There’s no doubt that people care a lot about those furry little creatures. Pets also prove to be the perfect companion in our difficult times. This also led to the increasing demand for pet care apps. Effective pet care app development enables remote watch, consultation, and feeding timers. Furthermore, it is also already expected that the global pet care market will have an evaluation of around $350 billion by 2027. That’s quite an astonishing figure! In this guide, we are going to learn everything about pet care app development.
What are Pet Care Apps?
Pet care apps are essentially mobile applications meant for improving the quality of life for pets. Pet owners use these apps to provide timely food and care to their pets. However, there are different types of pet care apps in the market. The top mobile app development company can help you understand the differences and the unique use cases of these pet care apps.
Types of Pet Care Apps
Pet Walking Apps
These apps are used for tracking the distance and duration when you take your pet out for a walk.
Pet Training Apps
These apps are used for teaching specific tricks or discipline to their pets
Pet Tracking Apps
These apps are very effective in tracking the precise location of pets
Pet Networking Apps
These pet care apps are used for remotely tracking your pets
Pet Health Apps
These apps are very useful for keeping the track of your pet’s health and vaccine information.
Pet e-Commerce apps
They are e-commerce stores exclusively meant to shop products for pets
Pet Exercising App
These are like fitness apps, but they help pets to do various exercises.
Features to Add During Pet Care App Development
There are certain features that your pet care app must have to fulfil the needs of the target audience. Below are some super important features;
Profile
The users should be able to create detailed profiles for their pets. In fact, they should be able to provide information such as name, breed, weight, age, activities, allergies, and other critical data to the app.
Clean and Simple Dashboard
You must provide a clean and simple dashboard to the users with real-time information. Furthermore, this screen would provide critical updates on the pet, vaccinations, prescriptions, veterinarian visits, and other vital information. Lastly, adding the current location of the pet would be an added benefit.
A Friends List
The pet owners should be able to create a list of friends of their pets. Furthermore, you can also enable socialization elements like photos, videos, and status sharing.
Vaccination and Prescriptions Tracking
The pet care app should provide complete information related to the pet’s prescriptions and vaccinations. Above all, this would drastically improve the usability of the app.
Real-Time Location Tracking
The pet owners can simply fit location tracking devices into their pet’s collars and track real-time location from the pet care app. Thus, no pet will ever get lost or get separated during walks.
Push Notifications
Push notifications can provide critical information about location, immunization, medication, and social updates to pet owners. Plus, it is also a great way of engaging the users of the pet care app.
Feeding Monitoring
Pet owners should be able to track their pet’s food intake and the quality of the food. Furthermore, this provides critical information about their pet’s diet and nutritional information.
Reports
This feature enables pet owners to generate useful reports about pets’ health, immunization, food, and medications. Therefore, they have more insightful knowledge about their pet.
Document Storage
This might be an additional or optional feature, but it provides great convenience to the pet owners to digitally store ownership certificates, medical documents, and other critical documents.
Emergency Panel
This panel is critical in an emergency situation to instantly reach the veterinarians, police, or other important authorities.
Pet e-Commerce
You can start your own pet products store by integrating an e-commerce panel into your pet care app.
Pet Care App Development Process
The development process to build a pet care app consists of various steps. Consulting the top mobile app development company can help you go through the entire process smoothly without any interruptions.
Step 1: Research & Strategizing
- It is crucial to have a transparent strategy to effectively transform your ideas into a successful pet care app. Thus, you will need to conduct in-depth market research.
- Understanding the competition is also very important to define your development and marketing strategy. For this reason, you must start competitor analysis to adjust your offerings
- As a business, you also need to define a target audience and the problem that you will be solved through your digital product.
Step 2: Planning & Analysis
- You must have a clear idea about all the possible use cases of your pet care app. Thus, you have to see from a user’s point of view. Ultimately, you will be able to draft a proper roadmap for the pet care app development process
- Next, you should define the budget for efficient pet care app development. It should stay under the limit and never exceed it.
Step 3: Working on the UI/UX
- Before starting the design of UI and UX, you must determine how you will be showing data to the users on your pet care app. Furthermore, you will also need to set various roles and their privileges in the pet care app.
- Next, you have to work with the wireframes to gain a clear understanding of the app design and functional requirements. Thus, you will be able to make the user experience more intuitive.
- After creating the wireframes, you will need to consider building mockups to have high-fidelity designs of your app idea. Thus, it is an important process to get a visual representation of your pet care app.
- Now, you need to simulate the entire design to understand the user experience of the pet care app. Thus, your mobile app developers need to create a high-fidelity prototype.
Step 4: Core Development
- Your development team has to first work on the backend part of your pet care app. In fact, this side will serve as the fundamental infrastructure of your mobile app. Here, you will be including the server-side objects and database.
- Next, you have to work with the API(s) that you will be including in your mobile app. These APIs will be responsible for connecting the mobile app and the backend.
- Lastly, we have to build a robust front-end of the app. This part will be responsible for registering all the interactions made by the users with the pet care app.
Step 5: QA Testing
- You have to first begin with user testing to ensure that the user experience matches your expectations.
- Next, we will conduct functional testing to check if all the functionalities of the pet care app are working or not.
- After this, we will go with performance testing to ensure that the pet care app works well on various mobile devices
- Lastly, security testing will be done to give you the peace of mind that your pet care app is secure and reliable.
Step 6: Deployment
- You have to create a developer account on both Play Store and App Store to upload your developed pet care app.
- During the pet care app development, you must maintain a checklist to abide by the guidelines of the Play Store and App Store.
Summing Up
Pet care app development has become a major trend in the mobile apps industry. Businesses are developing their pet care apps to help pet owners to improve the quality of their pet’s life. MobileCoderz is a top mobile app development company if you are planning to develop a robust and secure pet care app.
Author Bio
Josephine Baker is a professional mobile app developer at MobileCoderz, a top mobile app development company. Over the years, she has developed many pet care apps with her team for both iOS and Android platforms. Lastly, apart from her professional life, she takes a keen interest in surfboarding and playing with her dogs.