Over 5.5 million apps are available on Google Play and App Store alone in 2022. Even though the market of mobile app development and companies’ revenues are getting bigger and bigger every year, at least 80% of mobile applications fail.
Most apps lose about 75% of Daily Active Users just within 3 days of installation. Why is it so and how to maximize your chances of success?
Mobile app development and promotion take enormous amounts of money, time and effort, so take your time to study the most widely-spread reasons for mobile app failure and our tips for preventing it.
You have probably seen this reason listed in every guide and marketing article about creating your product. Yep, very trivial, but still so common. Success is impossible without defining your competitive advantage and revealing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses through market research.
Lack of original idea and copying competitors will make your app get lost among the same ones. Bring a fresh idea that will solve real users’ problems which no one has noticed before.
When you get excited about your mobile app idea and think how unique and helpful it is, it’s easy to think that users will like your app. But who can validate this assumption? Users decide whether your app will be successful or doomed.
Without proper market research and an understanding of who your target audience is and what they need, many founders create applications no one really needs. By researching and defining a specific user problem and target audience, you offer a solution for a specific demand. This research can also be used later for marketing campaigns to attract users to your mobile app.
Most users abandon mobile apps after 3 or fewer attempts if they find them problematic to use. Unintuitive navigation, long page loads, an overabundance of features, and a long registration process are just a few examples that make users stop using apps.
Trying to fit a huge amount of functionality and come up with something new and interesting leaves users confused when installing the application and makes them learn how to use it. On the contrary, use of familiar elements and icons, and a minimum number of steps to reach their goal make users enjoy their experience.
UX is not just about the user journey in your app, it’s also about understanding the broader context in which users interact and engage.
If you didn’t have previous experience and decided to not outsource the development of your product, setting up your own team and processes might have a lot of complications. Lack of planning, communication problems and poor management during the mobile app development lead to missed deadlines.
Organizing processes during the mobile app development lifecycle and paying attention to such stages as analysis and quality assurance is crucial. So are your business’s adaptability and flexibility and global vision of your product.
Some businesses even after doing thorough research, defining users’ problems and making the app work smoothly, fail to monetize it because of choosing the wrong model. This is not surprising with such a plethora of monetization options. You can choose from advertising, affiliate marketing, transaction fees, subscription, freemium, etc. It all depends on your product type, industry, used platform, key features, budget and many more factors.
Even if your app is the most useful and unique, users still need to find out about it somehow. Be sure to plan and leave a certain budget for marketing purposes in the early stages and explore all possible promotion channels for your product. Remember that just as SEO is necessary for the success of your website, App Store Optimization is required to make your app visible and attract new users.
Even with experience in mobile app development, it can be difficult to assemble the right team in the shortest amount of time. Not knowing how to do proper research and business analysis, to create a user-friendly prototype and manage the development team will most likely lead to failure. Combining your knowledge and requirements with the experience and vetted industry talent of mobile app development company will result in a fast product launch and the top quality.
You can’t completely get rid of the risk of failure but you can significantly minimize it. We’ve already mentioned a few tips above but here is a helpful checklist that can help you avoid mistakes in your mobile app development:
⬥ define your UVP (unique value proposition) through market and competitive research;
⬥ set the goals and performance standards for your product;
⬥ establish user personas and customer journey map for a better user experience;
⬥ define main features and requirements for your application and describe them through use cases;
⬥ consider MVP development to reach quick market entry, collect users feedback and make further decisions based on real data;
⬥ research and choose a suitable monetization model
⬥ study available marketing channels and choose suitable ones for your product.
These points are only the beginning of the planning and design phase of mobile app development. There are even more things to take into account when it comes to the development itself, testing and quality assurance and app’s deployment. If you want to save money and time and reach planned results, we recommend consulting a professional mobile app development company.
The success of a mobile application depends on many factors that range from competition in the industry to marketing budgets to pure luck. Focusing on market and target audience research, following best UX practices for a particular platform, thorough quality testing and proper marketing & advertising planning can be the deciding factor between failure and success when it comes to mobile app development.
Got a project in mind? We’d love to hear what matters to you
Contact us