Developing an App for Your Business? Make Sure it’s Scalable

Whether or not an app will succeed for your business is difficult to predict. If it does, there is no looking back. Your next focus would be, to keep the momentum going. And the only way you can ensure this is by developing an app which is scalable. With a scalable app, you can handle a growing number of employees or users and accommodate more demands. It also makes your app easy to recreate on multiple platforms and form factors. So, it makes little sense to give this feature a miss, and open your app to the possibility of gridlocks when the need to incorporate new and more demanding features arises.

In a technology driven era, business growth can often exceed expectations. This may happen much before you see it coming and, in all likelihood, may catch you unawares. With a scalable app, it becomes easier to accommodate the sudden growth with zero downtime—and without sacrificing user experience.

For instance, a company which was an active participant in charity fund raising, decided to take its charity program into the mobile space by developing an app that would enable its field workers to show donors a list of charity projects and help them choose where to donate. The smart move, however, was undone by its decision to own an app that couldn’t be scaled. The company couldn’t foresee the scaling for “Christmas” type moments and failed to handle the huge leap in traffic. You can well imagine the pain of failing to cash in at the right moment.

The moral of the story is: account for scalability from the beginning. Design your app so it can grow by a factor of one thousand— or one million—if it needs to. By doing so, you make room for growth. Likewise, it helps you steer clear of pitfalls and fall behind demand at crucial moments.

So, before you build an app for your business, it’s wise to have answers to these questions:

• How many employees/customers will realistically use the app in the next 12 months?
• What kind of data do you plan to create for them?
• How long can all your customers fit on one server? What if you have more customers or data than that?

Your app has a lot of potential provided you give it room to grow. Scaling helps you find kinks and problems in your app before thousands of users give you negative reviews.