The Best Way to Create a Mobile App for iOS and Android: 8 Steps

TL;DR: Building a mobile app comes down to eight steps: define your idea, validate it with research, map out your features, design your interface, build it out, test it thoroughly, launch to the app stores, and keep improving from there. You don’t need to know how to code — visual tools like Bubble make it possible for anyone to build and launch a real native app. Just know that publishing to the App Store or Google Play does require a paid developer account and a review process.

You have an idea and want to build a mobile app. You’re in the right place.

Having a great idea is just step one, and this guide covers the other seven. Whether you’re a true beginner or you’ve done some development but never for mobile, you’ll learn everything you need to create a mobile app that works, scales, and can support your business or community. You’ll define your app idea, validate it with market research, map out features, design your interface, build functionality with visual workflows, test across devices, launch to the app stores, and set up a system for continuous improvement.

What is mobile app development?

Mobile app development is the process of designing, building, and launching software applications for smartphones and tablets. It covers everything from planning your app’s structure and database to building interfaces, wiring up functionality, and deploying to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Today, this process doesn’t require writing code. Visual development and AI-powered platforms like Bubble have made it accessible to anyone.

Types of mobile apps

There are a few different ways to make a mobile app, and not all of them follow the same process:

• Web apps and PWAs (progressive web apps): Apps that run in a browser like Chrome or Safari. They work on any device and are fast to build. PWAs can add features like offline support and home screen installation, though they don’t always offer the same depth of device integration as native apps.
• Wrapped apps: Web apps packaged in a shell so they can be distributed through app stores. They’re still built with web code underneath. Note: Bubble does not use wrappers. Bubble builds true native apps.
• Hybrid apps: Apps that use web technologies inside a mobile framework. They can access some device features, but depending on how they’re built, they may not match the performance or feel of fully native apps. Bubble’s native mobile apps are built on React Native, which provides a more native experience.
• Native mobile apps: The gold standard for mobile. Native apps are built specifically for iOS or Android, which means they can tap into the full range of device capabilities — camera, GPS, push notifications, biometric authentication, and more. They load faster, feel more responsive, and tend to earn higher user trust than other app types. This is what Bubble builds. Learn more about native mobile apps.

Historically, native development meant building and maintaining separate codebases for iOS and Android. With Bubble for native mobile, you build once and deploy to both, with no parallel builds and no repeated work.

Different development approaches

Mobile development has traditionally put builders in a tough spot: Move fast and sacrifice quality, or build something great and spend a lot more time doing it. Newer approaches change that equation.

Here are your options:

How much does it cost to build a mobile app?

The cost of building a mobile app varies widely, depending on:

• Your app’s type and complexity
• Your development method
• Your timeline
• Your own expertise

Hiring a developer or agency is the most expensive route. The average annual salary for a US app developer is between $100K and $130K. Even if your app only takes a few months to build, development costs can add up fast.

Traditional custom mobile app development often runs into six figures, depending on scope and complexity. Bubble is a much more affordable option, with subscription pricing that starts free. You still need to learn the platform, but most builders get up and running in weeks, and the Bubble AI Agent (beta) helps by explaining what it’s doing as you build.

Here’s a quick summary of how the approaches compare:

• Hiring developers: Faster due to expertise, but still time-consuming and the most expensive option.
• DIY approach: Less expensive, but requires development experience to move at a reasonable pace.
• Visual development with Bubble: You can build and test for free, but deploying to live, testing through TestFlight or Google Play, and publishing to app stores require a paid Mobile or Web and Mobile plan.

How long does it take to build a mobile app?

Timelines vary just as much as costs.

Traditional mobile development timelines depend on complexity, team size, and platform review requirements. Simple apps may take a few months, while complex ones can take significantly longer.

For DIY builds, your timeline depends largely on your own availability and experience. With Bubble, that timeline is often shorter than you’d expect, even without a programming background.

Founders and small teams are consistently building apps on Bubble in a fraction of the time traditional development requires. For example:

• Formula Bot, built by a marketing analyst with no programming background, scaled from an MVP to a data analysis tool serving a large user base while the founder worked on it alongside a full-time job.
• CreateWith conference co-founders built a mobile app for their event on Bubble in a short timeframe and without traditional custom-development costs.
• ChurchSpace launched its MVP on Bubble significantly faster than custom code would have allowed, with notable savings in development costs.
• Artizen, a crowdfunding platform for artists, switched to Bubble from a traditional development team and launched substantially faster while reducing development spend.

What you need before you start

A little preparation before you start designing and building goes a long way. You don’t need technical expertise, but having these basics in order makes the process much smoother.

