How to Build Additional App Features Into Your Appy Pie Free App

Need to add more app features into your free mobile app built using Appy Pie? In this article, we will discuss how you can add mobile app features to such a basic app built using the Appy Pie app builder.

In this article

1. Appy Pie: A brief introduction
2. How to build additional mobile app features into your Appy Pie app
3. Frequently Asked Questions on mobile app features

Before I start explaining how you can add mobile app features to your existing mobile app, let me outline some quick facts about Appy Pie.

Appy Pie: A brief introduction

Appy Pie is an app builder. It’s a privately-held Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company founded in 2015, and the company is headquartered in the Greater Los Angeles Area, California, US. Note the following quick facts about Appy Pie:

• Users of Appy Pie can create mobile apps without any coding skills.
• The app builder supports Android and iOS.
• Appy Pie has its marketplace and users can monetize their apps.
• Users of Appy Pie can choose from the available layouts.
• Appy Pie supports GPS, social media integration, push notifications, in-app purchases, and few more standard features.
• Users can create their app using the intuitive app builder, and publish it to the Appy Pie app store.
• Appy Pie has a tiered pricing plan. The Basic version lets you create Android apps. Its “Gold” version offers more features, however, you need to buy its “Platinum” plan to create an iOS app. With the “Platinum” plan, you can remove the Appy Pie logo.
• You can get a higher quota for push notifications as you buy higher-priced plans.
• While the basic plan features email-based customer support, the higher-priced plans have chat and phone-based support.

How to build additional mobile app features into your Appy Pie app

Free mobile app creators are a useful tool, however, they are very limited and don’t offer enough features for the finished product to really stand out.

I will now explain what you need to do to build additional features into your Appy Pie app. You will need to take the following steps:

1. Define the project scope

Hire a competent project manager (PM), an IT architect, and a team of business analysts (BAs). The PM needs to lead discussions with your business stakeholders to gather the new requirements.

Set the expectations with your business stakeholders, who might want to give the best user experience to your smartphone users. That’s only possible with native apps, which require a higher budget. Moreover, the investment in the Appy Pie app will become irrelevant.

Carrying on with a hybrid app will be less expensive, however, there will be trade-offs concerning user experience. Read “Choose the best — native app vs hybrid app” for more insights.

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I suggest that you use modern cross-platform mobile development frameworks like React Native. More on this shortly.

2. Choose the right SDLC model

You will add features to a mobile app, and you will likely do that in iterations. I recommend that you use the Agile SDLC model for this project since it supports iterative development. You can read “What is software development life cycle and what you plan for?” to learn more about Agile.

3. Plan for the mobile backend

You are building additional features in your Appy Pie app, which makes it a mobile application development project. Plan for the mobile backend, which takes a significant amount of time and energy to build and maintain.

I recommend that you use a “Mobile Backend as a Service” (MBaaS) platform, which manages the cloud infrastructure and persistent storage. This eliminates your effort to build and manage the mobile backend.

AWS Amplify is a robust MBaaS platform, and it offers the following additional advantages:

• You can easily implement features like user management, mobile app security, and push notifications.
• Amplify makes it easier to integrate APIs with your app.
• You can scale your mobile app easily with Amplify.

Read more about MBaaS platforms in “How to choose the best Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS)?”.

4. Choose React Native for developing the app features further

You need to get the source code for your mobile app from Appy Pie, subsequently, you should use React Native to add more features to it. Facebook created React Native and open-sourced it in 2015.

With this cross-platform development framework, you can create both Android and iOS apps that deliver a near-native user experience. React Native offers various advantages, and these are as follows:

• The most obvious benefit is that you can create Android apps as well as iOS apps with the same codebase.
• React Native uses JavaScript, which is very popular. Most developers will find it easy to learn this framework.
• This framework uses the Flux architecture from Facebook and uses JavaScript bridges to communicate with the native modules.
• Programmers with JavaScript knowledge will find it easy to install React Native since the installation is via “Node Package Manager” (NPM).
• You can use the React Native “Getting Started” guide to get familiar with it.
• There are 3^rd party libraries available for you to access the native modules when coding a React Native app.
• Developers experience high productivity since React Native has a hot reload feature.
• There is a vibrant developer community supporting React Native, therefore, you will get resolutions for your issues quickly.
• You can use 3^rd party tools like Appium to test React Native apps.
• There are 3^rd party libraries to help you with the build and release automation.

You can read “Flutter vs React Native: A developer’s perspective” to learn more about React Native.

