Smartphones have taken the mobile industry by storm. Besides for communicative purpose, mobiles are now being used for a greater cause. Businesses and industries from entertainment to health, have realized the potential a mobile application holds to reach out to the niche market. Once you understand the critical role a mobile app can play in the growth and expansion of your business or even generate revenue for your market, however, there are essential things you need to consider before launching your application.
You have a great app idea and believe nothing stands in your way to make big in the market. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case, an idea is never sufficient to sustain the product in the long term. Below is the list of certain things and factors that must be considered while brainstorming on a mobile application idea.
1. The Cost
The basic start comes with planning the cost and budget for your application. It can depend on the features, complexity and the platform you choose for the development. This will, in turn, affect the resources and scope that will be allocated according to your selected requirements. For instance, a mobile application with back-end servers will cost more than a simple (backend less) application.
A simple one screen app with a remote server can cost about $150 which obviously varies platform to platform. If you plan to build a native application, concentrating on just a single platform i.e. iOS, Android or Windows the cost is relatively less than building a hybrid application that runs on multiple operating systems. But then again by not choosing to build a native application, you will increase cost for building separate apps for each different system.
2. Market
Take time to research and explore the current market trends and the potential of your app idea to grow in the existing circumstances and structure. It may be possible that something identical or similar already exists in the market. In that case, look out for competitors and ways of differentiating your services that will allow the product to stand out in the consumer’s mind.
Understanding the end user allows you to have a broader perspective of what the consumer wants and how your idea can help them achieve their goals. This can be carried out by developing some use case scenarios to analyze the prospective set of target consumers and techniques of launching campaigns to directly market them.
3. The Right Technology
It all comes down to selecting the best platform to develop your mobile application on. There are basically 3 choices you can make depending on the need and scope of your project. A native application that is designed to be ‘native’ to one particular platform, a web app that runs on a mobile browser from a central server and a hybrid app that can operate on multiple platforms.
Each technology with its different underlying structure has possible pros and cons that decide the overall performance of the app. Before selecting the right technology, you must ask yourself the right questions; who is going to use the app? What kind of features will be incorporated? Will the app run offline when required? How important is the cross-platform functionality? The answers for it depends on the type and size of the industry you belong or want to target which involves several factors like security, portability, cost amongst many other. To learn more about choosing the right technology for a mobile app, read our blog to learn more interesting facts about each type of these platforms.
4. Beta and Alpha Testing
Testing of a mobile application prior to its launch is important to get customer feedback and suggestions. This helps to improve the quality of the software being designed and assists engineers and developers to understand the end user perspective. By building a user testing focus group, you can obtain valuable outputs that allow you to take effective measures to ensure customer satisfaction.
5. Marketing
The final and most essential thing to know once your product has been developed and released to the app store is devising the right kind of marketing strategy. Engaging your audience through social media platforms (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram and more recently Snapchat), posting blogs on a daily basis regarding news and updates regarding your app, optimizing the app with the right keywords on the App/ Play Store are some ways of building a buzz that will captivate user’s attention even before the app’s launch in the market.With around 1 million apps on App Store alone, the need is not to just penetrate the idea immediately after its release but also to sustain and even improve its discoverability in the long run. Many times a company spends a considerable amount of their time and money on product development that the marketing does not get its fair share of resources.
Many mobile apps despite having the right concept and tactics, failed to impress the market. The reason for their failure lied not in their execution of idea but the lack of the branding consistency. Not every app can become the next Instagram or Snapchat. By devising strategies that are able to thrive in the long run, a mobile app in the current market conditions has the potential to not only generate profitable revenues for start-up companies but also reshape the lifestyles of masses.
