Lean Mobile App Development: Apply Lean startup methodologies to develop successful iOS and Android apps

Lean Mobile App Development

Apply Lean startup methodologies to develop successful iOS and Android apps

Mike van Drongelen

Adam Dennis

Richard Garabedian

Alberto Gonzalez

Aravind Krishnaswamy

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Lean Mobile App Development

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First published: November 2017

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Credits

About the Authors

Mike van Drongelen works as a mobile solution consultant in the Netherlands. He develops Android, iOS, and .NET solutions for various customers and has some start-up projects of his own. Creating successful software using less code is what he is aiming for. He thinks developing software is fun, but waste is not. Too often, the business guys do not fully understand the tech guys and the other way around. This, among other insights, explains why he is interested in the lean start-up methodology and why he thinks it is important to apply it to mobile application development too. When he is not developing apps, he likes to go on trips on his motorbike or with his 2 CV.

Adam Dennis is a seasoned unicorn who has run political campaigns, created tech training centers for at-risk youth, and founded and sold a successful SaaS. Adam, as VP of Product Development, now runs more than 10 software teams for Dominion Dealer Solutions, an enterprise SaaS serving US autodealers. Adam promotes team excellence, fact-driven decision-making, and failing fast. At Dominion, Adam integrated lean / agile methods and coding best practices into all his teams. Adam lives on the island of Antigua. When offline, Adam etches glass and enjoys life with his wife and daughters.

Richard Garabedian has spent more than 20 years developing software for businesses ranging from defense contractors to small internet start-ups. He currently works for Dominion Dealer Solutions as the Director of Development for mobile and two desktop applications. Rich loves the Java programming language and is an avid Android user. He also pulls his own espresso shots and, according to his wife, spends too many hours video gaming. Outside of work, Rich is either competitive cycling or chasing after his three amazing daughters.

Alberto Gonzalez has spent his career providing creative leadership and delivering premium digital design for a wide array of clients that span from small businesses / agencies to some of the largest digital media companies worldwide. He has over 20 years of experience leading teams in award winning digital product design and marketing efforts. He currently serves as the Director of User Experience for Dominion Dealer Solutions, an enterprise SaaS serving autodealers and OEMs in the US.

Aravind Krishnaswamy is an entrepreneur and tech executive. He lives in Bangalore, India, with his wife, Monami, and his dog. He's passionate about all things cloud, mobile, and social. He cofounded Levitum and is fortunate to work with a wonderful set of friends. In the past, he lived and worked in Silicon Valley, where he was a part of one IPO and exit. He also holds a patent for work done during his MS research at Iowa State University. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis, writing, and travelling with his talented wife and dog. He's also a frequent public speaker at a number of product and tech conferences.

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Table of Contents

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

Yes, There Is an App for That

The app ecosystem

Not every app has a flappy ending

An introduction to the Lean Startup methodology

Getting your users hooked on your app

Summary

Lean Startup Primer

The Business Model Canvas

Key partners

Key activities

Value propositions

Customer relationships

Customer segments

Channels

Cost structure

Revenue stream

Example BMC - mobile marketplace app

Summary of the BMC

Lean Canvas

One metric that matters

Agile development and customer development

The MVP

Summary

Challenges in Applying Lean to Building Mobile Apps

Higher design bar

Apple's App Store submission cycles

Inability to dynamically load libraries

Cross-platform releases

Getting users to download an app

Maintaining app ratings

Summary

An Agile Workflow in a Nutshell

An Agile workflow

Kanban

Scrum

Epic, Stories, and Tasks

Scrum team

The daily stand-up

Backlog refinement

Definition of Ready

Sprint planning

Definition of Done

Sprint review, planning, and retrospective

Tools that you can use

Summary

A Pragmatic Approach

Timeboxed programming

Concierge service

Is it crappy or perfect?

Release early and often

How do you get started with nothing?

The chicken and egg problem

Fake it until you make it

Become an expert

Grab and adapt

Offer an app or a service that does not yet exist

How to keep things well structured

Design patterns

Become independent

Data layer

Are there any shortcuts?

Mash-up

Summary

MVP is Always More Minimal Than You Think

What is MVP?

Benefits of MVP

How to define your MVP

Building MVP

Bringing components together to form an MVP

Applying MVP to enterprise

Fail fast – validate everything

Apply agile prototyping - eliminate tech debt

Lean UX cycles – the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop

Advantages of a feedback-focused development model

Phases of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop

Phase I - Build

Phase II - Measure

Phase III - Learn

10 essential UX testing methods

Iterate and evolve - from viable to lovable

Five tips to go from viable to lovable

Summary

Minimal Viable Product Case Studies

Fun with Charades - Initial vision

The big ifs

Hypothesis 1

Hypothesis 2

Hypothesis 3

Hypothesis 4

Hypothesis 5

The conundrum

What we did well

What we could have done better

Summary

Cloud Solutions for App Experiments

Do you need to create a backend yourself?

Leverage cloud solutions for app experiments

Things to consider

The story of Parse

Strategic considerations

What services are available as MBaaS?

