The experience of creating a mobile application: it did not work the first time
We have just completed our series of articles on quantum programming. Now let's briefly return to the more understandable - mobile development, and in a series of several articles let's talk about the designer for developing mobile applications for online stores. This is the second attempt by the guys to create such a constructor and now it is successful. Charge experience under the cut!
I give the word to the author.
')
Four years ago we tried to make the first designer and the company for the development of mobile applications for online stores - we described that experience in Habré in a series of articles . Then they got more than 70 thousand views. Now, thanks to Microsoft and its technologies, we are returning with a new project, a second series and a new business - mCommerce (mobile commerce), the designer Appropio. Why the new iteration has become more successful (and success is estimated by the growth of the client base), which technologies have been chosen for this and which architecture turned out to be the most successful - read in this and the following articles.
If you want to know more about any area or you have questions, you can write directly in the comments, we will build your next articles with their account.
I understand that Habr loves numbers and code, but I cannot do without intro. It is difficult to set out the dynamics of three years in a few paragraphs, but I will try.
In our first article, I wrote about how we first tried to make a mobile application designer in the studio Notissimus . Four years ago, the designer was not in demand by customers, and the project itself gradually died out, after which we finally went into custom development - it was she who allowed the company to go through the “valley of death” and develop over 5 years.
Why is that? It can be said that four years ago the market was not yet ready for mobile applications, was not ready for mCommerce itself, mobile commerce, people even confused the mobile site and mobile application. However, now they are also confused, but less often.
A typical startup mistake is that we left the designer too early and did not “hit” the market and its inquiries. The penetration of the devices was not enough, the store managers themselves had not yet seen the prospects for mobile sales and the mobile was not at all present in their heads, and there were practically no successful examples.
What has changed now:
In 2017, smartphones accounted for about 14% of online retail sales in Russia - a growth of 27% compared to 2016, while the share of purchases made from tablets continued to decline. Interestingly, now purchases made using devices on the Android platform are ahead of purchases from iOS, and also demonstrate an annual increase of 33%. At the same time, the reverse dynamic is observed in the world - the annual increase in the Android operating system was only 38%, while the increase in iOS is 74%.
It should be noted - despite the general growth and positive dynamics, the backwardness of the market (at least in Russia) persists. In terms of products and applications, the market is empty, and even now we are playing ahead of it. Even in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the selling mobile application has a maximum of one of several hundred online sellers (these are not exact statistics, so to say - our feelings from communication).
After all, applications are a new environment for stores. For four years, everyone learned how to make websites with stores (boxed solutions are already in the tens) and promote them. But with applications it is still different. For applications, not only the development platform itself is important - it is important to understand how to work with this tool, how to support it, how to develop it. This is a set of issues that businesses and store owners need to understand. Competence and knowledge is clearly not enough.
We do not exaggerate. Recently, they showed examples of how a large trading company of the DIY segment in St. Petersburg how companies in this segment can increase sales through applications, citing cases, numbers, etc. At the same time they mentioned in passing that you guys don't even have a mobile website. A week later we were called to the tender for the development of ... a mobile site! And now we are trying to convey to executives that a mobile site and mobile apps are slightly different things — a site for quickly obtaining information, and an app for building long-term relationships.
Can I sell from apps? Yes. Absolutely. We in this series of articles will cite many examples (impersonal), but for now - look, this is an excerpt from our internal analytics - weekly sales from mobile applications:
The image shows impersonal sales results through mobile applications for completely different business categories (clothing, DIY, food, flowers, etc.). The sales figures are given for the week (week to week is being compared) and I want to separately highlight the amazing sales results in the amount of 10,000,000 rubles! At the same time, the turnover from the company's website has not decreased, that is, the company received an additional turnover of 10 million rubles a week made using mobile applications.
An example of one of the stores:
Sale of food
670 thousand rubles per month
The main question - the application must be "able to cook." I will say that this is a change in psychology, the very paradigm. Until now, not everyone understands this, but the application is a very personal media.
The person who put the application is loyal. He likes the brand, he buys, he comes back. The application is endless and almost free advertising for the company. It is constantly present on the user's screen and a few dozen (or even hundreds) times a day reminds of itself with at least an icon (not to mention annoying guns - however, a separate conversation about them). And people even like to update applications and read - and what has changed?
But the positive dynamic is obvious. And so we approached our new product.
We decided to make a new platform (we called it the “application designer”, although this is not quite the case — rather, the platform, but from the end-client’s point of view, the term designer is clearer and easier to take root). Our designer for the lowest price allows you to try mobile as a shopping environment. The company's risks are minimized - this is not a custom development for a million or so, but a little more than 100 thousand (or rather, 129,000 r) to create the first version of two applications for iOS and Android. This is almost any business can afford, and if the store does everything correctly, the result will be visible.
