Ever been tapping through your phone on some of your favourite platforms from slots with good examples of some here to video players and social media and think to yourself, I wish I had my own app? It’s a very common question, and it’s often asked just how difficult is it to make an app – technology has certainly allowed for things to become much easier, and making an app is one of them. But just how tough is it to make an app of your own?
To start it’s important to know what the aspirations for the app would be – there have been examples of very simply apps, much like the start of a basics in programming course where you’d learn how to print “Hello World”, there are apps with the simple purpose of sending “Yo!” to another user. There are also much more sophisticated apps which processes much more complex, and these won’t be the target – so sticking on the simpler end of things, they’re actually not all that tough at all, it is just a bit of an involved process throughout.
There’s typically a flow involved with making an app too which may make it look more complicated than it is – you’ll need to go through the research and pre-planning to ensure you’re working through the project with direction and purpose, even if it’s just an app for your own personal use, you don’t want to get lost along the way. Next comes the mental prototyping and sketching stage where you refine the plan and create the plan of how things will actually work, and you’ll use these stages to determine if your plan is actually possible, particularly within your own skillset. Finally you’ll start the prototyping stage, you’ll put your plan into action and make a working model as proof of concept, if everything goes well, you’ll be able to move onto the finished product.
The are tools out there that can help you out by putting in much of the leg work, much like platforms like Wordpress changed website building too, or you could go the more traditional route of coding by hand – there are a huge number of tutorials out there to help you get started on whichever mobile platform you’ll be working on, as well as existing code that you may be able to work from as a base.
There’s certainly a learning process, particularly with how involved each step is, but if you’re willing to commit the time and have a vision for what you’d like, it ultimately isn’t all that hard – if you have something in mind, why not try to put it down and see if it can be a functioning project?