Technical considerations

Canvapp - an Android MVP app using Firebase

Sign up for Firebase

Layout

Dependencies

Models

Firebase dashboard

Summary

Native, Hybrid, or Cross-Platform

Who is your audience?

Measure - don't guess or use intuition

What are your technical requirements?

What are your technical capabilities?

Native versus hybrid - the strengths and weaknesses

Native apps

Hybrid apps

Pros and cons of going native

The biggest benefits of going native

Pros and cons of going hybrid

The ugly truth - a little hybrid doesn't hurt when you have clear goals

Making the final decision - factors to consider

Leveraging cross-platform development tools

Adobe PhoneGap

Xamarin

Appcelerator

How to choose the right tool

Summary

There Is an API for That!

Succeed or fail fast

What is in a mash-up solution?

Publishing an API

Lego or Duplo?

APIs versus SDKs

Dependency management

Android

iOS

Available APIs

An iOS app proving our hypotheses, MoviUber

Hypothesis

Validating the idea through customer interviews

Let's build an app

Movie locations

Uber

IMDB

Displaying locations on a map

Uber integration

Enriching the data

Look! No code. Prove your hypotheses with IFTT

Recipes, channels, and triggers

Summary

Onboarding and Registration

What is user onboarding all about?

Why does it matter?

Pirate metrics (AARRR)

Higher conversion

How to lower the barrier?

Single sign on using a social network like Twitter or Facebook

Show us what you have got

Phone number sign-up - a great alternative

Continuous onboarding - complete the user profile later

Tell a story - an example onboarding app

Onboarding sign-up when needed

Implementation

Summary

Do Things That Do Not Scale

What we mean by things that do not scale

Three reasons to do things that do not scale

Improved testing and data collection

Failure that can be controlled

Development of products that are more lovable

How to acquire early adopters and establish a small-scale laboratory

Focusing on a narrow marketplace

Manually recruiting early adopters

Perfecting the user experience

How to transition from an unscalable MVP to scalable code

Focusing on learning with wireframes and prototypes

Zeplin

InVision

UserTesting.com

Focusing on scaling and sustainability

Writing perfect code versus getting the job done

Automation and optimization

How to handle technical debt

Summary

Play Store and App Store Hacks

What is an experiment?

A/B testing as a technique for experimentation

Why perform split testing?

Store listing tests

App testing

Why do you care?

The competition is intense

Experiments work

Why running experiments with Google Play or App Store is hard

Obstacles to testing with store listings

Different app listing requirements

No standard way to measure results

Limited infrastructure for A/B testing

Why it is difficult to run parallel experiments

Hacks to workaround the challenges

Store listing hacks

How do users find apps in the first place?

Use microtesting to collect data

Running app tests

Summary

A/B Testing Your App

Why do statistics matter?

About actionable metrics

Acquisition

Engagement

Conversions and pirate metrics

Get to know your audience

Split testing can help us to improve our apps

Keep the differences between variations subtle

Tools for split testing and getting actionable metrics

Using Firebase for split testing

Summary

Growing Traction and Improving Retention

Traction

Freemium or premium only?

Improving retention

Notifications

Local notifications

Push notifications

In-app notifications

Services for push notifications

Implementation

Setup

Handling an incoming notification

Sending a notification

Summary

Scaling Strategies

Make it scalable but do not scale it right away

A scalable backend

Cloud-based storage and processing

Seen from a client perspective

You should know when you need to scale up or to scale down

A real horror story about an app backend that did not scale

Captain hindsight to the rescue!

To scale up or to refactor? That is the question

Auto-scaling

Summary

Monetization and Pricing Strategy

Monetization strategies

Selling or upselling your app

Selling a product or service in the real world

Offering your app for free and selling your service

Advertisements

Monetizing your data

Pricing strategy

Price perception

Android or iOS first?

In-app purchase product types

In-app billing

See how in-app purchases can be implemented

The case of the Empurror

Applying a pricing strategy to your store listing

Summary

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment = Continuous Integration and Delivery

Continuous Integration

Continuous Delivery

Repository and Git workflow

Automated tests

An example of a continuous workflow for an Android app

Building variants

The Gradle way

productFlavors

sourceSets

buildTypes

signingConfigs

Using TeamCity as build agent

Automated deploy and delivery

Self hosted

HockeyApp or Fabric beta

Fastlane, alpha/beta Play Store, and iTunes beta

DevOps

Summary

Building an Unfair Advantage

Introduction - it's not just about your app

Digging your moat with intangible assets

Protecting your work with IP laws

Why you should care - Business-destroying patent trolls

How IP laws can protect your app and business

How to defend your intellectual property

Going on the legal offensive

The network effect and platforms

The network effect

The platform effect

Making use of vertical markets

Why target vertical markets?

