The app market today is like the Coliseum, and unless you are that gladiator that possesses that one survival skill that no one has yet to discover, you are left to fight to endure with the rest of the combatants. Luckily, your survival odds in the app market are much higher than those in ancient Rome, but never the less, a few tips here and there can certainly up your odds.
Prioritize
Like any other major undertaking, you have to set priorities. Make sure you prioritize your time, your apps features, your budget, later releases, and any other aspect of your project that may call for sacrifices at a later date.
Solidify a Monetization Plan
You need to decide early in the development process how you will profit from your app. Are you going to make it free with ads? Are you going to provide a freemium service? Are you offering in-app purchases? Or, are you going to employ the newest trend of sponsorships? Your monetization strategy can affect development, so make this decision early in your planning phase.
Develop a Strong A Security Play
Security breaches have been rise to much chaos in the mobile industry. Start out strong with a solid and effective security plan. Invest big in this area! You need the protection, and you need to create a reputation that you are a secure company.
Learn Design Patterns
A lot of experts feel that app’s core should be thought of first during development. That’s not always the case. By considering what you want your app to look like before the development, you can create a better user experience.
Place Usability at the Forefront
You constantly need to be reflecting on usability. You need to create a visually appealing, easy to navigate experience for your users; otherwise, they will dismiss your app and move on to one that does.
During development, this thinking needs to stay at the forefront. Programmers will tell you otherwise, but users want quick and simple, and making that a priority can eliminate a lot of redoing things later on.
Keep it Small
Mobile devices have limited storage. In fact, users delete apps when they get storage warnings from their mobile devices. By keeping the size of your app small, you up your chances making the cut when device clean up day comes.
Study Your User’s Motivation
Take the time to look at how and why users are using your app or apps similar to yours. Read reviews of competitors’ apps, and develop a way to make your app more user friendly. More importantly, examine how quickly users are able to accomplish the goal that you created the app to accomplish.
Think About Wearables
Wearables are gaining more and more popularity, so you need to keep part of your development concentrated on this new mobile movement. Stay ahead of the pack with new technologies.
Reflect on Marketing Strategies
Keeping your eye on the ball during development is crucial, but at some point, you will need to develop a solid marketing plan. You need to make sure you are staying abreast on the most successful app marketing techniques.
Test, Test, and Retest
You need to constantly test and retest your apps for bugs and for a simple user experience. If you cannot provide your users with a quick and easy solution to the problem you set out to solve with your app, then you need to go back and create one. If you don’t, your app won’t succeed in the stores.
Author:
Bio – Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app and mobile website platform for small businesses, and Bizness CRM, a CRM for selling to small businesses.
If you agree to this study being posted on Read Write, the App market will be $25 billion by 2015 and as I see it, many entrepreneurs are already coming up with more and more creative apps under different niches. However, I believe there is a lot of potential that still needs to be tapped.
The only problem that I see at the moment with the people is the lack of proper planning and management of how to continue it in the longer run. According to my observation, many great ideas fail to perform in the market only because they were not released at a proper time or they had forgotten to consider some obvious checks. Since, there is a lot of competition, not everybody is lucky enough to get a second chance.
If you are one of those who are either building an app or about to launch it, this post is especially crafted for you. In this post, I will be including pointers that you should consider before launching your next app in the market. Read this and give another look at your project and see if you are really ready for the release!
What do you want from this?
Obviously the end goal of any app would be to get good amount of money in return . Here, the question is about how you are going to reach that goal and this needs to be answered before publishing the application in the market.
The goal of What’s App was ultimately to earn billions of dollars but in order to achieve this end goal, what they did was they created the need of it in the market and generated the biggest customer base in the market. Once they had achieved their goal, they signed one of the biggest deals in the history with Facebook.
Before you launch, you actually have to answer this question and specify the defined goals in order to achieve the ultimate goal after going through a series of successes.
Unique Selling Point (USP)
This is another factor that needs to be determined or you might not be able to achieve what you have been expecting from your investment. Cloning whatsapp and expecting to earn billions of dollars from it is nothing but day dreaming. All other apps that offer similar services like whatsapp are not worth billions of dollars. You need to have the USP like snap chat has with their product.
Regardless of how big problem you are solving, try to create a USP that helps your app stand out from the rest or it would be considered as just another app in the market and you might not be able to achieve the expected return on investment.
If your app doesn’t have a Unique Selling Point (USP), the best idea is to stop and think again!
Is it the right time?
Remember 3-D TV? Although, it’s still available in the market but due to the lack of programming and other factors such as headache of wearing glasses and highly expensive hardware, many people refused to give in to the option and as a result, it didn’t create the revolution in the market. I call it a failure and one of the reasons for its lack of success is that it was launched too early in the market and people were not exactly ready for it.
Before launching your app in the market, make sure that it is the right time to introduce it or else, all your efforts might go in vain. It is a good idea to start with beta testing and see how people are reacting to it and then after having the data in hand, you can plan your launch accordingly.
If the gathered data goes against your expectations, it is advisable not to consider the launch at that specific point in time. Give your idea a second thought and come up with something that the targeted audience would easily digest.
Where do you start?
Another important question, which most of the people fail to answer unfortunately deals with the platform to be used for your app. You need to know where you should actually start. Although, the use of Android is spreading like crazy, it is important to consider that people using iPhones tend to spend more money on applications as compared to the android users.
The idea is to give a fresh look to your project and see which platform you should begin with, later moving on to the rest. If you have a paid app that offers real solution to a user’s problem, then probably the best idea is to start with an iPhone app; whereas, in case of a free app, opting for Android is a better idea.
Again, it is important to have data in hand before coming up with the final decision. Try to create a quick survey around your app on websites like survey monkey or mechanical trunk and see how people are responding to it and decide accordingly.
Double Check your Security
One of the major problems, that many app project owners do not consider as important, is the security of the data being provided by the audience. In the app industry, the most important thing is the data being provided by the users, and therefore, if you are unable to provide security for their data, no matter how powerful your app is, people will eventually leave and go for other better and secure options.
Once your app is completely made and ready to be launched, it is always a good idea to ask your development team to recheck the application from security point of view. There is a tool called CheckMarx that automatically checks and identifies the security lacks within the code and offers possible solutions for it.
Once you have answered all the questions given above and you really think that you are ready for the launch, then go for it and see how the audience is interacting with the app.
Launching the app is no rocket science; however, considering a few factors would ensure a smooth launch. Make sure to give highest priority to your customers and the audience around your brand and continuously analyze the data and act accordingly.
There could be more questions but the ones given above are the most important ones and failing to answer them might lead your app to fail in the market.
So, try answering the questions and get ready for the launch!