standard coding. The hybrid apps comprise web app and native app elements wherein the web apps are encapsulated under a native app shell. With one source code, the app is launched for multiple platforms. Unfortunately, the user experience gets compromised as hybrid apps can’t replicate UX that native apps deliver.

• Crafting an intuitive UI that enrich UX

The app’s interface creates an indelible impression on the customers’ minds during the first visit. The UI and UX engineers are liable to design the app’s UI that’s clean and clutter-free. It’s challenging for design gurus to build a usable app and deliver the best experiences.

Solution: The designers and UX testers must test the app if it catches the eyeballs at first glance, graphics and other design elements are placed aptly and clutter-free way, navigation is seamless, and the app’s flow syncs well with the target audience’s expectations. The UI and UX testing, user survey, and feedback from beta users would help in rendering a great user experience.  

• Device compatibility and resolution issues

This is one of the important aspects of UI and UX designing, where ensuring the app works well on a range of mobile devices is important. If the app doesn’t perform as expected on famous devices or OS versions, it ruins the user experience. The screen resolution issues, and device compatibility are the biggest concerns that mobile app development companies face during mobile app testing.

Solution: When the mobile app is under development, the team should check the app is compatible with all the devices that the target audience uses the most. It improves the app accessibility and ensures you won’t lose the users to the competition. Also, referring to WCAG guidelines helps in catering to small screen size and device compatibility issues.  

• Seizing an edge in the crowded market

Managing funds and finance for app development don’t finish your job. Making a well-developed app stand out in the market is the biggest challenge in front of businesses. The mobile app market which is overcrowded with billions of apps makes things more difficult. The various strategies for app promotion make things more complex.

Solution: you need to research the market, competition, and unmet needs of the target audience. The research helps you create a USP around the app that highlights how the app fills the void. Plus, promoting the app on various channels- social platforms, affiliate marketing, PPC, or marketplaces according to time and budget helps a ton. All things together make the app discoverable by the users who are looking for such an app in the app store.  

• Building an up-to-date app

Every mobile app has a lifecycle that needs to be managed to keep the app updated with the market after its launch. The smooth launch doesn’t guarantee that the app will keep the customers glued to the app. The app must be updated at regular intervals, which is challenging to add new features or modify the existing ones.

Solution: The precise go-to-market strategy with a long-term vision helps in making the mobile app top the chart constantly. Continuous app testing would help in knowing how the app is performing under increasing load. The analytical data from user testing showcase the features that go well with the target audience and what needs to be removed.  

• Customer acquisition and retention

With technological progress, the app market has become a dynamic marketplace where users expect something new every month. This is one of the aspects of app management. The app must be assessed to figure out the key areas to improve and make the most out of the scaling opportunities. Otherwise, increasing customer acquisition and retention becomes challenging after a while.

Solution: continuously conduct surveys through forums or in-app surveys to collect user data about the app. Thereafter use the data to improve the existing app that increases the customer satisfaction levels. Analytical engines are a great help.

• Creating a security net that no one can tear 

The mobile app development team makes every effort to keep the app security tight and prevent malware attacks. Enterprise apps with complex features and structures are more vulnerable to cybercrime. Dealing with and preventing cyberattacks is challenging for the IT teams.

Solution: The security walls must be tested constantly because the unsecured apps are removed from the app stores. Implementing the best coding practices, defining data access levels, taking data back-ups regularly, data encryption, and built-in anti-malware software help in raising cybersecurity standards.  

• Integration with existing systems 

When large enterprises look for new mobile app development to meet the growing operational needs, then making the new app seamlessly integrate with existing applications is tricky. Besides, ensuring that the app won’t hamper other apps’ performance and keep them bespoke is challenging.

Solution: the development team should be aware of the systems with which the app will be integrated at a later stage. It helps the team to plan and place all the features in place that facilitate newly developed app integration hassle-free. The ERP system development is another way to deal with backend challenges.  

• Finding the best mobile app development services provider

Teaming up with the wrong development company costs a ton to the organizations. The poorly developed fail to address the user’s challenges. At the same time, finding the right app developer is a hard nut to crack in. Creating and managing an in-house team is an arduous task.

Solution: Don’t go with the inexpensive option as it may become a costly mistake at a later stage. Research and choose the company, interview the team, ask for a portfolio, communicate with existing clients, and then finalize the development company to work with. Also, make sure the company enables custom solution development from scratch to meet the business needs. 

What are the challenges arising during web app development?

• Ensuring cross-browser compatibility

The web application development company finds it difficult to ensure that the website works on all internet browsers and different screen sizes. The problem grows by manifolds when legacy browsers don’t support advanced features, security tools, and modernized layouts.

IE browsers are the best instance of it, which is why Microsoft decided to discontinue IE services to the world. Consequently, the web developers need to make extra efforts to make the website compatible with different browsers. The layout differences, Doctype errors, and HTML/CSS validation makes the web app development- challenging.