How successful companies exploit vertical control

Switching costs

How to use switching costs to improve user retention

How to decrease competitors' switching costs

Good customer support

The right perspective on customer service

A recipe for great customer service

How successful companies use customer service to improve profits

A look at some great tools to help with customer support

The power of a well-developed brand name

Reasons to brand yourself

How to build your brand

Tools to monitor your brand via social media and app stores

Building a brand on a budget

Branding case studies

Summary

The Flyng Case Study

That sounds awesome, but what is Flyng?

The team

Mitchell Trulli

Daniel Guthrie

Mike van Drongelen

The other contributors

The MVP

A distributed team

Flyng's USPs

Growing a user base

The business model

Customer segments

Value propositions

Customer relationships

Channels

Revenue Streams

Key resources

Key activities

Partners

Cost structure

Unfair advantage

Getting feedback

Unvalidated assumptions

A zombie feature

Feedback and actionable metrics

Split testing

Vision

Technical considerations

Parse server hosted at Back4App

Real-time data

The other dependencies

Queries

Complex operations

Push notifications

Crash reports

Releases

Summary

Appendix

Reading list and references

Preface

The lean start-up methodology has become a well-known term in the start-up land. There are many books covering this (and related methodologies) such as The Lean Startup (Eric ries), Running Lean (Ash Maurya), The start-up owner manual (Steve Blank), and The Four steps to the epiphany (Steve Blank).

The lean start-up methodology is, among other things, about reducing waste by gathering feedback earlier. 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.

Your start-up, or even an existing app, needs multiple but short iterations to find out what works and what does not. That raises questions such as: Does your app actually solve a problem worth solving it? And how does the lean start-up methodology come into this?

All the books are currently focused on business-oriented members of your start-up or company. However, a pragmatic approach for the technical-oriented members of a company, with a mobile first strategy, is missing in particular. Theory is cool but a practical approach could help developers to move faster.

This book tries to fill that gap. It explains the elements of the Lean Start Up methodology and elaborates on research and on implementation. In particular, the focus is on things that need to be done from a technical point of view. That makes this book a down-to-earth guide on how to apply the lean start-up methodology to real Android and iOS development. As such, it comes without any mumbo-jumbo. If you want real action and if you want to develop an app that people need and really want to use, then this guide is for you.

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.

What you need for this book

In the first place, this book is to inspire technical-oriented cofounders of start-ups and existing business technical leaders seeking to integrate lead into their development operations. In addition, there are some Android and iOS code samples that we discuss to explain some of the concepts. Although the concept is more important than the code, you can try the sample for yourself. Where applicable, you can find a link to the Github repository, containing the code.

For the Android examples, you need to have Android Studio 3 (or above) and the Android SDKs installed on your computer. Android Studio is available as a free download for Windows, OSX, and other operating systems. The Android examples are written in Kotlin and Java.

The samples for iOS requires xCode 9 or above (xCode is available on OSX only and you need to have a paid Apple developer's account). The iOS examples are written in Swift 4.

Some examples require a (free) registration at Firebase, Facebook, Fabric, or other services.

Who this book is for

In particular, the audience of this book will be technical cofounders, developers, or CTO's working in a start-up environment. However, if you are a CTO, Development Director, or developer of an existing software company, then this is for you too. Lean, when applied well, helps start-ups and existing copanies equally.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

All Android and iOS examples and descriptions are based on Android Studio, xCode and various third party services, running on a OSX machine.

Console input is shown as:

$ gem install cocoapods

A block of code is set as follows:

func refresh (sender: AnyObject!) {

...

        let cngQuery = client.queryDataset(wwmu-gmzc)

        cngQuery.orderAscending(title).get { res in

            switch res {

            case .Dataset (let data):

                self.data = data

...

        }

    }

Data (XML, JSON or otherwise) is shown as:

UberClientID

    your uber client id

    UberCallbackURI

    LSApplicationQueriesSchemes

        uber

Where you need to apply your own client ID, API key or API secret it, for example, reads as: your client_id within the code or the data.

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen.

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Yes, There Is an App for That

There is an app for almost everything already, or so it seems. Creating a profitable app is not easy, but if you develop your app in a smart way, your company can be successful too!

This book aims to help you build a profitable business around your mobile app using the the Lean Startup methodology. Unlike many other books, this one is not only for the business-oriented members of your organization. Instead, it is a very practical guide, explaining what tools and techniques can be used to develop apps the Lean way. It is important that technical-oriented people also become enthusiastic about the Lean Startup methodology, which is the reason why this book is primarily aimed at technical co-owners and developers. They need to have the right tools in order to apply the methodology to their daily mobile app development. We will discuss how you can save time and reduce waste by using a number of techniques and tools.

On the other hand, the book will be of interest for nontechnical people too. It would be ideal if they could obtain a better understanding of the underlying technical processes involved in app development. We need the business folks to find and clearly define the problems, so that the technical folks can deliver the right solutions for them. Everyone needs to collaborate closely. If you have a good understanding of each other's perspectives, you can achieve much better results.

If your startup is missing a technical cofounder, then now is the time to find one. Do not outsource the development (yet). That often does not work well when your startup is at an early stage.

In this chapter of the book, we will first look at the Lean Startup