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

TL;DR: Building a mobile app takes eight steps: Define your idea, research the market, decide on features, design the interface, build the functionality, test on real devices, launch to the app stores, and keep improving based on user feedback. Once your app is live, you can make money through subscriptions, in-app purchases, ads, or transaction fees.

If you have an idea for a mobile app, you’ve already done step one. This guide covers the other seven, and you don’t need a coding background for any of them.

You’ll define the idea for your app, research your market, design the interface, build the workflows, test on real devices, launch to the App Store and Google Play Store, and grow your app after launch.

What is mobile app development?

Mobile app development is the process of designing, building, and launching apps for smartphones and tablets. That covers a lot of ground, from mapping out how your app works and what data it stores to building the screens people tap through and getting it approved in the App Store and Google Play Store.

You can make an app without coding on Bubble, a fully visual AI app builder. Describe what you want, and Bubble AI builds a working first version of your web or native mobile app. Then add features and make changes by chatting with the Bubble AI Agent (beta), or step into the visual editor whenever you want to shape the details yourself.

Types of mobile apps

Not every mobile app is built the same way. Here are the main types:

• Web apps and PWAs (progressive web apps): These run in a browser like Chrome or Safari, so anyone with a browser can use them. PWAs are web apps that behave more like installed apps: People can add them to their home screen and use some features offline. But PWAs still can’t tap into as many phone features as native apps, and what works varies by browser and device, especially on iPhone.
• Wrapped apps: Web apps packaged in a shell so they can be distributed through app stores. They’re still built with web code underneath.
• Hybrid apps: A mix of the two. They’re built with web technology but run inside a mobile framework, so they can use some phone features. How close they get to a true native feel depends on how they’re built.
• Native mobile apps: If you want your app to feel at home on a phone, this is the way to build it. These apps are made specifically for iOS or Android, so they can use the camera, location, and push notifications, and they tend to run faster and smoother than anything in a browser.

Traditionally, building a native app meant writing and maintaining two separate codebases, one for iOS and one for Android. With Bubble for native mobile apps, you build one app that deploys to both platforms. (Each store still has its own setup, testing, and review requirements, though.)

Bubble builds true native iOS and Android apps, without wrappers. They run on React Native, the same framework Amazon, Coinbase, Discord, and Facebook use for their mobile apps.

Different development approaches

Building a mobile app used to mean a trade-off: spend months and a big budget getting it right, or rush it and live with an app that feels cheap. You have better options now. Here’s how they compare:

How much does it cost to build a mobile app?

There’s no single price tag. Costs range from free to start on a platform like Bubble to $300,000 for a complex app built by professional developers. What you’ll spend depends on how complex your app is, how you build it, how fast you need it, and how much of the work you can do yourself.

Paying professional developers, whether that’s an in-house team or an agency, is the most expensive route. Business of Apps puts the average salary for a US-based mobile app developer at about $110,000 a year, and iOS developers in top-paying cities earn up to $151,000. By its estimate, a simple app costs $5,000–$50,000 to build, and a complex one can run $120,000–$300,000.

Here’s how the main approaches compare on cost:

• Hiring developers: Experts move quickly, but it’s the priciest path, especially with an in-house team, and custom builds still take months.
• Coding it yourself: Cheaper, but you need development experience to move at a reasonable pace.
• Building on Bubble: You can build and test for free. Deploying live, testing through TestFlight or Google Play Console, and publishing to the app stores require a paid plan, which starts at $59 a month (billed annually).

How long does it take to build a mobile app?

Timelines vary just as much as costs, from a few weeks on Bubble to several months or more with a traditional development team.

With a traditional development team, even a simple app usually takes a few months once you add up design, building, testing, and app store review. Complex apps can stretch well past that. If you’re coding it yourself, it comes down to how much you already know and how many hours you can carve out each week.

AI coding tools can get you a working prototype quickly. The time cost tends to show up later, when you need to fix or change code you didn’t write and can’t easily read. Small updates can take longer than they should, especially as the app grows.

Building on Bubble is often faster than people expect. You generate the first version with AI, and because there’s no code to maintain, the time you save doesn’t disappear after launch. When something needs to change, you can see exactly what to fix in visual workflows instead of digging through code.

For example:

• The team behind the Create With conference built a custom event platform and mobile app on Bubble in three days, and 95% of attendees used it.
• Elita’s co-founders had just weeks to pivot their pet health startup. They built an MVP on Bubble with an agency partner and pitched it at SXSW Sydney, where they won their category.
• Land founder Andrew Haarsager built his climate-prep app for iOS on Bubble with no coding background, and he’s rebuilt it twice based on what users told him.
• Artizen, a crowdfunding platform for artists, switched to Bubble from a traditional development team, launched 10 times faster, and cut its monthly development spend by $125,000.

