App Business
During the past years, we all observed dozens of histories about huge success in the world of mobile apps. Angry Birds, Instagram, Pokemon GO and many others brought their owners millions of dollars. But at the same time statistics prove that only 25% of developers earn over $5,000 per month.
Well, like in any other business there are giants and in the app business, these are mainly games. However, it doesn’t mean that the market is full. You can still earn enough in less complex novelty and productivity apps. Also, smart watches and smart TVs can be regarded as an interesting perspective.
Just a few random facts about possibilities of app business:
Enterprise demand for app development was rising through the past few years: from 23% in 2014 to 32% in 2016. In 2016 60% of app owners had revenue goals for their app businesses. People spend over 4 hours a day on their mobile phones in 2017.
Impressive enough, huh? So, you want to know how to start an app business. We’ll name 10 most important steps to achieve success in this. At the same time, we think that like in any other business you should concentrate on the marketing process and leave tech details to professional partners.
Steps are:-
Step 1. Idea:-
Like any other successful entrepreneurship app business starts with an idea. Many developers claim that it is just 5% of the success. Well, we can say it in another way: even the best idea can’t work without enough efforts and good partners. You can dream about one special app or try to work with many apps from the beginning. In any case, your main idea or maybe even the main wish must be getting into the app business. Only having enough will and energy you can break into the top of app stores. And our next steps will lead you that way.
Step 2. Market research:-
Sometimes we don’t have brilliant ideas. But this is only due to the lack of experience or understanding of certain topics. So if your main goal is working with mobile apps start exploring the market. An app is a key to everything. Even Google Play is an app. Also, you can find dozens of apps that will help you to estimate the cost of your application, development code tutorials, market research tools, and many others.
You should start with understanding the field you’re going to work in. It is not the easiest part, by the way. For the beginning, you may get acquainted with greatest success stories and the biggest failures in the app business. Then you can download those apps and try them by yourself. This will give you a possibility to point out some interesting and useful tricks. Also, you’ll understand which methods don’t work at all. Don’t forget about your auditory as well. You must always stay in the last trends and clearly see what your potential clients want right now. Of course, with a good idea, you can become the one who gives a trend too.
At Rovio we have always been innovative and forward-looking, and to succeed we need to be the best at adapting to change.
Mikael Hed , Rovio chief executive
Here we’d like to point 5 main features of the successful app. They’ll show you where to pay bigger attention when studying your competitors.
1 Appealing Design. Your app design usually consists of two parts: user experience UX and user interface UI. They are about the way your application works and the way it looks like. However, don’t be confused. Good design means not only the fancy look. Its more about the way users interact with your app. If all crucial functions are easily accessible and your visual design appeals to targeted auditory your app can become successful.
2 Scalability. Our world is constantly changing and your users follow that processes. New apps appear constantly and you competitors try to do their best. In these conditions, you must make your app as flexible and adaptable as possible. For this purpose, developers must choose a platform that allows changes and modifications based on users’ feedback.
3 Good marketing. Pay attention to the methods big players used to promote their apps. Regarding a number of mobile apps that appear every day, you’ll have to invest a lot of time and money into the advertisement. Your aim is to reach the widest auditory from all over the world.
4 Additional Value. Here we get back to the idea. You’ll be able to sell your app or motivate users to download it only if it proposes some unique value or helps them to deal with their life challenges.
5 Partners. Great software products that are highly efficient and bug-free come from partners, not providers. Find out the technologies your competitors used and know more about companies or people they worked with.
Step 3. Platform choice:-
In earlier years developers had to choose between Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Phone, iOS, Android. Now things got easier and you should seriously regard only the last three. In some way, even the last two, cause Windows Phone and apps for it couldn’t gain much popularity during the past few years. For instance, nowadays tens of millions of smartphones run Windows, compared to hundreds of millions on iOS and Android. And it doesn’t seem that things are getting better as lately, Windows was more concentrated on mixed reality. So we have Android and iOS devices left. There is a great difference between their app stores. If we look at statistics the image is quite clear. During the last years, Google Play remains a leader in annual downloads with 63 billion downloads in 2016. Third-party Android stores follow with 45 billion. At the same time, Apple App Store had only 29 billion annual downloads. However, the picture changes if we look at annual revenue. Here Apple remains the leader with 34 billion dollars in 2016. Google Play alone got 17 billion and third-party stores – only 10. Due to the experts in 2021, Apple will still remain the leader, although the combination of Google Store and third-party stores will exceed iOS even this year. Also, Apple App Store tends to have higher prices. So here you should think about your monetization strategy. If you’re going to sell your apps iOS will be a better decision, while Android apps can work better with an advertisement. By the way, we must also remind you about web applications. Those are quite universal and cheaper to develop. But they can’t fully compete with native apps and therefore we wouldn’t recommend them for starting your app business.
Step 4. Development:-
After choosing a type of the app you can look for reliable partners to work with. Actually, this stage is more about team building. Depending on your goals you’ll need various coders, designers, copywriters or even photographers. The key thing here is to find people for long-lasting cooperation.
You have few possibilities to find needed developers:
1 Get an offshore freelancer.
On services like Upwork or Guru, you can find the needed person. Competition between independent programmers is quite high, so rates there tend to be lower. However, their work usually takes more time and there is a risk that your app will not be ended or will have bugs.
Also developing an app requires at least two people: one developer and one designer. If you hire freelancers there is a chance they wouldn’t be able to make a good team. Besides, remember that apps will also need support in future.
2 Hire a developer on the permanent basis.
In this case, you’ll save money by working with one person.However, apps usually require knowledge of few programming languages, not talking about design. So even if you find such specialist he probably will cost you quite much.
Also if you live, for instance, in USA or UK hiring an outsource developers on constant base with the same experience will be much cheaper.
3 Look for a dev team or a partner.
If you are aimed at creating serious app business working with developer company would be the best decision. It offers you some benefits like a good team, long-time support, experienced programmers etc. Also if you’re planning to create a really big app, you’ll require some guarantee and big companies can give you those.
By the way, Business app development companies may become your partners so that you’ll get not only your apps but also a helping hand in your business. As was mentioned above outsource companies, for instance, in Eastern Europe have very reasonable prices.
Also don’t forget that your app will require more expenses and more work in future for updating, bug fixing or development. So that getting a reliable business partner for the long term is preferable at this point.
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