Want to create your own mobile app?

Disclaimer:
This article is a free artistic retelling-translation of the introduction of the book " App Savvy
Turning ideas into ipad and iphone apps

It may interest people who are just coming to the world of mobile development, and think about where to start. If you are an experienced businessman who already has a stable income from his own mobile applications - most likely, it will seem useless and obvious to you.


Probably, like many, you are also fascinated by the staggering success of smartphones and tablets - these smart gadgets running on Apple, Google and Microsoft operating systems, which virtually everyone now has. In many ways, the success of these devices is due to the app stores - the App Store in the case of iOS, Google Play on Android and the Marketplace on Windows Phone, which open up a huge amount of opportunities for users that were not available to owners of classic mobile phones.

We can say that smartphones with their application stores have become a new Internet - just as the Network is a huge ecosystem consisting of many sites, large and small, so smartphones with their mobile applications have turned into a huge network with a huge user base. Users who constantly roam the app stores in search of new interesting things, use mobile clients for their favorite sites, communicate, exchange information and gain new knowledge through their smartphones.

Apple products at one time produced a real BOOM and just blew up the market - literally two years after the appearance on the market, the audience of iPhone and iPod Touch users at times exceeded the AOL subscriber base (according to Morgan Stanley for 2009). Together with the subscriber base, the army of developers grew as well - for the first year of its existence, the Apple App Store grew from a small kiosk with a thousand applications into a huge supermarket with 50,000 offers. A year later, the number of applications in the catalog exceeded 200,000, and the number of downloads — 5 billion times! Now, when five years have passed since the launch of the App Store, the catalog contains almost 900,000 applications, and Apple moderators check around 15,000 new applications every week. The growth rate of mobile application catalogs for Android and Windows Phone is no less impressive.


The growth rate of the App Store in 2008-2010, the schedule with 148apps.biz

When Apple launched the App Store advertising campaign under the slogan "There is an app for this," meaning that in their catalog you will find an app for everything — of course, it was just a marketing ploy. But now it is very similar to the truth - in fact, you can find literally everything in directories, from the sensational, in the literal sense of the word, iFart , and ending with serious business tools, for example, for the selection of objects for investment or the search for commercial real estate.

But, despite the huge number of available applications, each of us bears the idea of ​​his own. Here we can draw another analogy with the Internet - just as in the era of the dot-com everyone dreamed of launching their own website, so many start-up entrepreneurs dream of making money by creating their own mobile application. Stunning success stories, a low threshold for entering the market and an abundance of tools for rapid development push people to this step and make them think “Why not me?”

"New" App Store

Generally speaking, when the App Store just appeared, it was not necessary to make a lot of effort to earn pocket money. Of course, I do not want to say that it was just a spit - but at that time people bought applications that nobody would download even for free now. At the time of launching the new platform, it was enough just to quickly make an application, add it to the catalog and quietly expect sales - because people were intrigued by the novelty platform, and a small selection in the catalog meant that all applications were bought sooner or later.

But today circumstances have changed. Application stores have become a highly competitive environment in which the interests of operating system developers who are interested in the quality of the applications offered, the developers of the applications themselves who need to make money, and the buyers who are looking for applications for themselves met. If at the very beginning of development, both Apple and Microsoft completely relied on developers and encouraged them to release as many applications as possible, now that the directories are already full, it has become much more difficult to take their place in the sun.

Look at the numbers

Speaking about the new App Store, you can see that the widespread opinion about the ability to quickly get rich, creating mobile applications, is fundamentally wrong, and an attempt to make it can hurt not only your vanity, but also your wallet.

It is true that leading developers live very well - because the most popular applications, usually games such as Angry Birds or Doodle Jump, receive millions of downloads. Having estimated that at each download you can receive $ 1, and looking at the enormous download volumes of these applications, it is very easy to look at the App Store and see only bundles of money that float past you.


Business Insider: Rovio Reports Angry Birds Maker $ 200 Million Revenue in 2012 , image from techcrunch.com

At this point, it’s very easy to think, “Why not me?”, To make your application - and face the harsh reality, which usually differs greatly from the cloudless existence of such leading developers. As the statistics show, more than half of the paid applications in the App Store do not even gain 1000 downloads per year, which means that after Apple’s commission is deducted for all your work, you will receive only about $ 700 - so if I were you, I would not indulge optimism, looking at the amazing performance of popular games.

Does this mean that if you are new to the development of mobile applications - you'd better immediately abandon this idea? Not necessarily, but, in any case, at first I suggest you to face the truth and study everything that already exists in the App Store - then you will understand that you have very few chances to come into it and immediately launch a very popular application. I don’t want to say that this is impossible, but many successful iPhone developers have created so many applications before they reach their goal. The main thing that you will get from the launch of your first application is the knowledge and experience of independent application development.

When you study the market, you may think that you will not succeed. My advice to you in this situation - think wider. Develop not an application, but something that has value for you and for people not only as a program on the phone. Solve real problems of users, do it easily and naturally for them - and then you can create an application that will become really popular.

But before starting the development of your mobile application, do not forget to think over everything. Successful mobile application developers are different in that they treat development as a business. They calculate the cost of development, the cost of entering the market, think through a way of returning investments - and this allows them to make stable earnings out of development, rather than trying to draw out a happy lottery ticket.

The more time you spend studying the market, the more clearly you will learn how to distinguish real opportunities for earning from the ghostly ones. Consider the development of an application as an investment, and you will learn to interact with customers, media partners, you can create your own library of design elements and software code that you will use in all of your applications.

When you learn to understand the economics of the App Store, make the necessary connections and start building your library, you will get a significant advantage over people who just wander through the App Store trying to find a place under the sun.

Unlike the rest, you will not come to the App Store filled with emotions and delusions of greatness of your idea. On the contrary, you will be able to objectively assess your capabilities and understand how much money and time you will need to invest in your application, and how you will return your investments.