Mobile Application Development

Hi, Habr. The word "startup" for many, recently, has become the name of some innovative project, whose activities are mainly related to the provision of services, but I would like to talk about another Staple - a company specializing in the development of mobile applications. The innovativeness of the service itself is drowsy, but all the economic factors of “start-up” are obvious. Probably I would never have started creating such a post if the 9/12/2010 were not at the Mobile Developer Day conference, and I didn’t see how interested customers are in the professional development of applications for several mobile platforms. And it is precisely the development of the command, where there are experts on several platforms, especially popular (iOS, Android, Symbian) or promising (WP7, MeeGo) at the moment. And I also want to believe that interest in us was caused not only by cool brand T-shirts, but also by our core activities.

Who are we

As a HippoApp team, we appeared quite recently, literally, since June 2010, as the second wing of the web studio, although some mobile platforms appeared later, therefore we were somewhat polyformed in the course of development. In addition to mobile applications, we are developing applications for social networks. During this time, we managed to create 3 apps for the AppStore and the Android Market, and 4 apps for social networks (vk.com and My World). Only 11. Now in testing and reviewing in the AppStore there are several more projects, so we are thinking of bringing the total list of works to 16 by the end of the year, including the application for WP7.

What we did

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I think it’s not a secret to anyone that starting work in the market at once to find orders that will take up all the working time is not possible, or almost impossible, so we decided to go the well-known way and began to implement our micro-start-up projects, if you want . The benefit here is obvious:
in case of economic failure of the project
- development experience in combat conditions;
- Experience in implementing one of the three main ways to monetize mobile applications (direct sales, advertising sales, sales within applications);
- work in the portfolio;
in the case of a project recoupment, one should understand that if a project pays for it, then it has some, most likely not small, number of active users, therefore, plus the first option here:
- experience of active fixes and dorobotki applications at the request of users;
- the possibility of selling finished projects;
- getting an additional channel to advertise and promote other projects

In the case when the project "shot" - the benefit to its creators is obvious.

What do we do

To be honest, for me it has become a great revelation, then, in what nascent state the mobile applications market is now in general, and especially in our country. Therefore, our ambitions have seriously increased, and now we are already negotiating the participation of us, as developers, in several interesting startups, as well as cooperation with vendor in the development of branded software and pre-installed applications.

I hope this post will be more useful to someone than just a topic with a link to the site with a behemoth.