• A clear problem to solve: The best apps solve a real problem for a specific group of people. Know what pain point you’re addressing and for whom. If you’re building a scheduling app, for instance, clarify whether you’re solving for freelancers juggling multiple clients or teams coordinating across time zones. Each requires different core features.
• A basic understanding of your user: Who are you building this for, and what do they need? A little research now saves a lot of redesigning later. Spend time in forums, review competitor app store ratings, or run a quick survey to understand what your target users actually struggle with.
• A willingness to learn: Building an app is a process. Bubble removes the coding barrier, but you’ll still be learning to think through logic and design. A curious, problem-solving mindset is your most important asset.
• A list of essential features: You don’t need to build everything at once. Decide on the core features that make your app valuable in a first version. A useful test: if you removed a feature, would the core user task still be possible? If yes, it’s probably a nice-to-have for v2.

How to create a mobile app in eight steps

Here are the basic steps for any app development approach, from idea to launch. Bubble AI changes how some of these steps work, and we’ll show you where as we go.

Step 1: Define your app idea

Developing a good mobile app idea goes beyond a basic premise. With millions of apps in the stores, creating one that stands out takes some focused thinking. A strong idea includes:

• A clear problem and solution: What real, felt problem does your app solve? The more specific you can be, the easier it becomes to design features that actually address it. “Helps people be more productive” is too vague. “Helps freelance designers track billable hours across multiple clients” gives you something to build toward.
• A defined audience: Who is your app going to help? Knowing your target user shapes every decision from feature prioritization to how you describe the app. A project management tool for solo freelancers looks very different from one built for enterprise teams.
• A strong product-founder fit: Are you the right person to build this, and why? The best founders have direct experience with the problem they’re solving, either as someone who’s lived it or as an expert in the domain.
• Differentiation from competitors: How does your app solve the problem differently, or better, than what already exists? This doesn’t have to be a revolutionary new feature. Sometimes it’s a simpler interface, better pricing, or a focus on an underserved niche.

With your idea solidified, you can define the minimum viable product (MVP) — the most basic set of features needed to deliver on your app’s core promise.

Step 2: Perform market research

Once you have an idea, you need to validate it. Market and audience research is how you do that.

Your research should cover:

• Competitor analysis: What other solutions exist for the problem you’re targeting? These could be traditional services, other businesses, or existing apps. Download the top apps in your category and use them as a real user would. Note what works, what’s frustrating, and what’s missing.
• Market gaps: Where do those solutions fall short? Gaps in what competitors offer are your opportunities for differentiation. Pay close attention to low-star reviews. Users often describe exactly what they wish the app did differently.
• User feedback: What pain points and unmet needs do your target users have? Look at competitor reviews, forums, and social media. Better yet, set up a survey or run a few interviews to hear it directly.
• Audience demand: How much do users actually want a new solution, and does your specific approach resonate? Consider running a landing page test or pre-launch signup to measure genuine interest before you start building.

This research helps you understand your ideal customer and find product-market fit. Once you understand what competitors are doing, where they fall short, and what your audience wants, you can build features that set your app apart.

Step 3: Determine your app’s features

Your research then helps you define three things:

1. How your app is structured
2. The core user journeys, or the paths someone takes through your app to accomplish a goal
3. The essential features that need to be in v1

Think through all of this from your user’s perspective. What are they trying to accomplish? What tasks will they use your app to complete? On a travel app, for example, core tasks might include searching for a hotel, booking it, viewing the reservation, and accessing check-in details.

From there, map out what each task requires. For the hotel search task, that might include:

• A search engine: The primary interface where users enter their destination, dates, and preferences. This is the entry point for the entire booking flow.
• Search filters: Options to narrow results by price, star rating, amenities, or distance. Filters keep users from scrolling through irrelevant results.
• A loading state: A brief transition that shows the app is working. Even a simple animation reduces perceived wait time and signals that something is happening.
• A results page: A scannable list showing key information like price, rating, and photos, so users can compare options without opening every listing.

Focus on the essentials for your MVP and add more after you hear from real users.

Step 4: Design your app’s interface

As you design your app’s interface, keep these core mobile design principles in mind:

• Keep it simple: Each screen should serve one core purpose. Use white space to keep things uncluttered. If you’re cramming multiple actions onto one screen, that’s usually a sign it should be split into separate views.
• Be consistent: A consistent design system makes your app more intuitive. Define your colors, typography, and button styles once, then apply them everywhere.
• Design for touch: Think about how your app will actually be used on a phone. Keep important buttons easy to reach and navigation natural for gestures like swiping and tapping. Primary actions work best in the thumb zone, which is roughly the bottom third of the screen.
• Optimize for performance: Avoid resource-heavy graphics and animations that can slow things down on mobile. A beautiful app that lags on every screen will lose users faster than a simpler one that feels fast.
• Follow native conventions: Use platform-specific UI standards for iOS and Android. Users expect certain patterns, and deviating from them adds friction.

