Getting Started With Pet Care Mobile App Development

With more and more people getting pets, the necessity of a pet care app is increasing at a rapid pace. With features like time to feed, remote watch, and consultation on the app, the experience of keeping and maintaining pets has been improving. It is actually tough to take care of everything yourself, so the app would help users with it.  

A pet care app enables reminders, how-to, guides, and more to the users, so they can take care of their pets much better. There are key differentiators between different pet care apps, and various things depend on which type of pet care app you want to build. There is a range of features to choose from, along with various technologies to choose from, and we have covered it all in our blog.

How to Develop a Pet Care Mobile App?  

Step 1: Making a List of Features  

The market is already quite full of popular pet services apps, and to build your place in such a market, you need to offer something better or extra. We have listed down the most popular features below, and combined with our developers’ perfection in building user-oriented apps, there is a huge possibility of success with your own pet care app.  

Reminders 

Automated reminders for feeding, walking, vaccinations, and everything else. Once the users set their pet’s profile, intelligent automation will provide direct recommendations based on the pet’s breed and requirements. Users will be able to upload things like vaccination certificates, appointments, etc., directly using manual entries, and the app would remind them at the selected time. This feature is specifically helpful to people who are preoccupied with a lot of stuff; they would never miss their appointments, day to bathe their pets, or anything else.  

Monitoring 

It happens very often that we have to leave our pets home alone, and monitoring is a primary requirement in this case. Whether the pet would be suffering in any possible way or breaking things around the house, the users would be able to live-stream it on their phone. We can connect the cameras in the home directly or help integrating new ones directly in the pet app. This feature is especially essential to people who are working and have to go out for their jobs.  

Social Profile 

The feature should sport a feature where the users can create a social profile for their pets, enabling better interaction with other owners on the app. The social profile is hardly found on any of the current pet care app offerings and can be a game-changer for yours. We would include various different features within this one, so the users can make the most out of their time on the app.  

Vet on Chat 

It is always necessary to keep a handy vet on-call, as most of the time, there are minor but significant emergencies when it comes to pets. Whether the users are looking to enquire about sudden temperature rise or when to bathe their pet the first time, vets will be available to help at all times. This feature will help all the users at some point in time and would be the reason why they would choose your app above all other offerings.  

Notes 

Taking notes of what the pet does, when did one last feed them can be essential in raising a pet the right way. As a simple example, suppose a couple lives together and owns a pet, but have work in different shift around the day, they can simply put notes synced between their apps. The notes could be about anything at all but are most essential for the feeding time and sleep schedule the pet has been through.  

Image Recognition 

It happens a lot of times that words cannot explain the condition your pet has, and for that, we will include image recognition and reverse image search right in the app. Whenever you see some spots or face issues with your pet, you can just click a picture, and either of three options will have it solved. You can directly send pictures to the vet using the same feature, enabling quicker resolutions.  

Forums 

Sometimes no one knows better than the one who has been through it. Users will get access to exclusive forums mapped to their pet and their breed type, where other owners can ask and answer questions. While there are forums on the internet, we take it to the next level in your custom pet services app. This feature will be a hit in a lot of ways once it gains popularity; as only the real owners know the struggles and the happy moments, we provide a platform for them to share it on.

Step 2: The Development Part  

There are various choices to make when getting on your pet care app developed. You need to choose the technology for the app, the development path, the mobile app platforms, and the marketing to maximise your app’s popularity. Choosing the right development platform and technologies will not only help you save money but will also allow you to enter the market quicker. If you choose the right development partners to guide you, you can save up to 50% of your pet care app development costs.  

The major decisions you need to make include:   

The Development Platform for Your Pet Care Mobile App  

There are two popular mobile app operating systems, iOS and Android; for both, you would need separate applications. You would want your app to work on every phone, right? For that to happen, you will need to build two separate apps. This equates to double the effort, cost, and double maintenance and support for the app. But if you choose to compromise a few things, cross-platform apps would be built using one codebase, saving you 1000s of dollars. Let’s consider both the options and their pros and cons.  

Native applications: Two different applications for iOS and Android (with more for more platforms if you want to target more). Native app development is downright the most capable when it comes to mobile apps. You get perfect apps to work on respective platforms. The basic downsides are the high cost of development (2 against 1) and maintenance of two separate applications. 

Cross-platform applications: Cross-platform app development technologies such as Flutter and React Native lets you build an app capable of running on multiple platforms with minor tweaks. These apps are very capable, but you would still miss out on maximum performance and some sensor use native to devices. Apart from this, a capable pet care app development company can build a perfect app for you using cross-platform development. 

Choosing Team Members for your Pet Services App’s Development  

The team or the app development company will be the ground workers for building your app to perfection, and choosing the right ones is a top priority. While there may be changes based on the number of team members, you would typically need the following in your app development team.  

• A Project manager   
• App developers   
• UI/ UX experts   
• QA and testers  
• Digital marketers 

The Technology Stack   

Choosing the right technology stack lets you build an app considerably better than the competitors. Right from choosing third-party APIs to the database types will be your decision if you plan to not hire an app development company for you. If you hire a mobile app development company to get your pet care app developed, they will do this choice for you, but it is still always better to know your options before making decisions.  

Native App Development  

• Swift (iOS development)  
• Android Studio (Android development)   
• Cross-platform app development  
• React Native (Cross-platform development framework)  
• Flutter (Cross-platform development framework)  
• Ionic (Cross-platform development framework)  
• Xamarin (Cross-platform development framework)   

Data analytics tools  

• Python  
• Java  
• Amazon EC2  
• Amazon S3  
• Kafka  
• Scala  
• Amazon VPC  
• Amazon EMR  
• Apache Impala   

Utilities  

• Elastic Search   
• DevOps  
• Chef  
• AWS CloudFormation   

Databases  

• Aerospike  
• MongoDB  
• Cassandra  
• MySQL  
• Postgre   

Recommended Read: How to Develop a Bespoke Veterinary Practice Management Software?

Step 3: Who to Hire?  

Setting Up your Own Team  

While setting up a team for developing your pet care application, you would be facing the issue is who to hire. Keep in mind that whoever you hire will be a part of your company, add the office rent, HR staff and managerial staff salary to the total app development cost. While it may be a good idea to hire a team for the maintenance of your app, building a whole new office and hiring so many employees for betting on an app isn’t a good idea. You can get your work done by the experts in the cabin next to you, but you need to figure out if that’s worth the premium.  

Hire Freelance Developers  

Freelance developers are the building blocks of the new age of information technology; they cost less, are available in abundance, and are available 24/7. The downsides? The project would simply hang if one fine day your trusted freelancer who was always on time doesn’t show up. Moreover, there’s the risk of data loss, failing to comply with data privacy policies and breach of NDAs. That leaves us to the last and the best option.  

Hire an App Development Company  

App development companies are around the world in all shapes and sizes; their job is to build a perfect mobile app for you at minimum cost and time. This makes for the best option for building your pet services app as they are both reliable and would comply with the contract in most cases. Hire a reputed mobile app development company from overseas to save massive costs while getting the same or even better results in lesser costs.

Recommended Read – How To Hire An Android App Development Company?

Are you Ready to Develop your Own Pet Care Application?  

Pet Care apps are highly popular, and we see their popularity far more in the coming years. If you have an idea that can change the pet care industry, we will help you build a mobile app around it. Whenever you are ready, just reach to us, and the developers at Matellio would be more than happy to build the perfect pet care app for you.