Successful mobile teams move fast to deliver new functionality, drive usage, boost engagement, improve conversions and create apps that stick. These practices are foundational to future-proof apps that customers love and use again and again.
Guide
Future-proof your mobile app with feature flags and experimentation
Everything you need to know about how to build, test, and deliver mobile apps that last.
Millions of apps in the Apple App and Google Play stores are getting squashed by high user expectations, right and center.
Remember...
Mobile app engagement and sales are not about more fancy features.
It is about getting more out of the onboarding experience by providing a relevant experience after someone downloads your app.
You can improve your mobile app effectiveness using feature flags and focusing on these elements:
Feature clarity
Test earlier in the product lifecycle so your target audience engages with the features you release.
Relevance
Reduce the inefficiency of development backlogs. Build specific app interactions for users.
Value
Use the onboarding experience to show why your app is useful. It'll motivate users to engage and eventually pay for what you're selling.
See what you need to deliver features that last and grab your users' attention after just one use. All tactics, zero fluff.
Learn:
- The benefits of a/b testing and ways to improve delivery
- How feature management impacts user experience
- The experience your users when they use your mobile app
A better way to release
Large-scale, 'big-bang' launches were once the most common way of releasing exciting new app functionality and redesigns. Mobile product and engineering teams worked tirelessly to get the new features ready, while marketing and PR departments prepared accompanying launch materials.
For every successful Big Bang release, however, many others failed to gain traction. Worse still, some were so harmful that they caused teams and even entire companies to stumble or crash.
Test. Validate. Release. Repeat.
Rolling out new features for every app user at the same time can be a recipe for disaster. Instead, roll out more frequently and with fewer risks, validating your performance and impact on the customer experience before launching.
Stop launching and start rolling out
Avoid failed launches by adopting modern product development techniques like feature flagging, gradual rollouts, and product experimentation. Futureproof apps have faster and more resilient development cycles, which result in better customer experiences.
Experiment, learn and deliver value for users.
Learning from real-world results is the most reliable way to understand how your products impact user behavior. This knowledge is the key to making product investments that keep your app relevant and reliable.
Feature flagging, testing and constant iteration help your team prioritize the projects that deliver measurable outcomes.
Build and release with confidence
Enter feature flags. Also known as switches or toggles, they allow you to turn functionality on and off without deploying new code. This increases control, allowing you to release more frequently and test and learn without impacting the user experience. Set the flag to “on” to execute the new code. Set the flag to “off” and the code is suppressed.
Remotely configuring functionality allows you to say goodbye to messy rollbacks and hotfixes. If you detect errors, performance spikes, or user backlash, you can immediately roll back the changes without going through the app stores to redeploy code.
With feature flagging, you can:
- Learn how to create a strong foundation and deploy changes faster and more safely than ever.
- Make data-driven decisions that resonate with users by conducting controlled experiments.
- Test features, UI/UX changes, or content variations. Then use it to tailor in-app interactions with users.
Two examples of testing at depth getting magnified results for digital businesses
Quip used Feature flags to gate certain features on their mobile app to safeguard against any potential buggy releases. When releasing application updates on mobile, the turnaround can be slower than web or desktop releases as app updates have to be reviewed by the respective application stores.
Therefore, the team utilizes feature flags to mark beta features so that, in the event of a feature release not going as planned, they can quickly toggle it on or off, providing both more flexibility and peace of mind.
quip
Real-time app updates
Reliance on app stores for distribution and product updates can add complexity to shipping a new feature. Arduous app store review processes and internal debates slow you down.
Feature flags allow you to roll back in production without a deployment or app store update. You can also release new functionality gradually, without requiring users to update their app version continually.
Feature variables allow you to configure all kinds of product levers to modify, test, and measure app functionality without additional deployments or app store releases.
So, spend more time iterating and improving the user experience, instead of preparing and waiting for the next app release every time you want to make a change.
Test in production more safely
Testing in production mitigates the quality assurance (QA) inadequacies of relying entirely on “lab testing” or testing in a simulated environment, and “dogfooding” where employees use their products as a test before releasing them to the public.
Internal testers are prone to bias because they are overly familiar with the features. Testing in controlled environments often requires data and simulated conditions for devices and network speeds. It is virtually impossible to account for every real-world scenario and type of user.
Feature management makes it possible to test in production. This results in a more streamlined way to catch production bugs and, at the same time, create a resilient mobile app experience. Feature flags allow mobile teams to continuously test, deliver, and deploy software all without the risk of rolling out bugs to the entire user base and dedicating emergency release cycles to hotfixes.
To effectively test new functionality in production, make the new features available only to your internal testers using the live app store version of your app.
Depending on how the internal testing goes, you can then include a segment of real users before starting to increase the availability of the feature across your wider audience.
In summary, use feature flags to:
- Accelerate development by integrating work in progress behind a flag
- Remove blockers to app store releases
- Ensure positive results by gradually rolling out new functionality
- Rollback when there are issues in production without an app store release
- Decouple code deployments from market releases
- Enable product experimentation (A/B/n testing)