FAQ

How does my business benefit from having a mobile app?

With so much global access to smartphones, we now take care of all aspects of our work and lives online on our phones 24/7. Folks are on their phones — so you should be, too. If your brand or organization isn’t available as an app, how can you compete in the global, virtual market…when there’s so much to choose from?

Your mobile app puts your brand in front of your customers and key audience, giving you mindshare and presence—even in the slivers of time we spend waiting in lines, looking up something on the go, and distracting ourselves with screen time on a break.

With worldwide social distancing and remote work, your customers will be into their phone apps now more than ever. If you’re focused on tomorrow’s generations, apps are key to reaching and connecting with young audiences. If your industry relates to wellness or safety, your app can help keep your customers in touch with emergency medical care, child safety, mental health…and the list goes on.

Plus, apps come with metrics, so you can measure your outreach and engagement easily and digitally and share your mobile marketing successes with your management team, investors, and analysts.

What purpose could my app serve? I’d love some examples.

Mobile apps can be designed and developed for an endless number of possibilities:

• Instilling curiosity and desire for purchasing your products and promoting your brand
• Connecting with and forging brand loyalty with new customers and new markets
• Creating a customer or user journey that delights and inspires your audience
• Educating your audience about your products, brand, or initiative
• Providing exclusive video, audio, and visual content on the go
• Reinforcing daily habits to amplify the impact of your own products and offerings
• Measuring user or customer engagement and app activities through analytics

As you upgrade your app over time, imagine what you could do with your own Tercera-designed app!

How much time and money does it take to create an app?

When it comes to creating and launching apps, the sky’s the limit!

Many popular apps are known to have cost anywhere from $25,000 to several hundred thousand, depending on user adoption, features and functionality, platform availability, and more. These complex, dynamic apps take close ongoing collaboration between the tech and the business teams, incur fees for maintenance and promotion, scheduled upgrades, security and authentication. Some even have entire in-house app teams dedicated to ongoing app management full time.

But as most of us know, complicated doesn’t mean it’s better.

With Tercera, you’re in good hands. When we partner closely with you, we design and deliver a quality, visually captivating app in less than 90 days—within a quarter!

You’ll be informed of key steps and decisions to make throughout the entire design and development process, so that you can relax, save time, money, and tech headaches, because we’ll take care of them for you before they even come up.

And you don’t even have to be a tech expert yourself…at all.

Tercera app packages and options include those that start well under $25,000, so you can budget your annual marketing resources accordingly, as you grow and evolve your app. Come have a chat with us today, and find out what suits your business needs best.

Why is React Native such a great programming language for developing my app?

React Native is one of a few technologies that allow you to build for both iOS and Android at the same time. The plus side is that you get more bang for your buck, obviously, but the added bonus is that it is much, much easier to find a React developer than it is to find an iOS / Android developer, let alone someone who does both. You’re putting yourself in a position to be able to update your app more easily by using React Native.

What’s it like to work with Tercera?

Once you’ve decided to start on your app journey with Tercera, we’ll guide you through what you need to plan, design, and launch—as your trusty tech partner by your side all the way.

1. Decide on a Tercera app package that’s right for you.
2. Schedule a time to start your design with our design team.
3. With one week to your design’s completion and a security deposit paid, we secure a kickoff  videoconference meeting date to walk you through what your package includes, designate milestone dates like Demo Day and project leads, and answer questions. This is a great meeting for including and updating your team and stakeholders.
4. When your design is submitted to our development team, your app will be coded to your specifications. This takes 4-8 weeks depending on the amount of assets and content on your app. Keep in mind that designs possess interdependent elements, and cannot be changed once finalized.
5. Demo Day arrives! This day marks the unveiling of your app, how it looks, and instructions are given for your team and colleagues to test out the app.
6. Bugs are to be reported within one week (7 days), and final bug fixes are completed.
7. Tercera publishes your app to Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and you’re live!

As a complementary part of our packages, we also provide to you additional guides and tools, including an Application Design Form, a “How to Design Your App’s Purpose and Evolution” guide, a “How to Manage Your App in App Stores” guide, a “How to Debug Your Staged App,” and more.

When you’re ready for next steps, so are we. Get in touch with us to chat about future upgrades and additions to your app.

What size are business apps, typically?

App content can be measured in a variety of ways. Here are some:

1. There are file sizes for graphics, video, and audio files. There’s also word count for messaging.

2. Tercera apps usually run from 10 to 20 “screens”. Additional screens are available as an add-on service. What’s most important is how smoothly your user journey flows throughout the design of your app, not one more or one less screen.

3. Some app functionalities require substantial hours and coding on the back-end, and this takes developers longer to complete. The “size” of an app development project can also be seen in terms of developer labor.

As a design best practice, our designers will help you organize and tighten up your content and flow, so you don’t end up with screens that hang like run-on sentences.

Why should I develop a static app, and not something complex and dynamic all at once?

