By 2018, less than 0.01% of all mobile apps out there will be commercially successful. That’s what Gartner says – and we’ve got no reason to doubt the forecast. Building mobile software has never been easier with the proliferation of mobile app development tools & the rise of the “citizen developer” initiatives. Code quality & application performance aside, the main reason why companies fail to crack the App Store and Google Play charts is poor marketing. If you have a brilliant idea for an app, you’d better forget about Rovio’s overnight success and spend some time (and dough!) on marketing.
Top Earners (iOS developers who generate at least $ 50 thousand in revenues – 12% of the App Store’s registered publishers) have $30 thousand as an average marketing budget and devote 14% of project time to promoting their project. If you’re a startup & barely raised funding through Kickstarter, your app can still be a hit – as long as you choose the right marketing strategy. Here are some app marketing success stories that prove you can do more with less.
Marketing done right: top 5 app success stories.
Stay.com. Although building an application for Android first is not a major trend yet, that’s what the guys from Cutehacks did. Stay.com enables users to create personalized travel guides, store them on a smartphone and use the data offline. The app uses first-hand information provided by the best baristas, chefs, and media personalities from all over the world, so you can feel at home no matter what city you stay in – and save some money on
roaming. Cutehacks spent nearly six months simultaneously developing the Android and iOS versions of Stay.com, and here’s what they learned. First, you can’t ignore the Android look of an application. iOS-inspired layouts will probably alienate Android users – after all, the App Store and Google Play have different UX/UI policies. Although Cutehacks delivered a good-looking app that efficiently handled different Android resolutions, they received many
negative reviews from devoted Androids. Second, there’s memory and performance. Back in 2012 (and that’s when the Stay.com app was launched), the size of an Android application was device-dependent, so Cutehacks had to do some significant re-coding. Finally, they found out Facebook APIs were unstable and poorly documented and spent quite a lot of time searching for developer tips on Quora and Stack Overflow. It sounds like everything.
Cutehacks did go wrong, but it’s far from being true. The guys successfully implemented the ACRA tool, enabling users to send failure reports every time Stay.com crashed. They also used Trello to enhance project management (and poor management is why approximately 30% of all IT projects fail). But what makes their story worth citing is the timely changes they made to Stay.com once they discovered users weren’t happy with the current Android version. If you want to succeed, you should pay attention to user feedback – and follow the App Store/Google Play developer guidelines, of course.
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