How to Develop a Drone Control Application?

So, to help you with providing your customers with a user-friendly digital solution to manage the drone (and a little more), we’ll talk you through the details of Web & Mobile Application development for your product. To be more specific, we are going to talk about features you can implement into the app.

Additionally, we’ll talk about securing your app with special features and regulations you might need to comply with so you’ll have a solution with high-level security. We also find it useful to review a couple of existing drone control apps so you can highlight some ideas for the app of your own.

We’ll sum it up by listing useful Tech Stack (APIs, SDKs, and other apps you can partner with) you can integrate into your app, and answer some of the Frequently Asked Questions about the development process.

Welcome! 🚀

⚙️ Top Drone Control App Features

The set of features highly depends on what segment/niche you’re operating in. If it’s kind of a toy drone for a relatively low price, you might limit your features to the most crucial ones. However, if your customers pay a decent amount of money for your product, you can implement extra features to meet your clients’ expectations. In this section, we’ll talk about both basic and extra features for your drone control app.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔒

Most of the Sign-Up flows include registering an account using the email and name of the creator. But when it comes to operating drones with recording features, the usage requires more sign-up steps to ensure security.

Additionally to the email and name, you can add phone number verification, password length & contents requirements, etc. Alternatively, if your app is compatible with your drones only, you can set up the sign-up process via a unique code given out when buying the drone, a batch number, a unique product code, etc.

It’s not only about reliability — but customers might also feel more comfortable knowing that the filmed content is securely protected from outside intrusion.

Don’t forget to think about the ways users can restore access to their account in case they forget the password, lose access to the email, or any other reason. It can be a phone call, security questions, a multi-step restoration system with several steps to complete, etc. In the next section, we’ll talk about security features in detail.

To sum the features section up, the possible functionality you can implement isn’t really limited — there are alternatives of the same features for any development framework or operating system. You might want to add a chatting feature to bring the community together, leaderboards to encourage people to use your drones more often — it depends.

Think about your needs and simply talk about them with your Tech Team, Tech Partner, or other trusted people to figure out the way to make your ideas a reality.

🔑 How to Ensure Your App’s Security

Depending on the intentions of your customers, they might store highly sensitive data (like private yards, other people’s faces, etc.) in the app. So, in this section, we’ll talk about how you can protect the app’s data using security features. Additionally, we’ll also cover Regulatory Compliance a bit.

Security Features

Without further ado, let’s start with security features you can integrate into your drone control application.

# 1: Multi-Factor Authentication

Firstly, we’d recommend enabling a multi-factor authentication system to ensure high-level access protection. This way, even if fraudsters get through the first authentication layer, there will be another one (or maybe even several).

Apart from the GDPR, depending on what market your business covers, there can be some local regulations that you should comply with.

📚 Drone Control Apps: Case Studies

In this section, we’re going to review 2 of the most popular drone control apps:

• The first case is going to be the app for DJI professional drones that cost around $1000 or more.
• The second subsection would be dedicated to a high-quality “toy” drone that costs approximately $100 and actually uses the same technology as DJI but has a separate app.

This is rather for you to get some inspiration on what you want to see in your app,, learn from the mistakes of others, and see what products your potential competitors bring to the market.

DJI Fly App

DJI Fly is an app for drone control from DJI, one of the leading companies in the drone industry. They have quite a broad functionality and a huge community.

The connection between drones and smartphones happens via the app. It’s possible thanks to a separate WLAN network that gets connected to the smartphone. This way, the drone becomes “aware” that it should listen to the commands coming from a specific device.

The app has buttons for automatic landing and take-off. The digital controller screen is quite user-friendly and responsive, meaning that the drone reacts to the commands rapidly. However, this benefit vanishes when flying outside in windy weather, which is more of a drone problem rather than the app.

The camera settings are accessible via the app on the digital controller screen. The screen is also dedicated to changing flying modes both for filming and entertainment. Tello provides an in-app gallery where content gets stored directly after filming.

Generally, it’s a good app with all necessary functions for drone control, taking Tello drones’ affordability into account. However, there’s also something that allows Tello to stand out — their Tello Iron Man drone with a dedicated immersive application. The devices are themed as Iron Man from Marvel movies and comic books. The separate app is also fully dedicated to the adventurous world, has Iron-Man-based guides and missions to complete, etc.

🤖 Tech Stack for your Drone App

This section is going to be dedicated to various Tech Stack options that you can complement your app with or integrate certain features instead of coding them from scratch. Tech Stack in this context includes APIs and SDKs, which are basically sets of code for development and a way for companies to provide their services “out-of-the-box”.

There are quite a lot of APIs and SDKs for drones and dedicated apps specifically. The best part is that they’re basically a set of different APIs designed to enable several features needed for drone control apps. It saves a lot of time and can help you reduce development costs. Let’s review 3 of the most popular ones in the table below:

The first one is cloud storage. Cloud storage is quite a popular solution for drones since this way, users can access the data from anywhere, by logging in to their accounts. Plus, there will be no need for users to keep hardware devices.

There are countless cloud providers on the market you can choose from — Google One, pCloud, Dropbox, and many others. However, cloud storage might be somewhat problematic when it comes to “heavy” files. If the size is rather big, the data transfer might take a long time.

It’s also possible to make drones with internal storage and space for SD/micro SD cards. Alternatively, there are external hard drives that you can either offer via your online store, send them as a complementary device with the drone, or leave it up to users what to do with the storage.

⭐ A Tip from Stormotion: when adding live video transfer from the drone camera to a mobile phone, developers integrate compression tools. The compression somewhat lowers the content quality, but otherwise, such a process would be resource-consuming.

That’s why developers often implement the following trick: they set up video broadcasting of medium quality to the smartphone (so users can navigate the drone) while recording the same video but in HD into the device’s memory. This way, you provide users with high-quality content creation tools with lower resource consumption.

💡 Takeaways

Developing an app for drone control is an exciting yet challenging process. There are a lot of details to take into account as well as budgeting questions. You also need to decide what features are relevant to your target audience, and implement them while maintaining a high performance of the app.

Plus, you should look for reliable Tech Stack providers with high-level security. Apart from that, you have to take care of the security of your app and spend some time implementing the protective features.

But it’s all worth it since providing a well-developed drone control app significantly increases user experience. This might lead to sales increase and expand your clientele.

If you have any questions left or need any help with the development, feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to help you!