If you’re newish to the process of creating and maintaining an app, never fear! We’ve got you. Launching a static app is a great first step that won’t break your bank. And it gives your team members responsible for the app some time to get acclimated to the tech world, whether that’s yourself and a trusty colleague or other members of your team.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Awesome apps aren’t, either.  

After you’ve gotten familiar with the nuts and bolts involved in designing, developing and launching your app with Tercera, we’re more than glad to work with you again on your “v2,” where we add in all the fancy bells and whistles you’d like, in order of priority.

As budgets renew and increase, talk to us about when you’d like to get that additional development done, so we can secure you the fastest possible start date and turnaround in our production schedule.

And we’ll collaborate with you until you’ve got the app of your dreams.

What first steps should I take to plan out my new app?

For your first launch version, we suggest the following steps:

• Set up 2-3 crystal clear app goals for your target audience. Who is that audience, and how will you be engaging them on app platforms like App Store and Google Play?
• Ask stakeholders in your organizations for their input, collaboration, and buy-in if needed. Do you have colleagues in marketing, design, and branding who would like to provide guidance on your app’s design? What about your leaders in sales and marketing?
• Decide what type of app you’d like. Would it be mainly educational, to drive awareness, engagement, or purchases? What key messaging will you present in your app, and how would this evolve over time as the app is upgraded?
• Assign team member(s) to be responsible for the promotion and maintenance of your app. We recommend that you assign at least 2 team members for the sake of redundancy, so nothing falls through the cracks when someone’s out of the office.
• Draft a clear, visually engaging user journey with a simpler workflow and compelling takeaway. Good bones and closed loops matter.
• Start gathering your app assets, including photos, graphics, logo files, video and audio files, branding guidelines (fonts, colors, etc.), and anything else that may take you time to have created, labeled, and organized. Make sure these files are up to date, high resolution, complement each other, and adhere to your brand guidelines.
• Look into wireframing an “app story” for your brand or organization. This lays out the journey of your user from screen to screen, like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Wireframes are used to tell our development team exactly how the app should look and behave. Our in-house design talent at Tercera is glad to help.

If you’d like our help with design, no worries: Tercera’s (Segunda) package includes app design with our design guru. Depending on your availability for collaboration, we can work with you to design your 10- or 20- screen static app in as little as 3 weeks!

Please note: “design” and “development” are the two distinct halves of your whole project.

Talk to us to schedule a design consultation with our Tercera design talent.

What sets Tercera apart from other app development companies?

We design and develop high-quality, visually compelling React Native static apps in as fast as 90 days, without substantial technical expertise and daily project management from your end.

Tercera’s people share our values of integrity, equality and inclusion, and standing behind what we deliver. We want to support small businesses and communities of color, which is a part of everything we do.

Tercera operates to support communities of color in all we do — which is reflected by our business model, aimed at supporting small businesses, the backbone of our workforce and economy. As well as training aspiring engineers; every one of our applications is also a vehicle for a young engineer to get a better grounding technology so they can thrive in this industry, supporting themselves and their families.

React Native (RN) was created in 2015. Two years later in 2017, Tercera founder and CEO Sara Ines Calderon was architecting apps with it, giving her years of expertise coding React Native apps in various consumer-facing industries.

Who does Tercera serve?

We welcome the opportunity to work with people from all walks of life. Whether you’re tech savvy or not, just starting out in business or not, we’re ready to listen to what you need. We celebrate diversity and inclusion not just in the people we help and the way we treat them, but also in the up-and-coming tech talent we train and lift up with the tech career opportunities and mentorships we create here.

Tercera is a women- and BIPOC-owned business, and we’re located in the heart of warm, sunny Austin, Texas.

Sara has worked tirelessly to create more diverse and inclusive tech spaces in her home of Austin, Texas for years. As a former Director of Women Who Code Austin, and Women Who Code Board member, she’s also a founder of the annual Austin Diversity Hackathon where folks from across the state come to participate and learn technology together.

At Tercera and beyond, Sara’s leadership and trailblazing in the tech sector has inspired others to join her team and work under her mentorship at several companies where she’s worked as a React Native Lead. About a dozen former mentees are now working various jobs in technology all over the country. Your mobile app from Tercera is designed and developed by rising stars from BIPOC communities. Tercera struggles to help level the playing field and include everyone, no matter what you look like or where you come from.

My app budget isn’t quite what I want yet. Should I wait to start with Tercera?

Contact us to inquire about your app project, and we’ll work with you to figure out the payment options that suit your needs and your schedule best.

As soon as your security deposit is paid, we’ll be able to secure a start date for your app development and kick off your project internally by updating our team members and locking in production dates for your milestones. This helps ensure that your app is delivered on time, per your schedule.

On your start date, keep in mind that your design should be within one week to completion at this point, since we can jumpstart your coding framework for one week before we require the final design details in full.