Answering the question why we returned to the idea of ​​the designer again, you can simply answer:
In other words - the market is big, growing, there is no competition - and why not try it? In fact, our designer is a small step to a large mobile marketing for companies.
Plus - we have been doing business applications for 5 years (not games), and most of them are trading. It would be a sin not to turn our years of experience into the final designer.
We try to adhere to the concept of maximum openness. And the best way to bring screenshots from a bank account. :) The following is the data for 2017 - at the beginning of 2017 we started developing and immediately began selling (as advised by smart books). The total income amounted to 1,400,000 rubles, which we, naturally, spent on development (in addition to our own investments, which we and our business partners make).
In 2018, things went a little more fun, because the product has already become more mature, successful cases have appeared with good results. Revenue for the first months of 738,000 rubles.
The technological basis of our designer is the Microsoft Xamarin cross-platform development environment. A number of modules are written on it (product gallery, basket, product card, payment, etc. - these modules are constantly being improved, their number is growing), which can be easily combined into a ready-made application for a store. While we are collecting the applications with our own hands, we are planning to launch personal accounts for clients in the coming months to do this themselves.
The cabinet is a very important thing, but we didn’t take the time to develop it on our own, preferring to do the assemblies for our clients, because While there is no 100% understanding of how to make it so that the client can really make a very high-quality product, and not an odd job that he abandons.
First, Xamarin allows you to achieve almost native performance on two platforms at once. There are no delays inherent in HTML 5, of course not. With it, you can also easily “communicate” with native functions (geolocation, fluff, camera, etc.). Cross-platform itself provides portability and replicability of code between platforms.
The advantage is that if the client wants to further develop the application himself (and we give the source code to customers - we grant exclusive rights to the result of the work - we specifically focus on this), he can take on a C # programmer who will gradually learn Xamarin and be able to develop two platforms at once.
Do I need to modify the client myself or ask us? 99% come to us, but the very fact that the source code is transmitted (by the way, with documentation) and there is a practical opportunity to develop the product yourself - has a strong psychological influence when making decisions.
Among the shortcomings: there is no obvious quick opportunity to customize applications, as is the case with HTML5 designers - to shuffle the elements in the visual editor, you can not immediately see the resulting layouts.
Another relative difficulty in the development.
By the way, this idea with dragging is utopian in its essence. A designer who is trying to thoughtfully transfer the corporate identity of the client and its content to a mobile application, taking into account the existing limitations of the platforms in terms of design, is working on each new application. Such beautiful applications as in the screenshot are obtained.
Several years ago, the designers were on the crest of success - almost every month a new one was opened, which promised a simple and effective solution for certain customers. Now the “constructivist” euphoria has passed (and Apple even tried to ban sample applications), and there are several reasons for this:
We went along the path of having several debugged universal templates for online stores, which are visually customized for the client's corporate identity and, together with its content, change the final product almost beyond recognition. As a result, we cannot say that we stamp applications. Yes, they are “strung together” on the general framework of the design, but our goal is to give the customer our selling tool, and not flood the App Store and Google Play with the same type of handicrafts. Believe me, any medium-sized company does not want to get a rival's twin template product.
The second drawback for us is not as such, since our parent company Notissimus is engaged in custom development on Xamarin and in this case we have already reached the heights, which allowed us to create such a cross-platform designer.
How it works - in our next article. Stay tuned!
Maxim Kulgin is one of the founders of the mobile application designer (more precisely, APPROPIO LLC, which has appropio product rights ). At the same time, he is one of the founders of the mobile application development company notissimus.com. He lives in St. Petersburg. 45 years. Married 2 children. Contacts: FB , mobile: +7 (812) 748 2096.
Ps Those who want to observe more closely how our team works - I recommend to subscribe to the channel - we are recording a lot of video, which is called “from the inside” :)
I give the word to the author.
')
Four years ago we tried to make the first designer and the company for the development of mobile applications for online stores - we described that experience in Habré in a series of articles . Then they got more than 70 thousand views. Now, thanks to Microsoft and its technologies, we are returning with a new project, a second series and a new business - mCommerce (mobile commerce), the designer Appropio. Why the new iteration has become more successful (and success is estimated by the growth of the client base), which technologies have been chosen for this and which architecture turned out to be the most successful - read in this and the following articles.
The plan of our articles is approximately as follows:
- In this article, we describe the state of affairs in mobile commerce, our approaches and why we again hope for success. There will be more marketing talk about applications, history, business and the market.
