10 Must-Have Features for Your Next Mobile App

The booming demand for mobile apps has made it essential for the apps to be user-friendly, simple, not time-consuming, etc., to ensure the users value the apps they use.

However, they must be designed with a user-centric approach to ensure the mobile app functionalities meet the users’ expectations. The global mobile app market size was $206.85 USD billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 13.8% by 2030.

Due to the increasing demand, the app market has grown even more competitive, and there are more than 7 million apps available for OS and iOS.

That is why the modern app landscape offers a more innovative design, is built by following market trends, has a user-friendly interface, drives engagement, and has the must-have mobile app features.

That is why we will share some of the top features for mobile applications that will change the game for you.

1. User Experience Enhancements

Intuitive Navigation

Having an intuitive navigating interface allows users to navigate through the app effortlessly to find what they are looking for. This often includes having a bottom or side panel, a clear button, advanced search, and filterizations.

Smooth Performance

To ensure seamless user experience, the app just offers optimized mobile app performance and that includes optimizing loading time and minimizing latency. Besides, users prefer a smooth screen transition and animation, making it one of the most essential mobile app requirements.

Personalization Options

Modern app landscape goes beyond the option for the personalization of user names. Users prefer apps that allow customizing font, theme, color, language, and more.

Seamless Onboarding Process

Interactive walkthroughs, such as video or animated tutorials, clear instructions, pop-up tooltips, etc., can easily make the onboarding process more seamless. They also help users understand the key features for mobile applications.

Accessibility Features

Having accessibility features, such as color contrasts, simple and clear layouts, voice recognition, adjustable font sizes, and various input methods, helps enhance the user experience.

2. Security Measures

Data Encryption

It guards users' sensitive data and prevents data breaches.

Two-Factor Authentication

Enabling two-factor authentication or 2FA is a necessary feature to include in your mobile app. It is like adding an extra lock, and it can feature passwords and facial or fingerprint recognition.

Secure Payment Gateways

Implementing tokenization, verifying user identification, detecting fraud, etc., helps ensure safe transactions while protecting users' financial data.

Regular Security Updates

The flaws and gaps left during the development can be sealed and tightened by regularly updating security features.

Biometric Authentication Options

Biometric authentication is one of the key features to include in your mobile app and it relies on the individual’s physical traits, making it more secure and anti-fraud.

3. Robust Backend Infrastructure

A robust backend not only ensures a smooth operation but also helps tighten the data security even further. As part of that, it is best to ensure a scalable server architecture for faster solutions during high traffic, and reliable cloud hosting secures data from unauthorized access.

Moreover, choosing the right database technology for mobile app makes it easier to retrieve necessary data.

Adding a real-time data synchronization system improves the user’s experience by keeping them updated with the latest features. Developers need to add a disaster recovery plan to ensure the app or user data, even at the time of unexpected disaster.

4. Cross-Platform Compatibility

iOS and Android Support

iOS and Android are two of the most dominating mobile operating systems in the world. So, the best way to ensure your app survives the competitive digital landscape is to ensure it supports both of these systems.

Responsive Design

A responsive design framework lets the app layout adapt to any screen size and orientation.

Consistent User Experience

With the best cross-perform compatibility and the best UX design, the app can ultimately improve the user experience.

Unified Codebase

Another critical features for mobile apps to improve the app is a unified codebase that enhances the user’s experience, making the app compatible with various devices.

5. Integration Capabilities

Third-Party APIs Integration

Integrating third-party API allows personalization, is cost-saving, accelerates development, and increases application performance efficiency.

Social Media Integration

Social media integration helps increase audience as users can easily share their activities on the app to their preferred social media platforms.

Payment Gateway Integration

The payment gateway is a process that allows users to make secure transactions to purchase digital products or services. The main benefit of integrating this feature is that it improves customer satisfaction and builds trust.

Whether the app development company is a startup or an advanced company in the industry, offering a safe payment gateway is one of the most effective ways to increase the application's market value.

CRM and ERP Integration

Integrating both CRM and ERP is vital for allowing a better, faster, and more personalized user experience. These features boost productivity, enhance operational efficiency, automate synchronizations, extend functionality, etc.

IoT Device Integration

IoT in mobile applications has been bringing revolutionary changes in our day-to-day lives by enabling ease of communication. Not only do they enhance data analytics, but they also increase overall productivity and improve communication.

6. Analytical Tools

Features like analytical tools offer the following benefits to the users.

User Behavior Tracking: Tracking user behavior and analyzing it helps developers improve the application further by removing barriers.

Performance Analytics: Using metrics to analyze loading time, response times, crushes and errors, etc., helps improve app performance and ensure user satisfaction.

A/B Testing Capabilities: The A/B testing process is creating multiple versions of the app and then testing them on various groups of users to understand how the features affect user behavior.

In-App Feedback Collection: Encouraging users to share their thoughts, ideas, and other feedback often helps developers identify bottlenecks or shortcomings and eliminate the issues.

Conversion Rate Optimization: CRO offers valuable insight by tracking common customer behaviors and helps deliver a better-performing app to optimize user experience.

7. Offline Functionality

One of the most effective ways to increase user’s trust and improve their experience is adding offline functionality. The app should allow users to access necessary data and essential features for mobile apps even when offline. The data or offline activities should synchronize, and necessary data should be updated as soon as the user is online.

This capacity of the apps allows the user to switch between online and offline modes seamlessly. Optimizing offline data usage is also vital to ensuring efficient performance, as it helps conserve the device’s storage space. Moreover, offline content caching is equally important to help the app load faster, reduce data usage, and improve app performance.

8. Push Notifications

Push notifications are among the most essential elements for mobile apps. And here are the types of notifications that should be added to the app features.

Personalized Notifications - based on user’s preferences and for their benefit.

Timely Updates And Reminders - allows users to stay updated about certain activities they want to be reminded about at a specific time.

Geolocation-Based Notifications - tracking the user's locations, this type of notifications notify the users about various things they might be interested in their current location.

In-App Messaging - these are notifications that the users get after opening the app, which can be a full-page message and top or bottom banners.

Opt-In/Opt-Out Options - users should be allowed to choose what type of app notifications they want to receive and what they don’t.

9. In-App Purchases

Users buy various “digital goods”, such as storage, features, content, and services, through in-app purchases. Reducing the walkthrough steps to streamline the purchase process steps and ensuring a secure payment method by maintaining data safety can easily keep the users more engaged.

The users should also be able to track their purchase history and cancel subscriptions via a subscription management process. The developers can also add various promotional offers and discounts to encourage users to make in-app purchases.

10. Social Sharing Features

Adding social sharing features like the following can change the user’s perspective regarding the app. Shareable content integration enables users to share content from various platforms or share app content to their social media by using various buttons.

But to share such content, they must be able to log into the app using their social media account, such as Facebook or Instagram. That way, they can interact with other users in real time via live chat and invite their social media contacts using the viral referral programs.

And the most effective way to increase user engagement is introducing user-generated content sharing or UCG, such as reviews, blog posts, social media content, surveys, etc.

Summary

The app development landscape is evolving rapidly like any other. This is why it is vital to adapt to modern trends and add features that are mobile app development essentials.

A user-friendly interface, customization options, offline accessibility, social media integration, etc., are the best ways to ensure a reliable experience for users.

Moreover, developers should also track user behaviors and app performance levels and identify drawbacks to improve the app performance even further.

Most importantly, ensuring the highest security should be non-negotiable as that is one of the vital ways to gain customer reliability and build long-term customer relationships. Ensuring these essentials will ultimately give developers a competitive advantage in the mobile app market.