5. Use GraphQL to design APIs

You will likely design and consume APIs as part of adding new features. Many developers consider Representational State Transfer (REST) as the standard for designing APIs, and it indeed offers many advantages.

However, GraphQL, a query language for APIs has emerged as a powerful alternative to REST. I recommend you use GraphQL since it offers the following advantages over REST:

• RESTful APIs return all data in an API endpoint as a response to an API call. If an app needs less data, then it is receiving more than what it needs. This is called “over-fetching”. In the case of GraphQL, the developers can specify the exact data elements, therefore, they avoid this challenge.
• Similarly, if an app needs more data than what an API endpoint has, then it needs to make multiple API calls. We call this “under-fetching”, and the query capabilities of GraphQL eliminate this.
• Programmers often design RESTful API endpoints in line with their front-end views, and they just make an API call to get all data for that view. While this is helpful, if they change the view, then they will need to change the API too! This slows down front-end iterations, however, you can eliminate this challenge with the query capabilities of GraphQL.

6. Form the complete development team

You now need to onboard the complete development team, therefore, you need to hire developers. In addition to their technical skills, a great app developer needs several competencies, e.g., professional ethics, decision-making capabilities, the ability to collaborate, etc.

Read our guide “How to find a good software developer” to learn more.

You need the following roles:

• UI designers;
• Mobile developers with JavaScript and React Native skills;
• Testers;
• DevOps engineers.

In the first place, you had opted for Appy Pie since you didn’t have access to a software development team. Now you are planning for a development project, which is a big change for you!

You should hire an expert developer team for implementing invaluable app features, which will help you to manage the complexities. Our guide “Dedicated vs Freelance Software Development Teams: A Review” can help you with this.

7. Sign-up for a mobile device lab on the cloud for testing

Your mobile app needs to work on all mobile devices, therefore, you need to test it against a wide range of mobile devices. You need a mobile device lab on the cloud for this, and pCloudy provides just that.

There are over 5,000 device/browser combinations on pCloudy, and you can use its documentation to become familiar with it. Visit the pCloudy pricing packages webpage before you buy it.

8. Organize your team for success

Give your team the best chance to succeed, therefore, organize the team in a way that fosters collaboration. I recommend that you use the time-tested “Scrum” technique to manage this project since it works well for Agile projects.

As I had explained in our guide “How to build a Scrum development team?”, the following points concerning “Scrum” are worth noting:

• You should form a “Scrum team” where developers and testers work together. It’s a small, cross-functional team that thrives on collaboration.
• The PM should perform the role of the “Scrum master”.
• A “Product owner” provides the business requirements in a document named “Product Backlog”.
• Scrum teams are empowered, and the team estimates the requirements.
• The team then slots the requirements in various iterations, which are called “Sprints” in the scrum parlance. Business stakeholders work closely with the team during this process, which is called the “Sprint planning meeting”.
• The scrum master conducts “Daily stand-up meetings” where the team discusses the project status and resolves issues in a collaborative manner.
• When the team completes the work of a sprint, it demonstrates the app to the business stakeholders in a meeting called the “Sprint review meeting”. The business stakeholders approve the sprint provided the app works.
• A scrum team learns lessons from a completed sprint by holding a “Sprint retrospective meeting”.

You should use an effective PM tool like Asana to manage these activities.

9. Build the additional mobile app features

It’s time to build the additional mobile application features, and you should use the appropriate AWS Amplify documentation for guidance. Read “Storage”, which guides you to use the “AWS Amplify Storage” module, including the following:

• Automated set-up using “Command Line Interface” (CLI);
• Manual set-up;
• Testing the storage setup.

I recommend that you read the documentation to master the following:

• Setting up your mobile backend;
• Creating a database;
• Connecting to your backend.

Congratulations on successfully building additional features into your Appy Pie app!

Plan upfront for growing your business through customized app features

If you have come up with a great idea for a mobile app for your business but want to test the water then Appy Pie might work for you at this stage.

However, due to the platform’s limitations, especially when it comes to features, it just won’t cut the mustard in the long term. In that case, you will need to engage a reputed software development company for your mobile app development.

Our guide “How to find the best software development company?” can help you to find one.

If you are still looking for experienced mobile app developers to build customized and user-friendly mobile app features for your web and mobile applications, then DevTeam.Space can help you here with its field expert software developer community.

Write to us your initial mobile app design and development requirements via this quick form and we will get back to you for further assistance. 

Frequently Asked Questions on mobile app features