- In the second article, the iterations that we did when creating the designer, how we worked out the idea, cut off the excess or, on the contrary, added the necessary functionality. It will already be a story about how from a technical point of view, a prototype from an idea and a paper sketch was turned into ready-made components.
- The third part - once again on the technical basis, architecture, technology.
- The fourth is customer interaction - what do online stores want from mobile apps.
- Fifth - project management, refinement, the future.
If you want to know more about any area or you have questions, you can write directly in the comments, we will build your next articles with their account.
I understand that Habr loves numbers and code, but I cannot do without intro. It is difficult to set out the dynamics of three years in a few paragraphs, but I will try.
mCommerce on takeoff. Or not?
In our first article, I wrote about how we first tried to make a mobile application designer in the studio Notissimus . Four years ago, the designer was not in demand by customers, and the project itself gradually died out, after which we finally went into custom development - it was she who allowed the company to go through the “valley of death” and develop over 5 years.
Why is that? It can be said that four years ago the market was not yet ready for mobile applications, was not ready for mCommerce itself, mobile commerce, people even confused the mobile site and mobile application. However, now they are also confused, but less often.
A typical startup mistake is that we left the designer too early and did not “hit” the market and its inquiries. The penetration of the devices was not enough, the store managers themselves had not yet seen the prospects for mobile sales and the mobile was not at all present in their heads, and there were practically no successful examples.
What has changed now:
- Smartphone penetration peaked.
- The price of installations is decreasing, companies have a lot of their free promotion channels (and we advise for the first year to use these free channels, and not to spend money on the purchase of installations).
- There are already vivid examples of successful applications with millions of turns (the record of one of our clients is 10 million rubles per ... week!).
- Accordingly, the number of mobile shopping apps is growing exponentially - mobile commerce is one of the leading trends in 2016-2017.
In 2017, smartphones accounted for about 14% of online retail sales in Russia - a growth of 27% compared to 2016, while the share of purchases made from tablets continued to decline. Interestingly, now purchases made using devices on the Android platform are ahead of purchases from iOS, and also demonstrate an annual increase of 33%. At the same time, the reverse dynamic is observed in the world - the annual increase in the Android operating system was only 38%, while the increase in iOS is 74%.
It should be noted - despite the general growth and positive dynamics, the backwardness of the market (at least in Russia) persists. In terms of products and applications, the market is empty, and even now we are playing ahead of it. Even in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the selling mobile application has a maximum of one of several hundred online sellers (these are not exact statistics, so to say - our feelings from communication).
After all, applications are a new environment for stores. For four years, everyone learned how to make websites with stores (boxed solutions are already in the tens) and promote them. But with applications it is still different. For applications, not only the development platform itself is important - it is important to understand how to work with this tool, how to support it, how to develop it. This is a set of issues that businesses and store owners need to understand. Competence and knowledge is clearly not enough.
We do not exaggerate. Recently, they showed examples of how a large trading company of the DIY segment in St. Petersburg how companies in this segment can increase sales through applications, citing cases, numbers, etc. At the same time they mentioned in passing that you guys don't even have a mobile website. A week later we were called to the tender for the development of ... a mobile site! And now we are trying to convey to executives that a mobile site and mobile apps are slightly different things — a site for quickly obtaining information, and an app for building long-term relationships.
Can I sell from apps? Yes. Absolutely. We in this series of articles will cite many examples (impersonal), but for now - look, this is an excerpt from our internal analytics - weekly sales from mobile applications:
The image shows impersonal sales results through mobile applications for completely different business categories (clothing, DIY, food, flowers, etc.). The sales figures are given for the week (week to week is being compared) and I want to separately highlight the amazing sales results in the amount of 10,000,000 rubles! At the same time, the turnover from the company's website has not decreased, that is, the company received an additional turnover of 10 million rubles a week made using mobile applications.
An example of one of the stores:
Sale of food
670 thousand rubles per month
The main question - the application must be "able to cook." I will say that this is a change in psychology, the very paradigm. Until now, not everyone understands this, but the application is a very personal media.
The person who put the application is loyal. He likes the brand, he buys, he comes back. The application is endless and almost free advertising for the company. It is constantly present on the user's screen and a few dozen (or even hundreds) times a day reminds of itself with at least an icon (not to mention annoying guns - however, a separate conversation about them). And people even like to update applications and read - and what has changed?
But the positive dynamic is obvious. And so we approached our new product.
So why again the designer?
We decided to make a new platform (we called it the “application designer”, although this is not quite the case — rather, the platform, but from the end-client’s point of view, the term designer is clearer and easier to take root). Our designer for the lowest price allows you to try mobile as a shopping environment. The company's risks are minimized - this is not a custom development for a million or so, but a little more than 100 thousand (or rather, 129,000 r) to create the first version of two applications for iOS and Android. This is almost any business can afford, and if the store does everything correctly, the result will be visible.
