“Be prepared”, the Scout’s motto for generations, and despite it being a piece of old wisdom, it is still prudent advice today. “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”. As an app developer, that advice is just as helpful. Understanding the lay of the land is essential when developing your app, so Kumulos (Backend as a Service) have put together a short list of the top four areas where doing your homework will let you avoid many of the common pitfalls of app development.
1. The app concept
When you’re creating a new app, it’s very easy to be sucked into beginning the process of creating. From your initial app idea you and your team have sprouted great variations and features and the designer is churning out amazing looking initial UI pieces. It’s only then do you find that someone else has a popular app doing to exact same thing, and marketed in the same way you were planning on. Do your research and be aware of the market conditions.
Your original app idea may seem to you to be the most original, unique app concept you’ve ever heard of, but it’s a good bet that if you’ve thought of it, someone else in the world has had the same idea. So it pays to do your research before setting off to create your new app. Look around the market place, whether Google Play or the App Store, and see whether your idea has been done before, or if the market area (say, organizational apps) is already saturated.
If so on either count, try to think of ways to make your app idea stand out. A new twist on an old trope may be just what the market is looking for. Either that or maybe take the app in the different direction, perhaps find a niche that hasn’t been fully tapped yet and your app could fit right into.
2. App design
The design of your app, how it looks, how it works, how it feels, is at the centre of whether people will like it or not. And again, by doing your research you can make sure that your app will work exactly the way you want it to.
Looking at case studies of other apps, reading literature on app design and investigating similar apps to your own idea will help give you an idea of what customers are expecting in terms of UI and design, which in turn will help you avoid falling into the design traps that your competitors may have. Like the late Steve Jobs said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”, and if you see a feature of another app that you like but think “We can do this, but better.”, you’re very likely on the right track.
Researching app design isn’t just for making a better app though; it can also help you get it published in the first place. As we mentioned in our blog on App Design, the iOS App Store has some pretty stringent rules on the design of app they will approve for publishing. If you’re new to iOS development, we would definitely recommend that you check out these rules here before you go ahead and submit to the store. You never know, it may just save you a boat load of time. The full list can be found on Apple’s website here: https://developer.apple.com/appstore/guidelines.html
3. Money and the Marketplace
We said in #1 that researching your market was important for ideas; well we’re going to add that market research is just as or even more important when it comes to making money from your app.
For example, you’ve found a niche market waiting to be tapped in app design, but before you go ahead and put an app there, try looking around at the other apps in that niche and find out how much they are making, or whether they’re successful.
There may be a good reason why this niche is relatively empty, it may just not be profitable. The last thing you want to do is condemn your new app to an early grave by uploading it into a space where it’s not going to be found or bought.
Research will also help you in how you monetise your app. There are many different ways, standard purchase, subscription, freemium with adverts, freemium with micro-transactions, and more. Deciding which model best fits your app is a tough choice, but by researching other apps and seeing how they monetised successfully and unsuccessfully in the market you’re hoping to break into will give you an edge before your app even lands.
4. Budgeting
Budgeting for developing an app is hard. There are many variables and factors to consider, first of which being the initial costs of developing your app. This is where using numbers from previous projects can save you time and make your budget estimate more accurate.
Looking at numbers from previous projects can tell you right off the bat what your usual initial costs, (man hours, software, licenses etc) were, and as so long as your team hasn’t changed much since the last project, it will give you a good indication of where to set a foundation from which you can build from.
The same can be said for risk assessment. By researching the data from past jobs, you will see essential things like whether your team stayed within their time frame, what problems are most likely to occur, how the scope changed and how you managed it and ultimately whether you stayed on budget. All of these can be great indicators of what to expect with your risk assessment when budgeting and, again, will let you assign a foundation number that you can then work from to tailor it to the project.
With all of these examples the importance is always that forewarned is forearmed. By using the data and knowledge that is out that, you can make a better app, and do better business, which is our primary goal here at Kumulos when we provide you with a Backend as a Service.
Why not sign up for free and see what advice we can give you towards using data to your advantage?
Also, we’re hosting a webinar tomorrow. It will be starring our CEO Mike Romilly and it will be all about doing better business as an app developer.
If you’re interested, please sign up here:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1962374612458984192 .