Traditionally, wireframing has been the first step in the app design process, but Bubble AI can generate your initial design in minutes. You can also skip wireframing entirely and design directly in the same visual editor you’ll use to build your app.

Bubble’s editor gives you full control, down to the pixel, and you can switch between AI generation and drag-and-drop editing based on what you need. Because design and development happen in the same tool, you don’t convert your designs into code later — you add functionality directly in the same editor. Fewer steps, no repeated work.

Step 5: Build your app

With your design in place, you can build out your app’s functionality: the features, workflows, and data that make it work. The AI Agent can guide you through setting up data types, privacy rules, and workflows from natural language. Full workflow and data generation for native mobile apps is also coming soon.

Here’s your checklist for building:

✅ Start with data structure: What types of information does your app need to store? Building your database means setting up and organizing data types, which power the workflows and actions of your app. If your app has user accounts, for example, you’ll need to store things like email addresses, usernames, and phone numbers. In supported apps, the AI Agent can create data types and fields from your description, complete with privacy rules.

✅ Build workflows: Logic powers your app’s features. Workflows connect your app’s UI to the data. When a user clicks the “search” button, for instance, your app filters through the data and takes them to a results page. In supported apps, you can ask the AI Agent to create common frontend workflows from natural language (like “When this button is clicked, send an email”). More complex backend, plugin, payment, and analytics workflows may still require manual setup.

✅ Set up integrations: Think about what external tools your app needs to connect to. Are you using Stripe for payments? Adding an AI feature with OpenAI or Claude? You can connect external services through Bubble’s API Connector tab or through plugins, depending on the integration. Many common integrations are quick to add, while more complex APIs may take more configuration.

Step 6: Test and refine your app

Before you launch, test your app thoroughly. You’re looking for bugs, confirming that functionality works as expected, and making sure the experience holds up for real users.

Bubble’s mobile preview and BubbleGo app let you test your app as you build, even before it’s submitted to the app stores. This is great for checking layouts and interactions early. Real device testing is still important, and some preview features have current limitations, including native maps, datetime picker, push notifications, and certain camera and permission workflows.

Plan to work through these testing stages:

1. Initial testing and debugging: Start by testing the app yourself. Walk through each screen and workflow carefully. Use preview mode to simulate real user scenarios and journeys. Bubble’s built-in Debugger and Issue Checker can help you find errors in workflows and elements and figure out how to fix them.
2. Internal testing (alpha testing): If you’re working with a team, bring them in to test the app as well. It’s also useful to test with different user types. In Bubble, you can find a specific user in the database editor and click “Run as” to see the app from their perspective. This helps you confirm that permissions, security settings, and customized views all behave correctly.
3. Beta testing: Invite a small group of real users, ideally people in your target audience, to test the app and report issues or confusing areas. This is a good time to run usability testing and gather broader customer feedback.
4. Soft release (optional): A soft release lets you open the app to a larger but still limited group before going fully public. It’s useful for building early demand, stress-testing scalability, and catching remaining issues before a wide launch.

In each round of testing, focus on these five areas:

Step 7: Launch your app

At this stage, you’re ready to launch. Getting your mobile app to users means submitting it to the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, or both. Each store has its own guidelines that are independent from Bubble, but Bubble helps make the publishing process as streamlined as possible.

On the App Store: Apple’s review and deployment process involves several steps:

• Signing up for an Apple Developer account and verifying your identity
• Paying the Apple Developer Program membership fee, currently $99 USD per year
• Configuring and packaging your app for deployment (Bubble handles this automatically)
• Submitting your app for review
• Publishing and making it available to users

On the Google Play Store: Google Play has its own separate setup and review process. Timelines vary based on app complexity, review volume, and whether additional information is required. The process includes setting up your app in Google Play Console, configuring the required Google Cloud project details (needed for features like in-app subscriptions), configuring app settings for Android, and deploying for testing and review before launch.

Bubble’s publishing flow automatically packages your app for both stores. You’ll still need to complete the required account setup, store metadata, screenshots, testing, and review steps for each platform.

Step 8: Iterate and grow your app

Publishing your app is a milestone, but it’s really just the beginning. After you go live, there’s ongoing work to maintain, improve, and scale what you’ve built.

Here’s your checklist for the post-launch phase:

✅ Gather feedback continuously. Your users are the best source of insight on what to improve and what to build next. In-app surveys, support emails, app store reviews, and analytics can all help you understand how people use your app and what they want to see. Tools like Mixpanel are great for product analytics and event tracking. Hotjar is useful for heatmaps, session replays, and feedback collection. Setup depends on the tool and may involve a Bubble plugin, script, or API integration.

