How to a Develop Car Parking App?
Finding a car parking spot in the UK has been increasingly complex, and so arises the dire need for a car parking app. The reasons could be more people settling in the kingdom, or simply more people buying more cars. Nevertheless, whatever the reason might be, the parking spots are going to remain limited, even if new is going to be built they cannot match how many new cars are being bought.
The only way around the situation is a good car parking assistance app. Are you interested in filling up the gaps of the current offering with your bespoke car parking app? Today we will be helping you with everything you need to know about car parking app development. If you are planning to develop a car parking finder mobile app, this blog will help you with features to include, development options, and who to hire for developing your app.
How to Develop a Car Parking Finder Mobile app?
Step 1: Making a List of Features
The toughest part in developing a car parking app is to find the uniqueness in your offering and implementing it in the app. This uniqueness can be seen in design, type, and offering but depends on the features you offer in your car parking app. So we have prepared a list of features that can really set you apart from the competition and let you gain a competitive advantage. While it isn’t an exhaustive list of features to be included in a car parking mobile app, it will give you a good idea of the direction you should head to.
Advance Booking
Advance booking parking spots the day before, for the entire day, week, or month can help you gain the majority of customers. You need to decide your customer base first, though, whether people are looking for parking spaces once in a while or those struggling to find one daily. It could be both too, but focus on the priority customers first and implement this feature in a way that is perfectly suited to them.
Car Locator
In big parking lots, people can have trouble finding their cars when they come back. Your app should sport a feature to navigate to the car, or at least find the position within a proximity of a few meters. While most people give this feature a miss, it is a must-have to be included in your car parking app offering. More and more people would want to locate their car in a big parking space, and providing this feature is a must considering the lesser effort it would take.
Widgets
The parking spot availability people can look at a glance is a must-have feature, and adding a widget for it can be the best way to do it. Making widgets for availability, as well as the current position of the car can help you build a better user experience. Keeping the users up to date on their favourite parking spots can also be possible through widgets, which can solve the purpose of having the app much better.
Payment Options
Direct payment integration and support for popular parking spots or centralized ones can be a real game-changer. You can even create a wallet that automatically gets deducted and be loaded for an entire month’s worth of expenses. Adding a payment gateway can be deemed a bit of an expensive affair, but it is a necessity for the purpose it solves and the time it saves. Try integrating as many payment options as possible, and the same can also let you create new reward-type opportunities.
Live Feed
While it may seem far off as a parking app finder company, you can very well integrate dashcam footage in the app using APIs. This may be extra beneficial so the user can always have track of the place that their car is parked. While it is just an idea, you can do a lot more things with it, and a connected system would enable more to the app when considering overall usability.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are necessary for any real-time app and so should be a part of your car parking app offering. You can take it to the next level by tracking where exactly the car is moving and route them to the nearest parking spot. Push notifications can also be used to notify users about empty parking spaces or changes. When users get the information they want automatically, there’s no better way to engage them better.
Support
Having a customer support offering should be your priority when you make a real-time app. People might get in trouble for a lot of things when they are parking their car, and you need good customer support to resolve those issues. You see, it is all fun and games until somebody’s car gets towed from a parking spot you designated. The user would probably never use the app again, so you better have customer support ready to arbitrate between the customers and the authorities.
Security
Security is essential in a car parking app. Just consider the risk of a car getting stolen from a location you prompted the user to park at. Data encryption is a necessity for your app, and you are the one responsible for it and need to take care of it. No matter if you get the app developed by a company or by your own team, you should take extra care when it comes to the security of a car parking facilitator app.
Step 2: The Development Part
There are various choices to make when actually getting on the development part of a car parking app. The technology to choose, setting or your own service or using APIs, how can you maximize your investment return, and more. Choosing the right development methods and technology can help you save both time and cost while failing to do so might cost you even twice or thrice than it should. Make the decisions wisely, or you can hire a reputed mobile app company to consult on which development path would suit you the best.
The major decisions you would be making includes:
The Development Platform for Parking Assistance Mobile App
Native applications: Separate native applications for different platforms like iOS and Android. When there are two apps involved, you already know you have to pay for each app’s development. This is the preferred choice for car parking apps. While other apps can make do with cheaper counterparts, you would need extensive API integrations. A native app is but a necessity in this case as you require both the sensors and the security only a native app can provide.
Cross-platform application development: Cross-platform apps work the way the name suggests. It’s one app capable of running on multiple platforms with just some minimal changes. This is the way to go if your niche allows it, but it is hardly so in this case. However, as a highly experienced development company, we can make separate components for your app and work with similar security and features like a native app.
Choosing Team Members for your Car Parking Finder App’s Development
Every app requires a team of experienced engineers who can create the pieces and then put them together to function as a mobile app. You are looking at a team of at least 6-7 people when you are trying to develop a car parking app without outsourcing anything. Please note that having a smaller team will lead to much more time consumption while building the app, and take care of it based on when you are planning to enter the market. Below is a list of individuals you would require in your team.
- A Project manager
- App developers
- UI/ UX experts
- QA and testers
- Digital marketers
Technology Stack
Choosing the perfect technology stack apart from the app development platform comes as a part of things you should know before developing your car parking app. There are various different technologies to choose from when developing a cross-platform app, and that’s going to be the major choice in this case. Apart from development technology, you will need to choose databases, APIs, utilities, etc.
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
- HBase
- MySQL
- Postgre
Step 3: Who to Hire?
Setting Up Your Own Team
Setting up your own time might seem the most convenient and under-control way to develop an app, but it comes with its own set of consequences. Expect to pay a major premium in costs, apart from a huge chunk of money to be made for office space, permanent employees salary, allowances, etc. Setting up your own will burn a deep hole in your pocket but will give you maximum control.
Hire Freelance Developers
Hiring freelancers from any of the websites can be deemed as the cheapest way to build an app. But again, there are major consequences if you choose it, freelancers need precise instructions, and for that, you will need an expert project coordinator anyway. When you calculate the entire cost, it will come to be somewhere around hiring an app development company, except that you would face major unnecessary hassles tackling freelancers.
Hire an App Development Company
The best example of letting the experts take care of the job. There are various companies offering exciting packages and employing some of the best talents in app development. This method will cost you much lesser than setting up your own team while avoiding the hassles that come with hiring freelancers. Since you are getting a complicated car parking app built, we suggest going with this option to ensure smooth car parking app development.
Recommended Read – How To Hire An Android App Development Company?
Are you Ready to Develop Your Own Car Parking Application?
We see no downside of starting a car parking business in the current scenario. Realistically, the number of cars is only going to increase however you try to see it. The best part about it is, it doesn’t matter if the cars are electric or gasoline run; they all need parking spaces. If you are willing to get a quotation based on your requirements, feel free to contact Matellio. We are a team of experienced mobile app developers and will help you with all your requirements.