Solution: Testing the website for checking cross-browser compatibility is a good thing that involves switching between browsers for testing purposes helps in achieving the best results. Counter with layout differences leveraging Flexbox, CSS grids, and floats. Deal with HTML/CSS validation issues by resetting the stylesheet.

• Engineering unmatched user experience

The UI design quotient has a direct impact on the UX. Aligning UX designing process with UI designing helps in crafting the layout that appeals to the target users. It sounds good, but the reality is different because making the front-end development team and web designing team in rhythm is challenging.

The UX research is not the solution to build the app wearing the user’s lens as it’s a time-consuming process. Each browser with different screen sizes poses several challenges before web UI developers. Introducing user-centeredness in UI design while keeping all the factors in mind is also important. Oops! A lot of challenges to overcome.

Solution: creating the user-focused design is feasible with online surveys, a parallel designing approach, and guerilla research. Also, the research for target users’ location, demographics, market trends, and preferences makes user-centered web designing possible. The ongoing research and analysis for customer journey and interaction at multiple touchpoints enable UX optimization. 

The selection of the right web frameworks such as Angular, React, or Bootstrap that is not platform-specific helps a ton. The frameworks offer ready-to-use components that make user-optimized UI development viable.

• Making the app perform to the notch

The enterprise web application development company finds it challenging to achieve maximum loading speed in the era of customers who show zero tolerance for website loading for more than 2-3 seconds. Various tools such as largest contentful paint, first input delay, first content paint, cumulative layout shift is used to check website responsiveness and loading performance. But speed optimization can help in achieving a higher conversion rate, which is challenging.

Solution: Several UI elements and components optimization ensure improved web performance. For instance, code optimization tools help in keeping the code lightweight that enable immediate loading of the content. The image size optimization tools such as imagify, image optimizer, and WP Smush ensure faster loading. Minimizing the use of plugins also improves the site performance, which helps in increasing SERP and improves traffic to the website. 

• Building scalable architecture

You cannot guarantee the number of visitors at the time of website development. The number increases gradually, which requires scaling the website while maintaining the performance. Scaling the server is not a big deal, but scaling architecture is a massive challenge that pops-up speed problems, concurrency problems, consistency problems, and search problems.

Solution: Both frontend and backend architecture need to deal with separately. Hosting the backend on the cloud enables the app’s server to handle the increasing number of user requests simultaneously. It helps in eliminating concurrency and speed problems. 

The frontend scalability is enhanced with React-based component-driven architecture development. Later, the use of headless architecture helps in separating functionalities by decoupling frontend and CMS. It enables consistency problem removal.

• Securing web app against vulnerabilities

The enterprise web application development company has accepted the fact that growing cyberattacks have made enterprise data vulnerable to fraud. Shielding the website against increasing malware attacks is exhaustive. For instance, the unfiltered data passing to the browser leads to injection flaws. Broken authentication puts the data at risk and leads to identity theft. Security misconfiguration, cryptographic failure, insecure design, server-side request forgery, and others are common vulnerabilities.

Solution: the injection flaws are prevented by employing an advanced algorithm that keeps malicious input out. The secured framework can help in addressing identification and authentication failures. For instance, Django’s authentication features facilitate website protection from SQL injections and cross-site forgery. The user data encryption following RSA and AES standards is a good approach.   

• Seamless integrations

Third-party integrations such as payment gateway, maps, multi-language, multi-currency, social integration, and others facilitate easy-to-use functionalities in ready-to-use form. Third-party integration benefit is complemented with the challenge of dealing with customization and security. Plus, the technology difference between your website architecture and the third-party plugins makes things difficult. It can be ironed out through custom APIs, but it’s a hard nut to crack.

Solution:The best way to counter the API problems is to ensure that changes made by third-party service providers stay in sync with existing website architecture. QA team can connect with third-party vendors to gain complete data about changes to be made in API code or website architecture if possible. The changes made in API code should parallelly appear in architecture to ensure changes are occurring as expected. Continuous upgrades and website code maintenance guarantee sustainable performance.  

• Providing maintenance and support services 24/7

The technical ball won’t roll over as the website goes live. The challenges begin popping after the launch such as performance issues, security concerns, responsiveness, and others that are essential to address. Continuous maintenance and support are all important. The websites built with monolithic architecture cannot guarantee zero downtime during maintenance. Additionally updating the website from the core for security is full of hassles.

Solution: The maintenance challenges are best addressed by continuous monitoring to fix the issues proactively. Embracing microservice architecture enables independent service usage that facilitates upgrading a single function without affecting the entire system of functionalities. It diminishes the downtime and latency problem. 

Summing it up

Achieving the right outcome is essential to guarantee winning results in the end. The mobile app development company and web application development company must ensure the possible solutions to the aforementioned challenges to help businesses achieve their goals. Every business has its unique objective that leads to unique challenges. Each challenge must be dealt with differently by the development team. If you are looking for a company that provides smart solutions for mobile and web app development challenges, AIMDek is the right choice to give the right solution in your hand.