What you need before you start

You don’t need technical expertise to start, but a little prep saves you time later. Have these basics in place first:

• A clear problem to solve: The best apps do one thing really well for a specific group of people. A scheduling app for freelancers juggling five clients needs different features than one for a team spread across time zones, so get clear on who you’re solving for.
• A basic understanding of your user: Know who you’re building for and what’s bugging them. A little digging now saves a lot of redesigning later, so spend some time in forums, read competitor app store reviews, or run a quick survey.
• A willingness to learn: Bubble takes care of the code, but you’ll still be thinking through logic and design as you go. Curiosity will take you further than any technical skill.
• A list of essential features: You don’t have to build everything at once. Pick the handful of features that make your app worth using on day one. 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

To create a mobile app, you define the idea, research the market, decide on features, design the interface, build it, test it, launch it to the app stores, and keep improving it after launch. The steps are the same whichever tool you use, and along the way you’ll see where Bubble AI can do some of the work for you.

Step 1: Define your app idea

A good mobile app idea is more than a premise. There are millions of apps in the stores already, so yours needs a clear reason to exist. A strong idea has:

• A clear problem and solution: Get specific about the problem your app solves. The more specific you can be, the easier it becomes to design features that 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: 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 founder-market fit: 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. Consider whether that’s you, and why.
• Differentiation from competitors: Understand how your app solves 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: Look at everything people already use to solve the problem, whether that’s another app, a traditional service, or a spreadsheet they’ve hacked together. Download the top apps in your category and use them the way a customer would, noting what’s frustrating and what’s missing.
• Market gaps: The places competitors fall short are your openings. Low-star reviews are especially useful, since users often spell out exactly what they wish the app did.
• User feedback: Find out what’s frustrating your target users and what they wish existed. Competitor reviews, forums, and social media are a good start, but nothing beats a quick survey or a few conversations with the people you’re building for.
• Audience demand: Check that people want a new solution, and that your take on it lands. A simple landing page or pre-launch signup can show real interest before you build anything.

This research tells you who your ideal customer is and gets you closer to product-market fit. Once you know where competitors fall short and what your audience wants, you’ll know which features will 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 the app's first version

Think through all of this from your user’s perspective. 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: Where users type in their destination, dates, and anything else that matters to them. Everything else in the booking flow starts here.
• Search filters: Ways to narrow the results by price, star rating, amenities, or distance, so nobody has to scroll past 200 hotels they’d never book.
• A loading state: A quick visual cue that the app is working. Even a simple animation makes the wait feel shorter and tells users nothing’s broken.
• A results page: An easy-to-scan list with the details people care about most, like price, rating, and photos, so they can compare options without tapping into every listing.

Stick to the essentials for your MVP. Your first users will tell you what to add next.

Step 4: Design your app’s interface

When you design a mobile app, you’re designing for a small screen and a thumb. A few principles make that a lot easier:

• Keep it simple: Give each screen one job. Leave plenty of white space, and if you find yourself cramming several actions onto one screen, split it into separate views.
• Be consistent: Pick your colors, fonts, and button styles once, then use them everywhere. When everything looks and behaves the same way, people figure out your app faster.
• Design for touch: People often use their phones one-handed, steering with a thumb. Put the most important buttons in the bottom third of the screen, where that thumb naturally lands, and make gestures like swiping and tapping feel natural.
• Optimize for performance: Go easy on heavy graphics and animations. A beautiful app that lags on every screen will lose people faster than a simpler one that feels snappy.
• Follow native conventions: iPhone and Android users expect things to work a certain way, like where the back button sits. Stick to each platform’s patterns, and your app will feel familiar from the first tap.

Traditionally, wireframing comes first in the design process. On Bubble, you can skip it. Bubble AI generates an editable starting point in minutes, and you refine it in the same visual editor you’ll build in. Chat with AI when you want speed, then edit visually when you want precision and control.

Because design and development happen in one tool, there’s no handoff. You add functionality to the screens you just designed instead of converting designs into code later, with pixel-level control the whole way.

Step 5: Build your app

With your design in place, it’s time to build the logic and data that make your app work. The Bubble AI Agent can set up your database and workflows from a plain-language description. It explains each change as it makes it, so you learn how Bubble works as you build, and you can adjust anything yourself in the visual editor.

