How To Make A Million Dollar App
You need a good idea, good execution, and some luck to make it big with your app. We talk to experts across platforms and bring you their tips.
5 things to remember while making the app
- Plan your app: Research markets; identify your target audiences.
- Develop and build your app: Work on user experience (UX) and usability design; use helper SDKs for quick and efficient development; build your app on a specific platform; test/QA your app.
- Reach out to your audiences: Promote and advertise (using social media, app stores, recommendation sites); study download patterns and rework on distribution.
- Monetise your app: Identify your revenue model (advertising, in-app purchase, pay-per-download etc.); keep users engaged with features.
- Support your users: Update the app with new features and offerings; optimise your app and keep it bug-free; actively support your users and respond to their queries and woes.
Categories to go after
- Games: Puzzle and board games, adventure (3D) games, engaging games with a social/freemium purchase model.
- Entertainment: Movie based apps, music apps, news apps.
- Social media apps and general news apps.
- Fun & multimedia: For example camera effects apps, and apps like Talking Tom.
5 common mistakes developers make
“The app ecosystem also has something called the App Poverty line, which is hoisted at $500 per app per month. Only 26% of app developers are above the app poverty line today (as of Jan 2013). One of the main reasons for this is half-baked ideation.” – Abhijeet Kunder, Head Products, Seventy Nine
- Pack it with features: Features are good but if you pack in too many of them, it becomes difficult for end users to grasp the real deal. The need of the hour is to have a business goal defined for your app and push features that only supplement that vision. Keep it simple. Keep it real.
- Poor design: This can be detrimental to your app’s success. Bad reviews dramatically pull down your app rankings and users are very sensitive to usability design. Also, adding too many ads kills the user experience. Keep the app clean and usable at all times.
- My way or the highway: A lot of developers build apps that make sense to them as users. However, their point-of-view and focus-area may not come from the same place their potential users come from. Instead, focus on making something for an identified void in the market and mould the app to suit the needs of that market.
- Focus on app downloads: A lot of distribution networks today focus on getting you downloads via incentives. This model, although successful in yielding downloads, doesn’t do much to keep the users engaged. Make your app engaging enough for repeat value.
- Lack of promotion: Your app may be the next Temple Run, but if you don’t plan to market and distribute it (even push it towards a basic form of viral marketing), you’ll be left with nothing in your pocket. Let your audience know that you exist.
The Hungama experience on BB10: “The Hungama app has a uniform user interface across all platforms, be it Android or iOS. The BB Z10 is more native to the OS; your Hungama video/music experience, however, remains unchanged. A mix of intuition and great creative design, building this user interface was one of the easiest things in our case. The attempt was to ensure every unique feature offering in our app blended in right with the creative prerequisites.” – Raj Sheth, AVP, New Product Development, Hungama.com
iOS: because all killer apps are on Apple
*Rohith Bhatt works at Robosoft and has created apps for Big Flix, IBN and Fish Fun.*
Expert tips: Focus on the core functionality of the app and design the app around that. Do not bring the desktop/web browser thinking to mobile apps. Focus on a demographic and a geography when you build an app. Build metrics into the app, so that you can measure them constantly and tweak the app based on usage. Listen to your users (App Store comments) and fix any reported issues quickly.
What’s the best category to focus on? Games, as this is the most engaging category for iOS users. Photo & Video, as the iOS operating software is fast and robust for this category of apps.
What are the top mistakes app developers make? Not focusing enough on the user interface and user experience: show your app to your family and friends and observe how they use it. Participate in relevant forums (like toucharcade.com) and enlist external beta testers. Presuming that building an app and uploading it on the App Store would mean revenues rolling in: discoverability is a major issue and getting the word out about your app is very important. Try to reach out to influencers (like bloggers, journalists, etc.) and tell them your story. Not testing enough: app users are a pretty unforgiving lot. If your app crashes the first time they launch it, 60% of them would not try to launch it again. So test your app well, under various conditions, and on various OS versions, hardware units etc.
What works for iOS? It’s still the best platform for monetisation. Fewer OS and device variations to test on. The development tools available with the OS (Mac OS) are free. Great forums with very helpful developers.
