Top 10 Pitfalls To Avoid While Building Mobile Apps - What Businesses Need To Know

The growth in the adoption of mobile apps in the recent years has been phenomenal. The number of apps on the Google Play store is estimated to be 2.6 Million. It is almost three times more of what it was in 2013, according to the reports of Statistica. While apps have proven to be vital for the consumers these days, it also presents huge challenges for the developers who have to design top tier apps that have to compete in the mobile app market place.

So, do you want your product to stand-out from a myriad of the apps churned out yearly by over 23 million developers across the globe? Well for that, you will have to avoid certain pitfalls made by a lot of business owners.

Here are some of the most important points to be considered:

APP MISTAKES - OVERWHELMING FEATURES

There is a growing inclination by business owners of brands to include everything they have on their website in their mobile app. In reality, mobile apps should be developed to streamline an experience and allow users to quickly accomplish the tasks that they might otherwise take a long time while browsing on the phones or desktops.

Solution – Identify the key features that your app needs to have. It will definitely lead to developing an app that stands in the market.

UNDERSTANDING THE USE CASE OF YOUR APP

At the time of app development, it is important to understand the use case of your app for your customers and prospects. Before strategizing your app, consider asking yourself these questions. Are you truly answering the needs of your customers or simply developing an app because it is another tool for engaging your audience.

Solution – Survey your persona and get an understanding of what your customers need, how they want to engage on mobile. Also, what issues they are facing and what will drive them to repeatedly use your app over others.

MAKING RETENTION THE KEY

When a business develops an app, it greatly focuses and prioritizes on new downloads. They don’t consider retention as an important aspect. Getting hundreds of downloads with a single user do not make an app successful, repeated use of the app is what marks it successful.

Solution – A business must track all its data and analyze where the gap is. Is it about the download or the usage, and then, focus efforts on the retention and relevance.

APP MISTAKES - FAILING TO STRATEGIZE

There are important decisions that you need to establish before launching an app. Ask yourself – Why are you building this? Who is the target audience? What are their current app habits? Why would they download your app?

Solution – Businesses are often keen to develop apps but have not applied this necessary thinking to determine what the value is to potential users. So, strategizing is a must before developing a mobile app.

NOT TESTING APPROPRIATELY

Worldwide companies release more than 1000 apps on a daily basis, thus making it a highly competitive market to create an app that customers are willing to download. Most of the businesses make these basic mistakes. One of them is not testing the app before releasing in the market. The quality of the company’s app is important as it represents the business.

Solution – Ensuring the app is not failing and has extensive beta testing allows for a positive business growth.

DEVELOPING FOR MULTIPLE PLATFORMS

It is important for an app to extend its reach, to ensure that it reaches as many users as possible by developing on every platform available. But, the fact is that every app gets modified multiple times once the user starts using it.

Solution – Initially, start with a single platform and focus on making a success. After that, you can move ahead for other platforms.

APP MISTAKES - PREDICTING IMMEDIATE ROI (Return of Investment)

It is right to have positive expectation while developing a new venture but keep in mind that less than 1% of the apps make money.

Solution – Seriously reconsider your plans of developing an app if your goals are purely profit related.

DISREGARDING NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

Do not disregard any kind of negative feedback especially which are a paragraph long as these are the customers who care. You can’t please everyone, but there are valuable insights that can help you in making your app better.

Solution – Take a proper and regular feedback from your customers and let them know about how you would solve their issues.

NOT DEVELOPING A MARKETING PLAN

So, you are considering developing a marketing app? Great, but what about its marketing strategy? You have the idea and you are making investments in it, but before all these think about the marketing. We see most of the business owners going blank about it. If you do not have a marketing plan, you are endangering your time, efforts, and capital.

Solution – Plan a pre-marketing of your app, it can help your target audience to know about your app in advance.

THE VALUE PROPOSITION OF THE APP

As every app has the unique value proposition, businesses should think in detail about it. They should consider, whether they need to take this route, or, whether what they are offering stands on its own in demanding customers’ attention. If this doesn’t happen, it can have a negative reinforcement of brand perception.

These are some of the major mobile app development issues that business can face while creating an app. If you are looking for a professional mobile app development company, we at GigaSoft will be glad to help.