The process of starting your next killer Ionic 2 app to finally having your app inside the app store is not always easy. Though, if you split the process into manageable steps and work one by one off you will easily become an app creation machine, as it’s so much fun to build and publish Ionic 2 apps!
How to get from Zero to App Store?
At the beginning of the year I asked the Devdactic readers about their biggest problems related to developing hybrid apps. A common answer was the lack of clear guidance how to get from zero to app store. Although the process can be tricky at some steps and you can waste many hours on different stages where you shouldn’t, everyone can easily start, build and launch Ionic 2 apps today with just a little guidance.
Today I released my new eBook “Ionic 2 From Zero to App Store” in which I describe in detail how to get started and what to do exactly in each of the 7 stages of a project.
If you want to have clear guidance and something you can simply follow, make sure to check out the book now (or grab the preview chapter for a first glance at the content!). The main steps described inside the book can be summarized to points below.
1. Idea Creation
This is the beginning of everything. Every project starts with an idea or even a vision for something. But what to do if you actually want to develop something but lack the idea?
Not everyone has tons of good ideas at hand, though you might dream of your own successful app. Hope is not a strategy, so simply waiting for the golden idea to hit you won’t work most of the times. Therefore, this chapter will give you a more strategic approach to finding new ideas for your next killer app.
2. Wireframing
After having the idea what you are going build, it’s time to lay out a very, very rough structure for your app. This doesn’t have to be a a complete design for your app, but a vision of the app that can be afterwards easily converted to your code and architecture.
If you know which pages and services you gonna need, it’s a lot easier to directly get everything right inside the code the first time you do it. If you keep changing your mind about the flow of your app while already doing the coding you will run into a lot more work and trouble than if you prepare it well.
After this step you should know how many screens your app will have, what the basic structure looks like and how the user can navigate through it. It can be really helpful to do a mockup like this in a tool like JustInMind.
3. Get your Basics right
This step marks the actual start of the development. It’s now time to setup your version control, development environment and everything else if you haven’t done so before. Yes you heard right, you need version control (if you have never used it before).
Even if you work alone using Git will give you a lot more security and speed. Your code is safe inside a repository and synced to a service like e.g. Bitbucket and you can jump in your history or experiment with new features without having to fear that you gonna break everything and can’t go back to your working version.
At this basics step you also start your app and create all the pages, providers and services you have planned for your app. Lucky us, the Ionic 2 generator makes life really easy and helps to connect everything.
After you got the basics, your mockup idea or vision is translated to a clickdummy inside Ionic 2, so the basic construct for the app is ready.
4. Develop your Features
Now the basic app was all fun and easy, but now the real work begins.
We talk about adding the real features like API integration of different services and using the native device features. The stuff that actually makes your app come alive!
This is the core step for a development project and will take the longest, depending of the size of your project and the features that need to be developed. After this step, everything inside your app should work as intended and your app is more or less ready.
5. Styling
While developing your app you can already try to get close to the design, but there are always slight differences as you first want to get it working and then take the time to make it look good. And sometimes you just jump from feature to feature and put on the makeup later.
So this step is meant for fixing everything that’s not already right. With Ionic 2 theming it’s pretty easy to change the UI of your app in a matter of seconds. If you use the correct classes before or apply them now, you can change the complete color scheme of your app only by replacing a few SASS variables.
6. Preparation for Submission
At this point the development (first iteration) is done and you are ready to submit your app almost ready.
There are many assets and information you need to gather and prepare for both iOS and Android app store which you need to prepare. If you have never submitted apps before, you have quite some todos here because you need to setup your developer accounts for both iOS and Android. Also keep in mind, you can only build & submit iOS Apps using a Mac!
If you have a Mac, you need to setup some certificates and manage everything inside your developer profile, so the submission can be painfully if you don’t know where to go and what to do.
7. Launching your App
We got the app, the assets and it’s time to launch! But maybe you want to do an internal launch first? Like having a real launch but just for you or your team. That’s why you can submit your app and have a beta test phase!
This is possible both for iOS and Android, so you can test your app on all the desired devices and see if everything works as intended. If something is broken, go back to step 4 and fix it!
Otherwise if you are happy with your app, it’s time to release it!
After going through the testing programs of iOS and Android it becomes more easy to release your app as most of the information was already needed before. The only thing left now is to wait for your Ionic 2 app to be available on the iOS and Android App Store!
It can be easy
The process doesn’t have to be painful, and if you want to start your first Ionic 2 app today but feel lost, make sure to check out my complete step-by-step guide to start, build and launch your Ionic 2 apps!
If you have already built something using Ionic 2 that can be found inside the iOS or Android app store, leave a comment below. I love to see apps that were built with Ionic 2!
Happy Coding,
Simon
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