You're working on a mobile application. How can you make sure it's the best it can be?

Yes. It's relevant. You first need to know your target audience. If the app you're making doesn't align with the requirements of your target audience, then it'll be very very difficult for it to perform well. Make sure the features you're offering are the ones that your users want.

Also Research existing apps in the market. What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can your app be different and better?

Prior to initiating the design and development process of your mobile application, it's crucial to have a clear understanding of your target audience. Discovering their needs, preferences, and usage patterns is essential. Employing methods such as user research, surveys, interviews, or creating personas can provide valuable insights into your audience. These insights are key to shaping your app's unique value proposition, functionality, and design.

Design is equally important as the features in an application. If your app's design is poor and hard to get used to, then the user won't use it again no matter how many features it provides. If the features are well presented and at the right places in your app, then it can boost the usability of the app in a great way.

Ensure your mobile application is user-friendly, intuitive, and maintains consistency throughout. Adhere to mobile app design best practices, including the selection of suitable fonts, colors, icons, buttons, and gestures. Additionally, account for the diversity in screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions across devices by creating a responsive and adaptive app design. Conduct usability testing with actual users to gather feedback for enhancements.

What makes an app better in the long term is the performance of the app and how well it synchronises with the use cases. If your app is not performing well in low end devices, givign hiccups here and there, then the end user won't be using it for a long time. He will look for the alternatives, and when he finds the alternative, it's a goodbye to your app. So you should leverage the app performance by looking at the analytics, crashes, ANRs and other metrics like that.

Getting feedback from users frequently is necessary for any app to improve. You can't just update an app from your point of view. It's more like what the users think of your app and what they want. So asking users to give feedback on your app is equally important. You also need to look at the user metrics of your application like downloads, retention, ratings and crashes, etc.

At first, create an MVP of the app that has most of the main features. And then improve and update the app according to the user feedback.

From what I've learned, improving our mobile app involves looking at what others are doing. Studying similar apps that are doing well and our competitors gives us useful ideas. Asking for advice from experts and people in the industry keeps us sharp. It's important to be humble and willing to learn from what others have gone through.