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The technological age is well and truly upon us; now more than ever, technology oriented start-
ups are popping up all over the world. Now that smartphones are so widely used, more and more
development companies are investing money into mobile app development to take advantage of
surging demand.
With the success of any number of mobile apps whether they be social media related, games or
lifestyle apps, more innovators and new companies are emerging to try to get a piece of the pie,
many of who may consider being successful in this industry to be straightforward. In reality
however this is not the case, as mobile app developers face any number of challenges from
developing and designing the app itself, to getting it released and marketing it effectively.
Here we’ve listed some major challenges faced by app developers while planning, developing
and marketing mobile apps.
Determining the quality of an idea means asking some of the following questions –
What purpose does the app serve and what is its function?
Is the idea original and will it stand out?
Is the app easy for other developers to emulate?
What is the target market or market size for the app?
What is the price of the app?
Coming up with an idea that is simple, productive and in demand can sound easy, but this is
rarely the case.
As mentioned earlier, competition is fierce, with hundreds of thousands of mobile apps trying to
stand out from the crowd. Catering to users that have shorter attention spans than ever before
only makes things more tricky. You need to figure out what are the triggers for your target
market and what they want. You must understand what appeals their highest lifetime value
(CLV) users – that is, those who are more likely to spend and spread the word about your
product with their friends and family. You need to delve deeper to figure out how they can keep
users more engaged for longer. You have to undertake the challenging task of keeping the app’s
innovation quotient high, which will eventually ensure a higher number of users remain engaged,
and as will help to build a loyal customer base.
3. Clearly Defining The Target Market
To do so, the company should monitor metrics such as installs and downloads, costs to acquire
customers (CAC), average session lengths, average revenue per user (ARPU), etc. It means
finding a pure analytics solution, and effectively managing this can be a real challenge!
You may have a killer app idea, but to turn that idea into something real and marketable,
significant capital is required. Developing an app is an expensive affair as the cost of
development can be anywhere, depending on the nature of the app. How to get the money and
manage the finances can be a problem for some developers.
If one cannot find the right investors to invest in an app idea, there are several other ways to raise
funds. Some of these include taking out a loan, angel investors from family or friends, and joint
venture companies, all of which can be effective.
5. Development Technology
The obvious and core technical challenge of developing an app is choosing the best suitable
development technology for the app and deciding on whether to make a Native, Hybrid or Cross
platform mobile application.
A bit of research reveals that there are hundreds of articles online that compare the three mobile
app development technologies by pitting them against each other. One can easily gain a good
understanding of the respective advantages and disadvantages offered by each of the platforms
But choosing the one that make the most sense for a given project can be difficult, as app
developers often look for a one-size-fits-all solution.
One thing is to design and develop an app, and another is the promotion of that app. This is
challenging and testing for many mobile developers on a totally different level and usually
requires some business and market savvy to be successful. App developers define the following
as the top challenges and goals for app marketing:
Organic App Discovery – How to make the app discoverable in app store
User Acquisition – How to make users install the app
Retention – How to keep users engaged in the app
Monetization – Whether to implement purchase-app-once or fermium model or in-app
purchase or in-app advertising
Someone may develop a quality app with great UI, graphics and functionality, but if they can’t
get the right users to find the app, they aren’t going to get the returns.
9. Security
Security issues can be a nagging concern for mobile developers. Malware problems may arise
and software/hardware fragmentation only adds to the list of woes. There is a lot of work
required to address such app security issues, which consumes a great deal of time and money.