Nowadays, mobile applications can be a profitable business platform. It’s one of the newest online businesses on the market and 6 billion dollars have already been paid out to developers across the three major platforms. There is a huge pie for developers to take slices from, and this has already pushed over 235,000 development teams to flock to this market.
Most people believe that it only takes one idea to get you launched into the market. That is, until the idea finally arrives. At that moment, the idea girl or guy realizes that there are many steps involved in creating an app. Developers, artists, designers, sound engineers and others might all be required to create it, unless you’re prepared to wear all these hats. A great deal of planning goes into transforming the idea into something monetizable. To help you get started, we created a 8-step program.
1. Research Your App Idea
Ideas come in two forms. One that stems from seeing something in action and wanting to improve it, and one that stems from not seeing a solution to a problem you’re having.
With over 2 million apps on the market already, if you believe the later you probably haven’t done your research. Every idea has been done in one form or another. You should be able to find at least one example, it doesn’t matter if it was successful or not, everything is useful during research. What you’re looking for is what they did right, what they did wrong and learn from any interesting takes that you probably hadn’t considered at this point.
While doing your research, grab a screenshot of everything you see. When I research an app, I come away with 50 to 200 screenshots with notes about each of them. I look at their marketing plan, App Store text and I look at the way they acquire/convert users to paid subscribers.
Another note: finally, if you truly do find that unique idea in 2 million already implemented ideas, ask yourself why no one has done it yet. Perhaps it’s too expensive, too complex, or not right for the platform you’re looking at.
If, after all the research you go through, you still decide to continue working on your idea, it’s time to make a plan.
2. Make your Plan for Your App
Designing an app is labor intensive, but well worth the work when road blocks have been avoided and questions are already answered. The rule of thumb is: every hour “wasted” by design hitting a dead end saves 3 hours of an artist’s time and 7 hours of a developer’s time. Besides saving time, designers tend to be cheaper than the other two types of employee.
You can even design the app yourself, if you’re so inclined.
Define Your Goals
Goal, or pillar, setting helps you properly aim your project. These goals should define who your project is for, what it should accomplish and how should it be accomplished. For example, a calendar app aimed at CEOs of fortune 500 companies might list:
- The app is built for CEOs
- It needs to keep track of appointments on a day to day and hour to hour basis
- The calendar needs to be accessed by one or more executive secretaries
- The calendar should report to multiple CEOs
4 or 5 pillars should be enough. If you have more requirements than that – perhaps you should look into making 2 applications instead of just one.
Start Wireframing Your App
No, you don’t have to be an artist to do a proper wireframe in this instance; it only requires you to be able to draw rectangles and circles for the most part. If you have a few different colored pens handy, reserve one color for things the user can tap on (like buttons and actionables), and another color for decoration/support objects (such as photos and titles). Visio is also a great computerized way to create a wireframe.
By taking what you see in your head, and putting it on paper, you can start to see the kind of layout that is required of your app. Remember to refer to the research screenshots you took, they’ll answer a lot of questions and keep your space requirements in check. The screen size on mobile devices, especially when you’re supporting older devices, is very limited.
Sketching is the quickest way to find issues and solve them.
When you have every major state of every major screen, you’re ready to move on to prototyping.
Prototyping Your App
The purpose of prototyping is twofold:
- Validate all the assumptions made during sketching
- Bring visibility to the rest of the team, so they know what to expect
There are many tools available for prototyping. Axure is my personal favorite, because it offers the widest range and strongest toolset of all the prototyping tools I have tried. Indesign and Invision are two others that are recommended, but there are a whole host of prototyping tools out there and the best tool is the one that works for you and your team.
3. Pick an App Platform
Now that you have the design completed, it’s time to estimate the task. Estimates require one more piece of information though. Which platform, or platforms, do you want to launch on? Cross platform applications (especially if you pick the right tools) tend to do better than single platform apps, but more upfront investment needs to be made. Every major mobile platform has its advantages and disadvantages which are briefly covered below.
Google Play
Google has the distinct advantage of having the most devices on the market. They have a healthy App Store; however the majority of users expect the application to have some sort of free component.
It doesn’t make the largest amount of money for app developers in general, although there have been some notable blockbusters that were Android only in the years that the ecosystem has been around.
Apple
iOS has been the front running App Store since its inception in 2008. There are fewer devices available, but more buyers than Google Play. There is also the brand new iPad Pro which is targeted at business executives and creative industry professionals – if that is your target market of course.
The major problem with iOS is getting your app to outrank all the other applications. The Apple App Store grows by nearly 1000 apps every single day, and the only real successful way of driving users to your app is to be featured by Apple. The large box on the top of the store is generally able to drive 250,000 users to your application, but with no featuring fewer than 100 people generally organically find applications.
Windows Phone
Windows Phones don’t have a lot going for them. Their marketplace is small, tiny even. Usually the effort is not worth it.
The silver lining about Windows Phones is that with so few applications available it is easy to gain visibility on their ecosystem. Don’t expect big numbers to come out of the platform, but cross platform apps could greatly benefit from the added visibility.
4. Pick your App Development Tools
Tools can make or break a project. More senior developers probably already have a toolset that they prefer, but it doesn’t hurt to know about how to make a decision in case there is competing arguments for two or more toolsets.
Cost
The number one factor for stakeholders for just about anything is cost. Several engines, such as Unity allow you to develop on it for free, until you’re ready to launch and then the monetization kicks in. Adobe tools are also changing to monthly fees. If you don’t watch out, these fees can take a substantial chunk out of the budget.
