The mobile app has a significant amount of opportunity to communicate, engage with users and customers.
It’s always good to hear that, you are planning a mobile app for your business.
No doubt you have great ideas but how are you going to build it? What important factors you will consider while developing an app?
These always matters for you to stand out from the crowd.
Developing a mobile app is not just like getting things done from your mobile app developer.
It must be organized; feature full and well designed to meet the end-users requirements.
Otherwise, your app may get unnoticed among the huge numbers of competitive apps.
So, it will be more productive for you to note down all your ideas and sketch all in a paper. Before jumping with your decisions, please make sure to consider few aspects which are much needed.
Here in this article, I’ve put together this list of things that you need to think about before you start mobile app development.
Here you go,
1. Purpose of App Development
It’s very important for you to know the real reason or purpose of your app development and how it will help your business.
You must have a clear vision of your app and this must be aligned with your business objective.
The mobile world is growing fast and people prefer more towards comparing to the desktop.
More than 4.9 Billion global mobile users are using their mobile phone in browsing and it is likely to reach 5.07 billion by 2019.
So the chances of reaching more users and generating revenue are much high through mobile apps.
Coming to the mobile usages report of the top global market like USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, China and Indonesia from comScore, mobile users are consuming 2x minutes comparing to the desktop.
(Source: smartinsights.com)
2. Deep Market Research
Market research is the first and foremost thing before developing app relating to your product and service.
In-depth market research of competitors gives clear insights about your competitor’s strengths and weakness. You need to research on some points like,
- Who are your competitors?
- What is their business strategy?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What are their customers saying in the reviews and on social media?
- What is their unique selling point?
Through your research, you can outline your business objective and you can avoid repeating the mistakes your competitors made.
3. Know Your Target Audience
Market research of your business not only helps you collecting information about your competitors but also helps in understanding your target audiences. Knowing target audience and their behaviour is not an easy task but the deep analysis can make it possible. Ask yourself the below questions, to get know your targeted audience.
- What will be the key functionality of app?
- Which functionality are people using more?
- Which functionalities giving pain to users?
- Which business goals will it help you achieve?
- What audience will benefit from it?
4. Ways to Generate Revenue from App
Mobile App plays a different role in generating revenue for your business. Some app directly generates revenue where others are serving as a resource for users.
There are strategies like private advertisement inside your application to start earning on pay per click or pay per view basis.
Once your application will get 1000 installation naturally, you will avail the free banner ad service and include your advertisement code to your application through affiliate advertisement.
Make your app Freemium which is free for download but certain features are locked and they can only be accessed through purchase.
You can also make your app premium where the user needs to purchase the app from the store to earn direct money.
5. Platform to Select
Choosing the right platform for an app is completely depend open the features and users. Whether you choose iOS or Android to build your app but you need to consider your business model, user demographics, and the market you are targeting.
According to Statista the global market share held by the leading Smartphone operating systems in sales to end users from 1st quarter 2009 to 2nd quarter 2017 is,
(Source: Statista)
If you look at the Statista report of ComScore, Android is leading Smartphone operating system in the United States
(Source: Statista)
Both operating systems are getting used by a sizable audience. Choosing the right platform completely depends on your business requirement, budget, and timeframe to complete.
It is good that you should analyze your target audience usages before development.
6. Rich Features
There is a simple mantra, “If you are doing something, do it with 100% efficiency and accuracy, else just don’t do it.
“It’s always true that best features always keep users with you. So now the question comes – how you will know which features are best for your business and end users?
To get the solution for the above you need to ask yourself about,
- What features your target users are looking for?
- Does your planned feature provide great value to your business and users?
- Will the audience use it?
- How app can be more user-friendly?
You need to focus on features that will deliver biggest impact rather adding unused features.
7. Usability for End users
Usability is the process of identifying user’s need and providing a good environment to achieve a specific goal effectively.
Usability is the combination of good user interface, easy to use, memorable, unique and better looks for user satisfaction and error-free interface.
If the app will not provide better usability to the end users then the success rate will ultimately suffers.
Mobile App should be in such a way that user can be able to use the features without any assistance.
8. App Marketing and Store Optimization
Marketing highly affects the success of your mobile app. App branding, pre lunch and post lunch efforts maximized the web presence.
Before developing an app you need to plan about the logo, content and colour combinations to stay ahead of competitor’s app and consistency should be maintained in all places.
You need to find out the channels where you will get your target users and plan according to that to reach them through content, images, and videos.
Reach the influences in your niche and approach them personally to put your app in front of your audiences.
App store optimization helps users to find your app in stores. So plan a suitable name and prepare a unique title and descriptions with character limits for your app.
Plan to create some high-resolution screenshot images of your app and videos to add to the app store for aware users about your app.
9. App Development Cost
The app development cost completely depends upon the features you want to implement and the man-hour needs to spend on it.
It’s not an easy task for you and me to tell how much it really costs to develop a mobile app.
To some extent, an app developer can tell you and estimate the cost based on your requirements. You need to be careful while developer does the estimate.
If you are planning to hire a developer, you must ask some valid questions to him/her.
Conclusion
Development of mobile app is little expensive and time consuming process to be successful in the market.
If you will keep the above points in your mind before development, then the app development process will be easier and you can jump the distance easily.
A right mobile app developer or agency can guide you in proper way and you will get benefited.
Andolasoft is one of the recognized mobile app development company help you in all your queries. It’s not late yet, plan well, we’d love to assist.
