What Makes a Winning iPhone/ iPad App?
Everyone is searching for ideas to build the next winning iPhone or iPad app. While there is no single formula for building a successful-selling iPhone or iPad app, there are a number of things that can and must be done to achieve success. Without covering the basics, your app is likely to languish on the App Store with minimal sales. There have been some very good apps posted to the App Store that have not sold as well as they should have, and this is usually because not much marketing has been applied to the project.
Unless you stage a large event to launch your app and get it started with strong momentum or your app gets picked up by Apple on the home page of the App Store, you may find yourself in this situation.
Keep in mind that marketing is not a single event but a continuous process of aligning your message with your buyer and delivering your message over and over again so that your audience absorbs it and acts on it. Think about marketing in terms of other products you buy. How often do you see the same commercial on TV? How many times have you seen the same email ads or banner ads? Either you start out with a following, do something significant to get people’s attention, or you have to get the word out.
In the next sections of this article, we walk through some of the key elements of a winning app. If you are just starting development of your app then you are at a good point to evaluate if the app you are building has these characteristics. If you are mid-development or have completed your app, then use this article as a benchmark to assess how well you stack up in each of these areas. It’s never too late to go back and retrofit your app. Updates are one of the keys to a successful app as you’ll read in the following sections.
Build Something Unique
The best way to come upon a unique idea for an app is to rely on your own personal experience and identify where you see a need. This is easier said than done because most of us go along and may not think about how we could improve our lives with a new technology solution. You have to make a conscious effort to envision new ways of doing things. You can start by asking yourself the following questions:
1. What are your favorite hobbies? Is there anything about those hobbies that could be improved by applying an app solution to the problem? (Hobbies can be anything that you enjoy: gardening, stamp collecting, photography, genealogy, scrapbooking, cooking, collecting anything, antiques, and so on.)
2. What sports do you play? Is there a particular technique that you have learned playing a sport that would be particularly helpful to others? (Better golf swing, ways to hit a ball better, how to be a better right fielder, how to swim faster, how to prepare for the triathlon or to be an Ironman, better tennis tips, and so on.)
3. What line of work are you in? Is there anything in your line of work that could benefit from the use of an iPhone/iPad app? (Sales tools, materials and construction calculators, financial and insurance aids, and so on.)
4. What challenges do you face in your life? Is there an app that could help someone cope with a handicap or other illness? (Think about soothing apps, mental health apps, physical health apps, stress coping apps, and so on.)
5. What are your least favorite chores? Is there an app that could help someone with bill paying, gift buying, and so on?
6. What daily activity takes you the most time to complete? Is there an app that could help people speed up that activity?
7. What childhood games did you enjoy playing? Could that game (or a variation of that game) make a great game app?
We’re all trying to build a better mousetrap. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult to build a completely new and unique app. As I have mentioned before, whenever you come up with an idea for an iPhone/iPad app, the first thing you should do is a search on the App Store for that type of app. The chances are pretty good that you will find some or many apps that are close to what you have thought about building. For example, let’s take a topic like knitting.
You think you’ve got a great idea to develop an iPhone/iPad app that helps you learn how to knit. So, let’s check the App Store for knitting apps. An example of our search is shown in the next image:
However, on close inspection of the knitting apps, some apps help you count stitches (the author doesn’t really know what that means) and some of the apps actually teach you how to knit, cross stitch, and weave. There’s even a knitting game in the group. So, when you perform a search for your particular app idea, be sure to look more closely at the group of apps that you see and dissect them into separate groups to get an idea of exactly how many apps you are competing against. While it looks like 15 apps at first glance, it’s more like three or four that closely match your goal of teaching someone how to knit.
While you may not land on an original idea, it is possible to build an app that improves on what’s already out there. The chances are very good that you will find a number of functions missing from a competitor’s app. As mentioned before, if you can narrow down the top competitive apps to just a few, go ahead and spend a few dollars to download some of them and see what features they have and what they lack.
List the key features of the competitive apps as well as features that the available apps are lacking. You will start to see a pattern in terms of base features that this type of app must have to be viable in the market. Then you can look at what features you can add that will make your app a whole lot better.