✅ Stay current on security and privacy. Each platform has its own security requirements, and there are often regional or global compliance standards that apply to your app as well. Bubble makes this easier with built-in security and privacy features in the editor. You can manage privacy rules visually without writing code, and Bubble’s integrated security dashboard surfaces issues like exposed API keys, unsafe API configurations, and privacy-rule risks directly in the editor and deploy flow.

✅ Make regular updates. Fix bugs as they appear, refine your UI based on usage data, add new features, and respond to user feedback. Not every update needs to be user-facing. Improvements to infrastructure, databases, logic, or backend features can provide important performance and reliability gains.

For smaller changes like bug fixes, text edits, and static UI updates, Bubble’s over-the-air (OTA) updates let you push changes without resubmitting to the app stores. Larger or native-code-impacting changes may require a new build. Bubble also offers built-in version control, so you can track changes, work on multiple updates at once, and roll back if something goes wrong. Not all mobile app frameworks support OTA updates, but Bubble does.

✅ Scale your backend as needed. As your user base grows, your backend needs to keep up. That means thinking about database architecture, backend monitoring, and traffic distribution. On Bubble, hosting and infrastructure are managed for you, with built-in security features and automatic scaling that support growth as usage increases.

✅ Keep users informed. Let your users know what’s changing and improving. Changelogs and update announcements build trust and reduce confusion when things look different. Check out Bubble’s product updates for inspiration on how to communicate changes well.

How to make money from your mobile app

Common app monetization models

There are several proven ways to generate revenue from a mobile app:

• Subscriptions: Charge users a recurring monthly or annual fee for access to your app or its premium features. This is one of the most common models for apps that deliver ongoing value — think fitness apps, productivity tools, or content platforms. It creates predictable revenue and tends to reward apps that keep users coming back.
• In-app purchases: Sell digital goods, extra content, or special features directly inside your app. Gaming apps use this for things like virtual currency or unlocking levels. Productivity apps use it to unlock advanced templates or features. Note that Bubble’s native mobile in-app purchase support currently focuses on subscriptions, with direct connections to Apple App Store and Google Play billing.
• Advertisements: Offer your app for free and earn revenue through ads. This works best when you have a large, engaged user base — but ads can hurt the experience if they feel intrusive, so it’s worth thinking carefully about placement and frequency.
• Commissions or transaction fees: If your app connects buyers and sellers, or facilitates bookings or payments between users, you can take a small percentage of each transaction. It’s a model that scales naturally with usage, since you earn more as your users do more.

How to choose the right monetization strategy

The right model depends on what your app does and what your users expect. An app that solves an ongoing business problem is a natural fit for subscriptions. An app with discrete, one-time enhancements might do better with in-app purchases.

Look at what competitors in your space are charging and how. Listen to your users. Many successful apps combine models, like offering a free tier with ads and a paid subscription that removes them. Start simple and adjust based on what you learn.

Start building your mobile app

Getting a great app idea is the easy part. Building it, launching it, and getting it in front of real users — that’s where most people get stuck. Bubble is built to change that.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never written a line of code. With Bubble, you can generate a working app foundation with AI, then refine every detail visually. You stay in control of your design, your data, your logic, and your launch, with no developer required.

Here’s what you get:

• You can build a wide range of real apps, from simple personal tools to complex business and enterprise applications.
• You can build for web and mobile in one place, with a shared backend across platforms.
• You get enterprise-grade security, including SOC 2 Type II compliance, privacy rules, vulnerability monitoring, and built-in security checks.
• You can launch and update quickly, with OTA updates and automatically packaged apps ready for app store submission.
• You build on solid infrastructure, with managed hosting, automatic scaling, and a platform trusted by everyone from first-time founders to major enterprises.

Frequently asked questions about creating a mobile app

Can I create my own app for free?

Yes. Platforms like Bubble let you build your entire app for free and only require a paid plan when you’re ready to launch publicly or need more capacity.

Do app owners earn money?

Yes. Popular ways to monetize an app include subscriptions, advertisements, in-app purchases, and taking a commission on transactions. An app’s ability to generate revenue depends on the value it provides to users and a clear strategy for reaching and retaining them.

What’s the difference between creating iOS and Android apps?

Traditionally, iOS and Android apps required two separate codebases written in different programming languages, which meant building and maintaining each platform independently. Bubble uses React Native to build from a single project and deploy to both the App Store and Google Play Store.

Do I need a Mac computer to create iOS apps?

Traditional iOS development requires a Mac to run Apple’s Xcode software for building and submitting apps. Building on Bubble is entirely browser-based, so no Mac is needed — Bubble handles the technical packaging and App Store submission for you.

What is the average cost to build a mobile app?

It depends a lot on how you build. Hiring a development agency can run from tens of thousands of dollars for a simple app to well into six figures for something complex. Building with Bubble is significantly more affordable — you start free, and subscription plans scale with your needs rather than requiring a big upfront investment.

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