Answering the question why we returned to the idea of ​​the designer again, you can simply answer:
- Most managers are not yet fully prepared for applications in terms of integration into the sales system. However, everyone already wants to try. The designer allows you to reduce the threshold of entry.
- Applications in the Shopping category are growing by leaps and bounds, and in Russia we will definitely come to the conclusion that companies will pay close attention to this tool.
- In the Russian market, competition in the constructors segment is close to zero, and the number of online stores registered at J.Market is more than 20,000 pieces (no exact statistics have been seen, but there is an estimate that only about 50,000 online stores in the Russian Federation).
In other words - the market is big, growing, there is no competition - and why not try it? In fact, our designer is a small step to a large mobile marketing for companies.
Plus - we have been doing business applications for 5 years (not games), and most of them are trading. It would be a sin not to turn our years of experience into the final designer.
Work results
We try to adhere to the concept of maximum openness. And the best way to bring screenshots from a bank account. :) The following is the data for 2017 - at the beginning of 2017 we started developing and immediately began selling (as advised by smart books). The total income amounted to 1,400,000 rubles, which we, naturally, spent on development (in addition to our own investments, which we and our business partners make).
In 2018, things went a little more fun, because the product has already become more mature, successful cases have appeared with good results. Revenue for the first months of 738,000 rubles.
Platform
The technological basis of our designer is the Microsoft Xamarin cross-platform development environment. A number of modules are written on it (product gallery, basket, product card, payment, etc. - these modules are constantly being improved, their number is growing), which can be easily combined into a ready-made application for a store. While we are collecting the applications with our own hands, we are planning to launch personal accounts for clients in the coming months to do this themselves.
The cabinet is a very important thing, but we didn’t take the time to develop it on our own, preferring to do the assemblies for our clients, because While there is no 100% understanding of how to make it so that the client can really make a very high-quality product, and not an odd job that he abandons.
What is good or bad such an approach?
First, Xamarin allows you to achieve almost native performance on two platforms at once. There are no delays inherent in HTML 5, of course not. With it, you can also easily “communicate” with native functions (geolocation, fluff, camera, etc.). Cross-platform itself provides portability and replicability of code between platforms.
The advantage is that if the client wants to further develop the application himself (and we give the source code to customers - we grant exclusive rights to the result of the work - we specifically focus on this), he can take on a C # programmer who will gradually learn Xamarin and be able to develop two platforms at once.
Do I need to modify the client myself or ask us? 99% come to us, but the very fact that the source code is transmitted (by the way, with documentation) and there is a practical opportunity to develop the product yourself - has a strong psychological influence when making decisions.
Among the shortcomings: there is no obvious quick opportunity to customize applications, as is the case with HTML5 designers - to shuffle the elements in the visual editor, you can not immediately see the resulting layouts.
Another relative difficulty in the development.
By the way, this idea with dragging is utopian in its essence. A designer who is trying to thoughtfully transfer the corporate identity of the client and its content to a mobile application, taking into account the existing limitations of the platforms in terms of design, is working on each new application. Such beautiful applications as in the screenshot are obtained.
Why designers left the scene
Several years ago, the designers were on the crest of success - almost every month a new one was opened, which promised a simple and effective solution for certain customers. Now the “constructivist” euphoria has passed (and Apple even tried to ban sample applications), and there are several reasons for this:
- Their decisions were very typical, they were all made with a carbon copy.
- Normal access to native functions (at least in the Russian designers), in fact, no one did.
- The HTML5 technology worked, frankly, slowly and with errors.
We went along the path of having several debugged universal templates for online stores, which are visually customized for the client's corporate identity and, together with its content, change the final product almost beyond recognition. As a result, we cannot say that we stamp applications. Yes, they are “strung together” on the general framework of the design, but our goal is to give the customer our selling tool, and not flood the App Store and Google Play with the same type of handicrafts. Believe me, any medium-sized company does not want to get a rival's twin template product.
The second drawback for us is not as such, since our parent company Notissimus is engaged in custom development on Xamarin and in this case we have already reached the heights, which allowed us to create such a cross-platform designer.
How it works - in our next article. Stay tuned!
about the author
Maxim Kulgin is one of the founders of the mobile application designer (more precisely, APPROPIO LLC, which has appropio product rights ). At the same time, he is one of the founders of the mobile application development company notissimus.com. He lives in St. Petersburg. 45 years. Married 2 children. Contacts: FB , mobile: +7 (812) 748 2096.Ps Those who want to observe more closely how our team works - I recommend to subscribe to the channel - we are recording a lot of video, which is called “from the inside” :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/354870/
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