Flexibility
Even if you make the decision to only create your app for a single platform, in the future (especially if the app is successful) you may wish to port the app to another platform. Engines like Cocos2d allow you to keep the door open for quick and easy porting.
Future Support
How long will the provider continue to support the tool? If the tool begins to get outdated, the next iPhone launch or Google operating system overhaul could be the last one that the tool works with. Try to select trusted names like Unreal, which has been available since 1998 and is continually updated. Version 4.10 launched as recently as November 2015.
Programmer Skill Level
If you don’t have a senior development team, or even a senior developer, you may have to limit the complexity of your tools. There are several tools that let you build basic applications without much coding knowledge at all. The products they can produce have varying, but generally lower, quality levels than more powerful tools, but platforms like GameMaker can give the Do-It-Yourselfer just enough power to turn an idea into reality.
Keeping Control
While engines and development tools are all very important to creating the project, so is organization. Tools like Hansoft or JIRA allow a producer or stakeholder to manage tasks and set priorities for features. This is invaluable for keeping any project that lasts more than a few days on track. It is very easy to forget details, so all the tasks can be listed and prioritized here. These are also the tools that your developers can use to estimate the length of time it will take to produce your entire project.
5. Sit down and Code Your App
This is the longest part of the process, but there’s the least to say about it. Keep your developers on target by refreshing priorities and discussing as a team ways to improve the spec. Developers tend to have a different mindset than designers and, I’ve found, look very closely at ensuring the edge cases are well taken care of.
Do not get discouraged during step 5, and do not get into the trap of redesigning the app for the sake of redesigning the app. Bored designers get ideas and need something to distract them.
When you begin programming teams generally do not worry about visuals, often electing to use ‘programmer’ art until the feature has been approved and bug free. It can be done in such a manner that an artist can replace the developer art with real assets without any changes to code. Animations come last, after everything is approved.
6. Test and Improve Your App
Effective quality control can put a company head and shoulders above their competition. Quality analysts should be testing throughout the production phase; checking every completed feature to ensure a few things:
- They’re bug free
- They’re on spec
- The spec behaves as expected
Regarding point three – often members of the team are blind to User Experience (UX) problems because they’re intimately familiar with the design. Often it is beneficial to periodically have an external set of eyes try navigating through the app. When QA start working on a project for the first time, give heavy stock into any comments they make.
Often you’ll notice new users not using the app the way you wanted them to. You put a button planning for an edge case to allow a user to back out of a choice, but you really want them to press another button instead. There are guidelines in polishing your app’s UX that is summarized very well in this one tweet. This means that, for something that you want someone to notice:
- If it doesn’t move, it now moves
- If it moves, it now has a sound
- If it has a sound, it now has a particle
7. Submit Your App to the Platforms
When your app is relatively bug free, and when you’re relatively happy with the polish and have all the major features you wanted for at least a minimum viable product (MVP), it is time to submit. There are often days or weeks delay in app review times, so don’t submit on the day you set up your marketing efforts. Texts and screenshots should be taken just before submission so you have the maximum polish possible on the app’s assets, and don’t have anything that’s not perfect.
Your app icon should be clear and stand out – this can’t be stressed enough. This is the one tool you have on the App Store that will attract users to your app.
Apple updates their store promotions on Thursdays – so if you’re including iOS as one of your target operating systems, be sure your launch date is a Thursday so you’re ready for the update. Being listed as a “new” app, getting a promotion from Apple and your own marketing efforts all lining up on the same day helps your app shoot up the rankings faster. It becomes more and more expensive to climb the chart without all three of those promotions working together; and many developers give up if the first week is a failure.
8. Marketing Your App and After Launch Efforts
There are a number of efforts a company can make when launching an app to spread the word that the application has launched. Depending on your budget one or all of these might be the best route to take – it is up to you to decide how far you want to go.
Free/Low Cost Social Marketing
I should have said “Free”; social marketing’s cost is tied in with time and not necessarily money. Social marketing efforts could include:
- Trade forums (or game forums like TouchArcade)
- Facebook page
- Web Page
- Twitter Account
The idea behind social marketing efforts is to blanket your audience with posts everywhere so that they feel like everyone is talking about the app. Get your friends and family to help if you’re a solo developer. Social marketing efforts should begin a few weeks before your launch date.
Press Release
There are many outlets looking for an easy story to tell their audience. Make sure your press release is well written.
A well written PR effort will write the story for the outlet. It will pique the writer’s (or editor’s) interest and put words on the paper for them. They’ll tell your story, your app’s story and inform the reader who your audience is. They’re not easy, if you haven’t been a part of a PR campaign before, consider contracting out.
Your press release should be available a few days before your launch date.
Paid Advertisements
Paid advertising is the most expensive, but also the most likely to convert users, form of advertising you can do. With many services costing more than $1 for every installation you achieve, it is not generally a viable long term strategy. However, pairing up paid advertising with store featuring on launch day could help give that ‘everyone is talking about the app’ feeling required to get mass appeal.
Forms of paid advertisements include:
- Banner ads (both mobile and web-based ones)
- Search promotions (such as Google)
- Commercials (often presented as interstitials within other apps, however there has been a trend lately for television advertisements for big ticket applications lately)
- Rewards programs (such as TapJoy and Flurry)
Creating an app is a lot of hard work; many of my projects have taken over a year with 4 to 20 people working on it. It’s also a very risky venture, with many apps never coming close to breaking even. With the high risk comes potential for exceptional rewards – such as SuperCell’s Hay Day and Clash of Clan making a combined 2.5 million dollars a day.
Good luck in your venture!