If mobile apps used to be luxury, now they became necessity. They became a great tool for companies to strengthen their online presence as well as to build a more engaging customer community.

In today’s article we give 5 tips that could be of a great help when developing and designing your mobile app. Let’s take a look at them:

1. Do smaller releases quickly: Smaller but quick iterations are being highly recommended to developers and designers. Iteration is the key to perfection. Thus if you iterate frequently you will probably end up making more progress in the long run. This is what Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder of Instagram advises.

“Do fewer things more quickly, rather than waiting a long time between big releases as Instagram did. It’s not a mistake, it just took us a long time to do v 2.0. But I’d like to move us into smaller iterations more quickly because I think that if you get into a rhythm of releases you end up making more progress in the long run”, says Systrom.

2. Design for touch: While designing your app, you need to think from user’s perspective. What does this mean? It means that you need to get into the shoes of the user, the way he/she holds the phone, where the thumb sits, the spots the user will look at mostly, the spots and the way the user perceives natural to respond to, and so on. Before designing for others try to understand others behavior and the way they want and will use the app. This will help you a lot in designing a usable app. Many times great apps fail because they didn’t understand the user-device interaction, or they didn’t respond to it accordingly.

“Beyond button layout, think about how you want to indicate touch feedback — physically or visually. While the BlackBerry Storm tried the whole clickable screen thing, the truth is, haptic feedback (such as vibrations), while great for games or for alerts, doesn’t usually work very well for touch-based devices like mobile phones. Instead, use visual cues to show that an item is either touchable or has been touched. For instance, think about how the various keys on the iPhone keyboard grow in size when you touch them. That increase in size is feedback”, writes Mashable.

3. Develop for multiple platforms: Logically, developing an app for multiple platforms will help you reach out more customers. Moreover it could enable selling the app at a lower price which eventually could increase the chances of a customer purchasing the app. However “do note that developing an application for multiple platforms is a time-consuming task and you might miss on some of the features available in a particular device or platform”, writes TheGeeksClub.

4. Version control:  This is probably a familiar concept to most web developers. However, this might not be the case with most designers. Why version control? Because it enables you “to have an unlimited number of people working on the same code base, without having to constantly send files back and forth. You can instantly browse previous “commits” to your repository and revert to earlier versions if something happens”, writes SmashingMagazine. Moreover, “If/when a bug is introduced, you can see the list of possible changes that caused it”, writes HT Applications.

Here you can find top open-source version control systems and tools that make setting up a version control system easy.

5. Compete with yourself: When developing your app or introducing new versions, think of who will use it, how it will be used, where it will be used, and finally how it can be improved taking into account the previous questions. Once you have an idea you believe in, forget about others. If you start acting on the basis of what others are doing, you will end up following them and eventually you will lose your focus.

Keith Rabois, COO at Square, says: “We look at ourselves in the mirror everyday….it doesn’t really matter what other people do. We really strictly believe that. Insofar as a lot of companies start with the premise of, I have to worry about this feature, and they send around emails (asking), ‘Do we have that?’ We try to take ourselves out of that. It’s our job to build amazing products and we either succeed or fail depending on how amazing they are.”

Any thoughts on this? What do you think new, fresh designers and developers should focus on when developing their mobile app? Please share your views and opinions in Comments section.