How To Avoid Common Issues With App Development

• By Sarah
• General News
• 1817 Views
• 15th March 2022

Mobile apps are a key part of white label development, and often are requested by agencies and clients alongside effective WordPress websites, with the idea that the app and the website can work hand in hand.

Given that nearly 2m apps are available on Apple’s App Store and almost 2.9m are available on Google Play, it is evident that there is a high demand for apps to help streamline a business’ mobile experience.

However, of these millions of apps, only one out of 10,000 will become successful, recognisable and profitable, and the reasons for the remaining 9,999 struggling tend to involve one of these common issues.

 

A Solution Without A Problem

One of the earliest slogans for the App Store was “There’s an app for that” and what it symbolised was that the most important aspect of a mobile app is that is a solution to a problem.

A common issue with app development and why major projects can sometimes shockingly fail is that they fail to provide a value proposition and a reason for people to use it besides novelty value.

Whilst in cases such as iBeer it was clear that the only appeal was the novelty aspect, you see it in more modern app development projects such as Google+, which failed to justify its existence as its central features (Hangouts, circles) were quickly adopted by other social media platforms.

Currently, with so many metaverse and blockchain-based projects looking for a reason to exist, the failure of other solutions to non-existent problems will need to be kept in mind.

 

Being Too Similar To Existing Apps

Whilst imitation can be seen as the most sincere form of flattery, if your app is too similar to other apps on the market without being demonstrably better, it will almost certainly fail.

Whilst there are thousands of examples of this, the best case study comes from the often-forgotten clone of Snapchat by Meta known as Facebook Poke.

Allegedly coded in just 12 days, it missed the boat on ephemeral messaging and failed to make an impact besides being Facebook’s most notable failure up until that point.

However, with that said, being the first to an idea is not always enough to avoid falling into this issue either. The reason why the once-beloved app Vine failed is that its two main features (shooting and posting microvideos) were adopted by nearly every other social media site.

 

Poor User Experience

Users looking at new apps to download will not suffer a poor experience for very long, and if your app is slow to load, heavy through overuse of animations, has difficult-to-access features or has intrusive monetisation or advertising, they may just as quickly uninstall it.

It is vital to regularly test your app and focus on the end-user when designing the interface for it.

 

Targeting The Wrong Audience

Certain apps can have problems not necessarily based on the underlying technology but in certain contexts and with certain audiences.

Often this is a case of poor market research, where an app is not designed with a target audience in mind and does not succeed, but there is at least one case where an app was successful with the wrong audience and became infamous.

The app Yik Yak was an anonymous social media application similar to Whisper or Nearby, but would allow people to create discussion threads within five miles of other users, but became exceptionally popular in schools.

This went about as well as one could expect, with the app connected to cyberbullying and harassment, leading to widespread bans and negative attention which decreased use by 76 per cent in 2015, causing it to close in 2017.