Top 10 Successful Learning Apps

3 min readDec 21, 2021

All I need to start learning something right now is pull up my smartphone and open an educational app. It’s no surprise then to see startups and incumbents alike create learning apps in a frenzy, trying their best to digitize education. If you’re one of them and want to develop educational apps, this article will help you set the wheels in motion.

Types of Educational Apps

I’m sure you have a better idea of what type of learning application you want to create, but let’s look at all available options. First of all, educational solutions may target:

teachers
learners and their parents or guardians

You may also think of other potential users like school administration or advertising agencies. It’s important to remember that you will probably need an extra layer for managing your digital product provision.

All you really need to know about the types of educational apps is whom your product will serve and how you will help this target audience achieve their learning goals in the most efficient way.

Most Successful Learning Apps on the Market

If you’re envisioning a custom developed mobile app for educational purposes, you absolutely have to know who your main competitors are. A quick intro to all the trending mobile learning products, so you know what they are in general:

Duolingo and Babbel — language learning.
Mathway and Photomath — help users crack through math problems with explanations.
ABCmouse — one of the most popular apps for kids that covers reading, math, art, and music.
Google Classroom — connects teachers with students in a virtual classroom.
Picture This — identifies a plant in a photo, tells the user how to care for it, and keeps track of watering, etc.
Epic — a digital library for young children.
Kahoot — create and play quizzes.
Socratic — think Google search for scholars on AI steroids, optimized for learners.

Build a Winning Educational App in 4 Steps

If you’re not familiar with the app development process at all, certain steps repeat for every project, regardless of the type of mobile product you’re building. Let’s walk you through the major steps on how to build an educational app.

Step 1: Discovery

Depending on whom your mobile solution will serve and with what purpose, you will be choosing a platform. Every successful project in our experience started with a discovery step, and mobile learning app development projects are not an exception, of course.

On the other hand, if your target audience is teachers, and the solution will help them put together assignments and learning materials, you should strongly consider building the educational app as a web solution.

Step 2: Validate by rapid prototyping

Once you know for whom you’re creating, it’s time to put your idea into a form. You do this by designing the UX/UI and putting together an interactive prototype that looks just like a real app. As a result, you will come to the next step fully prepared, with a polished prototype that needs to be translated into coding.

Step 3: Development of educational app

The development step is almost proverbial: programmers code and quality engineers test. Of course, there’s more to that, but you don’t really need to know unless you need to directly control developers.

As for testing, we recommend adding automated tests with services like BrowserStack that allow you to test a mobile application for education on 2000+ real mobile devices. It’s also a good practice to run regression tests throughout development to catch the bugs after each significant iteration.

Step 4. Deploy

Making the app available for the public may seem as easy as uploading it to the App Store and Google Play, but there are still a few things to keep in mind.

You want to know how your education application will behave when too many users start actively using it.

You should have set up DevOps processes during the development step, but maintaining it post-release ensures you will be able to seamlessly ship updates once your application is in the stores.