Everyone wants to develop an application that is compatible with as many devices as possible. But be careful, this is not always relevant and it will have a very significant impact on your budget. So before you start, here are 3 tips that will help you make this choice.

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1 - Know your target audience and their uses

Whether you are launching an innovative product, whether you are inspired by an application that is popular abroad, or if you are developing a business application; whether there is an existing one or not; meeting your end users is essential. Indeed, changing a person's habits is not an easy task. It is therefore necessary to understand its uses, its behaviors, but especially its problems. Once you've identified a specific problem, focus on the solution and go for it.

To get to know your users, you can:

• Conduct qualitative interviews with a targeted panel of users
• Conduct user tests, if you already have a functional product
• Conduct surveys or quantitative studies
• Decrypt analytics data in case there is an existing one or if your users are already using your services via a website

Once you have done this work, you will have initial trends on the use of each OS by your users, which will help you:

• to choose your OS, if you need to make a choice
• to define the functionalities to be prioritized to meet the needs of your users

2 - Know the numbers of your market

However, it is not always easy to carry out large-scale studies, which is why it is good to know the key figures of your market.

Today in Europe, Android and iOS capture nearly 95% of the market shares. It is therefore legitimate to want to develop your application on these two platforms. But if you take a closer look at the numbers, choosing only one OS can be a good calculation. In Spain, for example, 92.3% of mobile users are on Android. So, if you want to optimize your budget, choosing only Android may be an option!

That said, in the first quarter of 2016, the Apple Store generated nearly twice as much revenue as the Play Store. This means that iPhone users are more likely to spend money via an app.

Thus, depending on your business model, it will be necessary to determine whether you absolutely must develop your application on all OS or if one of them is sufficient.

Finally, if you are developing a business application for your employees and they are all equipped with the same OS, don't waste your time or money, focus on this OS.

3 - Define a scope of development

Once you have obtained all this information, you will be in a position to determine the “definition of Done ”. That is to say the list of Devices and OS versions on which the application should run and what the team is committed to to consider a feature complete. Indeed, if your target is mainly composed of Digital Natives ultra-connected, including the iPhone 4 in your definition of done will not be necessary.

The most important thing to know is that a comprehensive definition of done will have an impact on your budget. In fact, for each Device and for each version it will be necessary to carry out tests and sometimes make adjustments in the code for the functionality to have the right behavior.

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4 - Choosing the right technology

That's it, you have chosen on which OS to develop your application. But it's not over, now you have to look at the technology you are going to adopt: native or cross-platform, trying to get as close as possible to the 5 angles of this pentagon.

Be aware that among the technologies in vogue, React Native, developed by Facebook, is already a reference.

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Discover our Migration offer from native technologies to multiplatform React Native and Flutter technologies!