Development of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has reached record scales which will be hard to repeat for any other industry.
We use mobile devices for every our need: from booking a hotel room to playing games and chatting with our friends. Nowadays there’re more than 1 billion devices used all over the world. And this number is constantly growing as mobile networks are improved.
Another factor is that developing countries prefer creating mobile infrastructure instead of traditional transmission lines. The number of Android devices activated every day is more than the number of new-born children! I think it shows the tendencies of growth of mobile market.
If you’re a mobile developer, then you should know all the difficulties connected with the release of a new app at the market. Before starting the process of development, a developer needs to make several important decisions, for example: should a native application be created, whether to apply HTML5 or hybrid technologies, what devices and mobile platforms the app will support, etc. This list is much longer.
But these are not the only difficulties for developers. When the app is published in a store, the battle for customers begins. Just Apple App Store and Google Play Store contain around 1.5 million of mobile apps, and user ratings may help any of them either to skyrocket of fall down.
As the market develops these trends become stronger. As the number of applications is constantly growing, stores have to be selective and decide which ones to accept and promote and which ones to decline.
Such decisions are based on the number of downloads, user ratings and even the speed of work of the app. According to one of the latest researches, every fourth application is deleted after the first use and more than 60{71b550cbed0aca3fea2335d26076176dc834a5ad6e765af844b2cea64fe7483b} of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded.
So what can a developer do in such a situation? The users expect your app to work as it has been declared to. They wait for the apps to perform the way they perform on their PCs in a web browser, regardless of the fact that these apps have to perform on the devices with characteristics that significantly differ from that of a PC.
Thus, if an app doesn’t respond or responds in more than 3 seconds, a developer has a huge problem. There’s no place for freezes and glitches at the mobile apps market, and you will hardly get a second chance from users. It means that users’ expectation satisfaction should be in the first place.
Whatever can be a potential cause for fails – source code, device specs, third party APIs like Facebook, PayPal or Twitter – you need to detect them before the users will get them. App failures are unacceptable. But it is not the only problem. Bad functionality of the most important functions can also have serious negative impact on the user reviews.
In order not to encounter such a situation a developer needs to take care of the stable app work in the first turn. It’s very important to determine the requirements needed for the development. System approach should be used when creating an application. It’s also recommended to do some testing at every stage of the development process and a developer should be ready to do a lot of iterations. And another very important tip – it’s essential to collect as much information as possible about the user experience of the app.
Mobile app market won’t disappear, but with its problems become more and more difficult as it develops. That’s why planning and best user experience are the key factors that can increase your competitiveness.