Android: open source but susceptible to increasing malware
*Jayant Saxena works at L Square Technologies and has worked on apps for India Today, Woodland etc.*
Expert tips: Memory optimisation: Instruments XCode and Android Debug Bridge are a few of the tools commonly used. Coding tips: modular, object oriented programming, proper and timely code review. Tools: XCode, Eclipse, Microsoft Studio 2012, SQLite.
Which category of apps is the most lucrative? The innovation and objective of an application drive its success. Applications like WhatsApp, Instagram, Pulse, The Guardian and Angry Birds are from different domains and these are the best known applications whose success is immense. So we can say there is no specific category which has the most lucrative apps. In each category there exists an application that has topped the charts.
Top mistakes and how to avoid them: The developer and UX engineer are the ones who play an important role, as they develop the concept and present it to the real world. The UX engineer needs to be aware of user expectations more closely and the developer needs to understand the platform constraints and how best a feature can be presented to the end user. Deciding the target platform and its OS version is also important, as there might be some features which are deprecated or added in new versions. To check trends and top paid and free apps on the respective platforms, try www.appannie.com and www.148apps.com.
Windows 8: the fastest growing OS also has Temple Run
*Satyen Gajwani works at Indiatimes and has worked on apps like Gaana.com.*
1. Planning and definition: Define a goal for your app. Write it down. Then expand on the idea till you’re satisfied with what you want to achieve. Now get down to the wire-framing. You don’t need any special wireframing or design tools — even a simple drawing on paper will do to begin with. The objective is to try and visually construct the flow of the user’s actions through your app.
2. Design and interaction: Navigation – there are many different methods of navigation that can be employed (persistent, hierarchical, drill-down etc.); choose one in a way that your user doesn’t get lost. Buttons – most smartphones are touch enabled so be careful when designing action items or menu buttons. Forms/text – if an input box needs to be filled with numbers (e.g. a credit card), make sure the number keypad is shown instead of the full QWERTY keyboard. Colours – a great way to visually connect similar items or to lead the user’s eye to the features you want to highlight. Loading – it is good practice to display a visual representation of the activity when the user is led from one function to another. Screen resolutions – take into account the different screen resolutions the app will be targeted at. Different platforms – don’t copy a design created for one platform and try to use it on another.
3. Development: Make sure you include a way to track your application usage. Be aware of power consumption and battery life: limit your app to only those activities that are absolutely essential.
4. Check before uploading: An attractive icon and descriptive screenshots are worth at least a thousand downloads. Provide a feedback email address. Use the power of social media to promote your app. Choose a concise, catchy name – the more it reflects what your app does, the better your chances of attracting the right audience.
BlackBerry 10: a developer friendly OS, if BlackBerry manages to weather the storm
*Sumit Mathur works at Vectorform and has developed apps like Surface DJ.*
Expert tips: While a native app is always preferred, apps can also be ported from other platforms on to BB10. There’s always a time/cost factor that needs to be taken care of. The timing of the launch is important too – for example, apps around music events in the city should ideally be launched just before a big concert. From a coding perspective, start building with a solid framework, make sure objects are properly assigned and released, and as much as possible, create and use re-usable components.
Which category of apps is the most lucrative? I think games and productivity would be the two categories that have the capacity to make the most money. I could be wrong, because you never know when a super app springs up (heard of Evernote?) from nowhere and makes more money than games.
Points to consider when making a BB10 app: Try to make the app in native code, which will enable you to scale, optimise and generally create a better running app. Always stick to the BlackBerry 10 design practices. Look for “Built for BlackBerry” certification, which can happen when you ensure that your app connects to BBM and a couple of other BB specific features. Try and avoid porting apps, which may not be optimised for BB10.
Is BB10 great for amateur app developers? Since BB10 is a new platform, it is really intuitive and brings an element of freshness in the way the user interacts. UI layout handling is easier and developing menu/action items can happen really quickly as against other platforms. Debugging could be made much more robust, but overall it fulfils its promise of being a game changer for RIM – which is a welcome trend for the once most-loved business phone.
From the May 2013 issue of FHM India.
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