building a mobile app it's part and parcel of many businesses today but what is the best way
to do this in this video i'm going to discuss ios app development and five key tips to build a
successful mobile app a quick spoiler here these tips can probably be also applied to an android
app generally speaking building a successful application is going to be platform agnostic
i'm matt grace managing director of flying donkey let's get into it
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all right before we jump into the first five tips i want to just quickly go over what ios is and
what ios app development is ios is the operating system for the apple phones and generally runs
all the apple iphone devices it's sold and manufactured by apple and will exist on both ipads
iphones and ipod touches ios is generally the creation of a mobile app on the apple ecosystem
which is generally considered to be called an ios app ios apps are generally built within one of two
languages that being either swift or objective c from a developer's perspective these are going to
be built on top of the apple software development kit using generally xcode which is their
development ide apple apps are released in the apple play store and go to a rigorous testing and
checking approval by apple prior to being released into their store they can be downloaded on any
ios device from this apple app store easily generally speaking you're going to have a few
reasons why you're going down the mobile app route and i'll quickly jump into a couple of these here
firstly you're looking for better engagement obviously everyone is on their phones these days
and so getting an app onto their phones will allow them to engage better with both your product or
service or if you're going down a gaming app to actually involve and play the game on their device
app monetization is also another way to actually get money out of your application
potentially the services you want to provide and you provide these to an application and you can
charge either a subscription fee or an upfront fee to download the app another option for an
app is delivering mission critical systems to your business we have built applications for companies
who want to have these applications internal to help them run their business internally generally
speaking this is where a company requires an app to be sent to their staff members in order for
them to do their job correctly whether that taking out on site and taking photos and logging data
simply updating tickets or sending emails to customers directly from within their app ecosystem
alright so let's jump into the five tips to make a successful app number one know your audience again
this may sound pretty obvious but knowing your audience is really key to making a successful
application which really dives into a marketing and sales approach but the key thing to understand
here is you've got two main market segments ios and android generally speaking the audiences are
different on both these platforms and your users may not be on both platforms therefore if you know
where your audience sits you know which platform to best build your application on ios is known to
have higher paying more wealthy customers and therefore if that is the target demographic
you're going after then ios might be the best application for you to build conversely if
you're in a company that issues android devices obviously you're going to want to build your
application on the android ecosystem again it's really about identifying your audience and knowing
where they are and then giving them the service that's on the platform that they're already on
you can build the best app in the world but if your audience isn't there to use it then
it's not going to be a success and that's why it's our number one key point in this video
number two be conscious of the development timeframe now generally speaking once you've
selected one or both of the platforms you've got to go and start building your application now
if you selected the ios platform only and you're looking to go down a native route you're generally
going to save yourself around 30-40 percent of your time as compared to building an android
application and the reason for this is pretty simple that's because on ios you're supporting
a much smaller set of devices if you ever think about it only apple releases devices for the ios
operating system and this means there is a much more cut-down set of devices to have to support
on the android side android is an operating system that number of oem manufacturers will
actually produce their phones and then install android on this means you have to support a
wide ranging set of devices and therefore your testing and development is going to take much
longer to make sure you capture all the edge cases developing a mobile app is not a simple
thing and it will take considerable time so make sure you select upfront the right operating system
for you that you want to develop your app on and be conscious that it is going to take you
time to get your app right if you are looking to develop for both applications and you realize
that native applications are not for you then possibly you could either build a hybrid app or
a cross-platform application and i've touched on these in other videos it will link below
all right you've got your orange you've found your platform and you're conscious of the budget
and time frame is going to take to build now it's time to list out your features to bring the app
to life when putting this list of features together remember to look at this from the
consumer's perspective the person actually using your application there's no point you
putting down all the features that you want in the application because you're not the person
who's going to be using the app you really want to consider the metrics that you're going to be
targeting on cf goes live potentially retention rate and churn this is really how much your
consumers are engaging with your application and how much they're coming back time and time again
in order to get these numbers as high as possible what you really want to deliver is an app that
consumers want and this is where listing out a set of features here is very important you need to get
a list of features that is well researched for your audience and is going to address the pain
points that they're actually after again all this research was done in step one when you're looking
for your audience and now it's coming to fruition just before you start building your application
all right tip number four give importance to the full budget not just the initial build but the
ongoing maintenance this is a mistake we see many people make where they approach us with a budget
to build an application but simply no ongoing budget to both maintain it update it and keep
it secure into the future building mobile app is not a once-off process and if you're not really
committed to the long term then your application will not succeed and this is really going to
be driven by your budget you've got to make sure upfront that you've got a budget both to build the
application and support it into the future i've listed a few key brackets on our website where
i'll publish a blog on this but it's important to know that the cost can become significant
depending on the size of your application and all the technologies that are used i'll list a
few here which you've got to keep in mind that an app also uses servers cdns submissions libraries
and other products to make it successful there is going to be ongoing costs to both maintain
and run your application and these need to be factored in in the initial build cost
all right our last fifth and final tip revenue model make sure you get your revenue model right
up front it's key to understand what revenue model you're going to target and this is going to really
depend on what application you're building i'll quickly run through the different revenue models
now just give you an understanding of what options you have in the app market and surprisingly there
is quite a few free access this is probably the most common of the app approaches but
this is where you give your application free access to download and use the application
generally speaking the revenue model here is going to be probably advertising because you're giving
the application away free of charge and therefore you're looking for people to use the application
have eyeballs on your screen and therefore you can put advertisements in there and pay for your app
this is a very common methodology these days it generally works well for consumer apps freemium
freemium is where essentially you've got a free application but it's got premium features inside
it now these premium features can be either consumable or non-consumable or they can be
recurring in nature so for example something like candy crush where you can buy and upgrade
to various gems is essentially a freemium model it's free to download and free to play but there's
plenty of consumables you can buy within the application another good example of this one on
the subscription side is netflix while the netflix app is free to download obviously to access the
app you need a subscription there's plenty of apps that use this freemium model again it's a very
common revenue type time to consider based on your business paid access probably the most obvious one
here but essentially a user would pay to download your app and once they pay to download the app
they have access to the features this isn't as common as it usually is but generally speaking
this is where you're going to pay say five dollars to download the application and therefore you own
that application as a consumer and you have access to all the features this is obviously a one-time
upfront cost and generally speaking if you own a structured revenue model like this you've got
to make sure that you capture enough revenue up front to support both the ongoing maintenance
and updates of your app and which is why this model is not as popular as the others because it
has no recurring or ongoing revenue but as i said there is some very successful apps in this market
and they do charge a quite premium price slight caveat to this or an alternate way to do that is
called pay him essentially where you download a paid app and to try and keep the price low
of that upfront feature you have some features cut off that require further payment again this
is a good model if you want to try and extend the life of your app or try and extract as much
revenue as you can getting the right revenue model in place is imperative because if your app doesn't
make you money for your business it's essentially going to be something that you're going to want
to can down the road there's no point embarking on building an application if it can't support itself
or it doesn't bring value to the business so it's important to get the revenue model right
all right i hope those five tips have helped you on your development journey as i said we
were looking here primarily at ios apps but a lot of these tips were applicable
to anyone building applications either ios or android here at flying donkey we've built both
native and hybrid and cross platform apps and we've gone through these steps with numerous of
our clients and guide them to build successful mobile applications if you're looking to build
a mobile app and want to make it successful feel free to get in touch and we'll be happy to help
you