The ability to step in and refine things matters. A December 2025 study found that AI models’ debugging ability drops 60–80% after just two or three attempts, so when AI gets stuck, being able to fix things yourself saves you a lot of back-and-forth.

Here’s what to work through as you build:

Start with your data: Figure out what information your app needs to store. Your database is made of data types, and they power everything your app’s workflows do. If your app has user accounts, for example, you’ll need a place for things like email addresses, usernames, and phone numbers.

Describe what you need, and the AI Agent can generate your database schema for you, data types and fields included. It can also generate privacy rules as it goes, and you can fine-tune them in the privacy rule editor.

Build workflows: Logic is what makes your app do things, and workflows connect what users tap to the data behind it. When someone hits the search button, a workflow filters the data and sends them to the results page.

The AI Agent can build most frontend and backend workflows from a description, including scheduled ones and ones that call your API Connector. A few things you still need need to set up include payment, plugin, and analytics actions, custom events, workflow folders, and running or testing workflows.

Set up integrations: Most apps lean on outside tools. You might connect Stripe for payments or add an AI feature with OpenAI or Claude, and depending on the tool, you’ll connect it through Bubble’s API Connector or a plugin.

The AI Agent can set up API Connector calls and install or remove plugins for you. When data comes back from an API, Bubble automatically parses it into data types you can use right away.

Step 6: Test and refine your app

Before you launch, try to break your app before your users do. You’re hunting for bugs and making sure everything works the way people expect.

Bubble gives you three ways to test a mobile app before you submit it, including on your own phone: web preview, the Simulated device option, and dev builds. Web preview is the fastest way to check layouts and logic, but it doesn’t render native maps or the datetime picker, and it can’t test push notifications, camera workflows, or permission workflows.

When you want a closer look at what end-users will see, switch web preview to Simulated device. It runs a real build of your app on a simulated iOS or Android device right in your browser, with no phone or app store account needed.

For the full experience on your own phone, including push notifications, camera workflows, and plugins with their own native libraries, install a dev build. Dev builds stay synced with the editor and require a paid plan and a connection to the App Store and Google Play Store.

Most apps go through a few rounds of testing:

1. Initial testing and debugging: Start with yourself. Walk through every screen and workflow the way a user would, and lean on Bubble’s built-in debugger and issue checker to track down errors and figure out how to fix them.
2. Internal testing (alpha testing): If you have a team, bring them in next, ideally testing as different types of users. On Bubble, you can find a specific user in the database editor and click Run as to see the app exactly as they would. It’s the quickest way to confirm that permissions, security settings, and personalized views behave correctly.
3. Beta testing: Hand the app to a small group of real users, ideally people in your target audience, and ask them to flag anything broken or confusing. It’s a good moment to run usability testing and gather broader customer feedback.
4. Soft release (optional): Open the app to a bigger but still limited group before going fully public. It’s a chance to build early buzz and see how the app holds up under more traffic before a wide launch.

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

Because Bubble builds native apps for iOS and Android from one project, you can run these checks on both platforms before you submit.

Step 7: Launch your app

Time to launch. That means submitting your app to the App Store, the Google Play Store, or both, and each store has its own rules. Bubble automates everything the stores allow, and the rest is account setup and review steps you’ll work through with Apple and Google directly.

On the App Store: Apple’s process looks like this:

• Sign up for an Apple Developer account and verify your identity
• Pay the Apple Developer Program fee, currently $99 a year
• Package your app for deployment (Bubble does this for you)
• Submit your app for Apple’s review
• Publish it once it’s approved

On the Google Play Store: Google’s process is similar, though timelines vary with your app’s complexity, how busy the review queue is, and whether Google needs more information from you. You’ll pay a one-time $25 registration fee, set up your app in Google Play Console, create a Google Cloud project so Bubble can upload builds for you, and then submit for testing and review.

New personal developer accounts have one extra hurdle: Before you can publish to production, Google requires a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in for 14 consecutive days.

Bubble’s publishing flow handles packaging for both stores, so your part is the store listing itself, like screenshots and descriptions, plus a final round of testing before review.

Step 8: Iterate and grow your app

Once your app is live, the work shifts to keeping it healthy and making it better. Here’s what that looks like:

• Keep listening to users. The people using your app are your best guide to what to fix and what to build next. In-app surveys, support emails, app store reviews, and analytics all show you how people use it and what they wish it did.
  Tools like Mixpanel help you track what people do in your app, while Hotjar, now part of Contentsquare, shows you heatmaps and session replays and collects feedback. Depending on the tool, you’ll connect it with a Bubble plugin, a script, or an API integration.
• Stay on top of security and privacy. App stores have their own security requirements, and depending on where your users live, privacy laws like GDPR may apply too. Bubble’s built-in security and privacy features help you keep up. You set privacy rules visually, and the security dashboard flags problems like exposed API keys, unsafe API setups, and weak privacy rules right in the editor and before you deploy.

