How to Avoid App Development Failures

Mobile apps give you much needed push towards your business and it can’t be denied. And the most evident reason is that mobile apps provide mobility and hence it becomes more successful than ever. This fact is leading Mobile App Development to create millions of applications every year.  

With that the competition arises every second even more. With that apps on playstore 5.5 millions of applications available, in which Android apps have a proportion of 3.3 million and iOS apps have a share of 2.2 million. Hence the competition is tedious to stay in this saturated market of apps, where there are more than 50 successful app stores. 

But did you know the sad fact hidden behind these statistics that 99 of the 100 consumer apps are not successful, and only 14 out of 100 business apps are successful, which is comparatively a higher percentage rate of 33 to 1, but still a pathetic situation. And this happens due to a lot of development failures. Failures might not be prominently evident, but there are critical reasons for the failure in app development. Let’s see what are those crucial factors in app development failure:

Avoiding Real World Scenarios

Your mobile app solution can be great. It will boost your revenue too and offer smooth services to your customer, but it has to be competent enough to solve real-world problems. The thumb rule of mobile app development is to solve real-time issues to ensure that it is serving a purpose to solve people’s problems.
And that’s important to stand out in the market among your competitors, to be real and a thinker to solve your customer's needs and problems by rolling out different features, to stay on their mobile phone screens. For instance, Amazon as an application has successfully created that trust and stability in people’s minds and hearts, and the customers feel connected to it. And they have 100 million+ subscribers all around the world. 

Hence it becomes important to think through your solution for mobile application before working on the idea and KPIs.

Lack of Research

The key rule of success in marketing and sales is to do prompt market research. Research might include different areas, it can be research on targeted audience, competitive analysis on your potential competitors available in market and much more. Let’s understand thoroughly:

Targeted Audience

Deciding the target audience is not an easy and one day job, it takes time for figuring out your targeted audience by marketing campaigns and strategy, and it’s not always right to be honest. Due to the volatile market of app development, strategists of the company have to understand that there will be new turns on the road. Hence finding a perfect strategy to target your potential audience becomes tough. But you can always try to hit near the perfect to make it successful. As your audience has to understand that it is not just serving a purpose in their life, but it’s the necessity

Competitive analysis

Now that you have got an idea, how competitive it can get, when you are launching a new solution in the market, or working on the same solutions but with different KPIs, it’s very important to do the market research with your existing and rising competitors. And it’s not one time analysis, but analysis has to be recurring to make your product or service stand out in the market. 

Non-Interactive User Interface

In this fast-moving world, no one wants to be tickled by the tough and nonresponsive or bad user interface. As it creates irritation and leads us to switch to another application or uninstall the current one. Which is not the agenda of any mobile app development company. It is a well-known fact that an attractive UI and smart strategies lead your users to the curiosity to know more about the app. Hence no matter if your solution is great and serves the need and purpose if the UI is not appealing and interactive, the users will decrease slowly. 

Hence a good UI and UX designer, with knowledge of trends in the market is very important for your app development company to avoid this failure.

Not giving importance to App Testing

This is a very crucial aspect for your application to be successful. As when a user faces difficulty to perform their action, even after completing all the first steps, it becomes a big turn off point for them. And leads to losing a customer or even more by their influence. Which is a very common consequence.

To avoid this mistake, a testing team of a few testers is very crucial. As they can give their full attention to test the application before going into the production environment. 

Improper or No Marketing Strategy

Have you ever heard of any application or mobile app solution growing without marketing strategies? The answer has to be NO! As digital transformation is playing a major role in technology, people also are getting advanced and expect tech companies to convince the customer due to a highly competitive market, having numerous solutions available already. Hence it becomes their duty and need to opt digital marketing strategies in order to not lose their leads. Now it’s up to the mobile app development companies to market their product in smart and intuitive ways based upon intense analysis.

Marketing strategies will do your 80% job, to create the awareness in your audience, and by helping the sales team to convert the lead into a customer. Showing presence in the market is the biggest win these days. The more attention, the more will be the success rate. To avoid failure, marketing is a very important matrix.

Bad Customer Service

After marketing, good customer service is one of the biggest KPI for any mobile app development business. A bad customer review can lead to the destruction of your all time reputation. Hence it is very important to provide the best of best customer assistance, whenever a customer needs help.

It’s very important to understand that customers believe in your solution to an extent that they need assistance even after facing an issue related to mobile app or service. But to avoid this mistake, it's very important that you create a dedicated setup for your customers to interact with the customer service executives in order to get assistance. To ease the process, for initial conversation, you can even set up AI chatbots to provide level 1 assistance.

Allocation of Funds

A traditional yet important KPI for a successful mobile application is to have a good number of allocated funds, categorized in support, new features launch, marketing, sales, and continuous improvement of the application. 

To avoid this failure, set up a finance department having a few members to control and take account of budget and finance strategies. It needs not to be a team, but a person, to take full accountability of. They have to make sure of the allocation in different departments of mobile app development, have a budget model, allocation of emergency funds, etc. to avoid any kind of finance-related failure in the present or future.

Final Verdict

However, there are other business matrices too, which can help your mobile app development to avoid failure in their journey. This includes choosing the right platform to build your app, choosing or outsourcing the best and most transparent team, keeping your stakeholders aware of everything, scope creep or change in scope, and having the best SEO strategy. Other than that some of the very common failures also include app compatibility with mobile phones, high maintenance, high storage, excessive notifications, bad code performance, etc. And to avoid these mistakes, the right guidance of leaders is also a very crucial aspect.