Do you know more than 3 million apps are available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store? There are about a million apps are available for BlackBerry, Windows Phone and on Amazon App Store. The point is, there are millions of apps available officially and you cannot name more than a hundred. It is not that hard to conclude that mobile apps are not only hard to develop but also very expensive and difficult to market.
Of course we can easily blame the highly saturated market but the reality is far bigger than that. The majority of app developers do not even follow the guidelines provided by the platforms and how developers repeatedly make the same mistakes again and again is quite surprising. Regardless of how you measure your app success, without proper planning and without learning from others’ mistakes, your app cannot possibly achieve its goals.
Following are some common reasons why apps fail and how you can avoid these mistakes.
Lack of Market Research
Having a great idea about a mobile app is a different thing than actually developing it. Your app development projects shouldn’t be idea driven but they should base on the market research and hard facts. You must know who would use your app even before writing a single line of code. You must know how this app would help people in the real world and how it would get users on its own.
Not only the market, but you must also know your target audience. Now there are billions of mobile apps available in the world and every age group uses mobile apps (there are mobile apps specifically developed for cats too). By recognizing your audience and by defining the ways they can use the app, you can actually build a target audience. Without proper marketing research and target audience identification, you would be developing apps for no one.
Not Choosing the Right Platform
First of all, if you have plans to launch your app for iOS and Android both platforms then work on one at a time. Starting developing for both at the same time leads to many problems like not meeting the deadlines, losing control over the process and handling complications on both platforms simultaneously. Make sure you choose the right platform based on your target audience, market and the app itself. There are so many differences between both platforms.
When developing app for both platforms, keep these differences in mind. You need to handle structural and user interface differences or you would end up with angry users who won’t figure out why the app has a non-standard interface.
Not Focusing On User Experience
We know how difficult it is to build a mobile app and there are thousands of things that developers have to keep in the mind to build apps that word. There are numerous components that must work together. Unfortunately, an average user doesn’t understand these things and reasonably he shouldn’t even care. It is solely developers’ responsibility to account these things to give a better user experience.
There are many small things that amateur developers do not really think about twice; these details matter a lot and most of the time they define the user experience. You must focus on your app performance, stability, loading time and features. You must avoid long registration processes and you should make navigation as easy as possible.
Not Making the App Interesting
By using excellent marketing tactics and by advertisement, you would be able to get a reasonable number of users but getting users download your app is a different thing than keeping them interested in your app and its features. Make sure the app is interesting enough to keep them focused and interested all the time. Make sure they see your app as a valuable thing instead of something that is just sitting in their phone and using the space unnecessarily.
Ignoring Users’ Prospective
As mentioned earlier, there are many things that matter in the app development process and your users are the most important ones. During the development phase and even after the completion, you should see your app from users’ prospective. Try to answer, how your app makes things easier for them? How it is a fun or useful app for them? Why someone should install it, keep it and use it? If you can answer these questions, you are going in the right direction.
Lack of Proper Testing
Even if you do all things perfectly and do successfully avoid all the mistakes mentioned above, you cannot possibly make a perfect app in the first attempt. For some people, app development is an evolving process where you have to continuously move forward toward better solutions. Launching your app in the market without proper testing is one of the worst mistakes you can possibly make. Now the bigger problem is you won’t even know why some people hate your app. They dislike it because it is buggy.
Even though if you know the importance of testing the app before launching it into the real world, Android fragmentation is a real issue; there are thousands of different Android devices in the market and not only Android ecosystem but on iOS you could face the same issue too.
How Bugfender Can Help You Develop Better Apps?
Bugfender is designed to overcome the issue of Android fragmentation and to help iOS and Android app developers test their apps on real devices in real world scenarios. We understand that it is not possible to reproduce a specific bug as there are hundreds of factors that could cause it in the first place. Now, by looking at the specific device and checking the log files, you can get an idea of that bug that causing the issue but what if the device is located thousands of miles away from you?
Bugfender provides developers the detailed insights about the app behavior and by analyzing those patterns, developers can discover bugs before users do. Unlike many crash reporting tools available for developers, Bugfender does not rely on total failure to report but it also looks for abnormal behavior like reduced performance, security vulnerabilities and stability issues.