• Keep improving. Fix bugs as they come up, polish the UI based on how people use it, and add the features your users ask for. Not every update has to be visible, either. Behind-the-scenes work on your database, logic, and backend can make the app noticeably faster and more reliable.
• Ship small updates instantly. Changes inside your app, like text, workflows, and UI, go out as over-the-air (OTA) updates, so users get them without you resubmitting to the app stores. Changes to the native shell, such as your app icon, splash screen, or plugins, still need a new build.
  If an update goes sideways, Bubble’s built-in version control lets you roll back. On the Growth plan and above, custom branches let you work on several updates at once without them stepping on each other.
• Let your backend grow with you. More users means more load on your backend. On Bubble, hosting, database management, security, and scaling are built in, and your web and native mobile apps share one backend, so you can grow from MVP to production without switching platforms.
• Tell users what’s new. A short changelog or update note builds trust and saves people from wondering why a button moved. For inspiration, see how Bubble shares its own product updates.

How to make money from your mobile app

Most mobile apps make money through subscriptions, in-app purchases, ads, or transaction fees, and many combine more than one.

Common app monetization models

Here’s how each one works:

• Subscriptions: Charge a monthly or annual fee for access to your app or its premium features. It’s one of the most common models for apps people use again and again, like fitness trackers, productivity tools, and content platforms, and it gives you predictable revenue as long as users keep coming back.
• In-app purchases: Sell digital extras inside your app. Games sell virtual currency or new levels, while productivity apps might sell advanced templates or features.
• Ads: Give your app away and earn money from ads. This works best once you have a big, engaged audience, and it’s worth being picky about placement and frequency, since intrusive ads can drive people away.
• Commissions or transaction fees: If your app connects buyers and sellers or handles bookings or payments between users, take a small cut of each transaction. It scales naturally, since you earn more as your users do more.

On Bubble, native in-app purchases currently cover subscriptions and connect directly to App Store and Google Play billing, with no third-party tools required.

How to choose the right monetization strategy

Pick the model that fits what your app does and what your users expect. If your app solves an ongoing problem, subscriptions are a natural fit. If it offers one-off upgrades, in-app purchases might work better.

Check what competitors charge and how, and ask your users what feels fair. Plenty of successful apps mix models, like a free tier with ads and a paid plan that removes them. Start simple and adjust as you learn.

Start building your mobile app

A great idea is the easy part. Getting it onto people’s phones is where most builders stall, and it’s exactly what Bubble is built for.

Bubble lets you vibe code without the code. Generate your app with AI, then shape it with the AI Agent or the visual editor until it’s ready to launch.

On Bubble, you can:

• Build web and native mobile apps in one place, on one shared backend.
• Ship to the App Store and Google Play Store without Xcode or Android Studio, then push updates over the air.
• Protect your app with enterprise-grade security, including SOC 2 Type II compliance and built-in security checks.
• Grow without switching platforms. Hosting and scaling are built in, and nearly 6 million builders already rely on Bubble.

Get started for free and see what Bubble AI builds from your first prompt.

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. How much an app earns depends on the value it gives users and how well you reach and keep them.

How can I build a simple mobile app?

You can build one without writing code on a visual development platform like Bubble. Use Bubble AI to generate your app’s foundation, including the database, user interface, and workflows, then customize the design and logic visually before deploying to the App Store or Google Play Store.

Can I build one app that works on both iOS and Android?

Yes. Bubble builds true native iOS and Android apps on React Native from a single project. Both versions share one backend and database with each other and with your web app, so there are no separate codebases to maintain.

Can I test my mobile app on a real device before publishing it?

Yes. On a paid plan, you can install a dev build on your own iOS or Android device that stays synced with the editor and supports push notifications and camera workflows. On the Free plan, the Simulated device option in web preview runs a real build of your app in your browser, no device or app store account required.

Do I need a Mac computer to create iOS apps?

Traditional iOS development requires a Mac to run Apple’s Xcode software, but Bubble is entirely browser-based and handles the technical packaging and build delivery for you. You’ll still need to set up an Apple Developer account, add your App Store Connect metadata and screenshots, and pass Apple’s review.