This is an era of mobility and billions of people are now using smartphones and the mobile apps on daily basis across the world. To beat competition, every business now wants to have a mobile app. But building an app is a costly and intensive process, both in terms of time taken and financial resources required. Many times it happens that although you want to build a mobile app but you don’t have enough budget to build an expensive app or you want to get to market quickly to cash the opportunity. What should you do now? Should you trim app features or look elsewhere to speed up the application development process?
In this article, we will discuss about the top tools which you can use to speed up your app development process so that you can release your mobile app quickly to the market with lesser cost for building an app. The tools which we will discuss now also help you to speed up your project development and as your project will be completed in lesser time hence you can spend more time on fixing the bugs and implementing features.

Let’s start

Parse Server

The first tool about which we will discuss is Parse Server. It is an open source cloud back-end with lots of additional services like databases, push notifications, user management and file storage etc.

It works like given below:-

First you have to create an instance of Parse Server on a popular platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Heroku.
After that connect your Parse Server instance to a popular Database-as-a-service (DaaS) like mLab.
Then integrate your app with your new Parse Service instance and start using its tools.
Success! Now you have a full-fledged cloud based back-end service for you.

Parse Server is an open source and you can set up your Parse Server instance on a number of infrastructure providers like Heroku, AWS, Azure, Google App Engine, Digital Ocean etc.
Good thing for Mobile App Creator is that Parse Server connects with many back-end tools which are useful for the app developers such as push notifications and file storage. For these services, you will need another service provider like Amazon S3 or OneSignal.
One of the best feature in Parse Server are Cloud functions. With JavaScript, you can code simple tasks which get executed whenever an event in Parse Server is started, like uploading a file or storing a database object.

Using Parse Server, app developers need to spend less time on building back-end services and maintaining webservers and more time on building apps and features. It is also scalable, easy to maintain, customizable and comes with lots of useful inbuilt tools.
Although Parse Server is open source and free but you will need infrastructure like Heroku to run Parse Server. Simple setup starts at $20/month.

Supported platforms are iOS, macOS, tvOS, Android, JavaScript, React, .NET, PHP, Embedded C etc.

Fastlane

Fastlane is a famous tool which focuses on continuous integration and continuous deployment i.e. CI/CD. That means whenever you create a new app version, it is automatically pushed and published to end-users or beta testers. Fastlane supports your workflow with automated tools and processes.
Just suppose that you Hire Mobile Developer and he made an app and you have released version 1.0 in the App store. After few weeks you have found and fixed some bugs and updated a new feature. Now you want to distribute the improved version 1.1 of your app to beta testers and after that want to release it for all users.

You will do the following:-

You will create a new build and publish it is App Store connect.
You will manually make new apps screenshots for every device model.
You will update your app’s metadata and screenshots etc.
You will push the beta build to the testers.

If you are the only one person which is developer then you can manage it but if you are working in a distributed team and you are working on multiple app versions at the same time – the current version, with fixes and the 2.0 with new features. Or if you are pushing out app updates every one or two weeks then the deployment of your app and its manual tasks can take up lots of time. But you can speed up and automate that process by using Fastlane. By this your app will not stuck between QA and the lead developer who is on vacation.

Fastlane will help by these ways: –

It will automate the creation of app screenshots, for multiple device models and languages.
It will automate distributing app beta builds, like setting of the build version, managing code, uploading the app and logging app changes.
It will automate the app publishing workflow, setting metadata, uploading screenshots and submitted the app for review.
It will automate code signing in your team i.e. share development keys, certificates privately between the developers in your team.

In short we can say that Fastlane supports many actions, like uploading your app build, and workflows which connect multiple actions. You can customize these actions. Fastlane integrates with the most popular CI/CD tools.

Best thing about Fastlane is that it is free and an open source tool. That means developers can contribute to the tool and build their own actions and plugins. Every Fastlane tool is documented well including examples and best practices which makes it so much popular.

It supports both the platforms i.e. iOS and Android.

B4A (Basic for Android)

This tool is highly useful when you are on a mission to inject speed into the development of our Android app. This tool has features which make sure you achieve considerable rapid development of your mobile app.

B4A or Basic for Android gives you the ability to develop Android apps by making use of BASIC, one of the most simpler programming languages. This tool comes with a visual editor which lets you manipulate your views as per your preferences and allows for wireless debugging.
B4A has one of the most convenient IDE and interpreter and lets you develop your own app in one of the simpler procedural programming languages. Overall we can say that this tool has so many features which actually help you speed up the whole process of app development.

App Design Templates

The apps which are designed better are always ranked higher. Hence the design of your app matters a lot for the success of your app. The new age app users give high priority to the user experience they are getting and expect excellent UI/UX of the app. Although most people tend to install only the select few popular apps into the mobile phones and avoid taking risk by installing unfamiliar apps but when an app comes with remarkable UI/UX and a strong branding, it attracts lots of users.
The process of designing an app takes lots of time and money. Even if you have in-house designers but they may not be good enough. Therefore, in this case, a design template can be very useful. Now, a design template is essentially a ready-made pre-designed graphics for your app. Although an app design template may be available for free, it doesn’t really mean that you automatically have the right to use it, customize it and earn money from it.
If you use a design template for your app then it would save lots of your time and money. These design templates which are available are mostly affordable and are of decent quality and they also offer customizability.

Conclusion

We have just discussed the top tools which can really help you to speed up your mobile app development. The process of mobile app development is an intensive work and requires lots of your time and money. But if you happen to use one of the above discussed tools then certainly it will take less time for development and launching of your mobile app and most of the in-between processes will be taken care of automatically and as we know a quick and smart development process has lots of benefits!

Top Tools to Speed Up Your Mobile App Development