Important points when developing a mobile application

Keep in mind that posting time can be up to several weeks. Let's say you have developed and tested an application, called all the bloggers or the media and said: "I have a new application, come to the press conference." You send it to the AppStore and have to wait seven working days in Russia. In this case, Google Play is a paradise for live updates, where publishing takes several hours.

Fragmentation of the operating system. If you are developing applications for Android, consider fragmentation and the existence of a whole zoo of devices. This affects the development time at all stages: design, design, development, and especially testing.

It is impossible to communicate with users in the store. For example, a user writes that he does not receive messages in ICQ. He is dissatisfied and expresses himself very colorfully, but not very informatively. We have no way to contact him and find out more about the problem. All we can do is get into the monitoring and see if we have messages. Maybe it was blocked by antispam.

Now some stores are acquiring an admin panel in which you can ask questions to the user, find out his contact details, see in which countries your application is downloaded, but so far the situation has not improved much. It is worth noting that Google Play continues to add this feature to some developers, for example, our company is available.

Time for testing. There are several ways to test an application. You can have testers on staff - with test cases, test plans, which they must pass. In addition, there is a service for testing - you pay for the bugs you find. You upload an application, 20,000 people test it. There are, of course, pros and cons to this approach.

Personnel in the mobile industry is everything. Good mobile developers are hard to find even for large companies such as Mail.Ru Group, Yandex or Google. That's why we work with interns - because sometimes it's easier to take a smart student and train him.

What should be remembered when developing a mobile application?

On every new platform, the user expects to see a rich application. He argues as follows: “I was sitting on a bad Java phone, while I could use ICQ. I bought a new phone, I go to the Marketplace, but there is no ICQ there? What are you doing there?" The user does not take into account the fact that you have to make an application from scratch.

The new platform means new devices, new documentation, new resources. The more popular the platform, the more competitors you have. At the moment, there are two stores that show this perfectly: AppStore and Google Play. If you have an idea for an app that is easy to monetize or just gets a lot of downloads, type in keywords in the search and you will most likely find that such an app exists. The more popular the platform, the more competitors. In such cases, it is necessary to carefully study analogues, look at statistics, try to understand in what parameters existing solutions can be surpassed.

It is important to understand how users choose applications. Initially, a person is not going to buy a specific application, he just looks at the list. For example, on request "free music". The icon and the first two lines of the description are what a person sees and evaluates in the first place. If the icon is decent, you can buy; accordingly, a bad icon reduces the number of downloads.

It is very important to get to the top of the app store. Getting into the top store is very good, gaining a foothold there is the key to success. Why is this needed? When a user wants to download something, he enters the chart and sees which application is currently in first place in terms of the number of downloads. It is very important to get there, because it is a kind of vicious circle. The app hits the chart, users see it, they download it, it hits number one again, and the iterations continue. Therefore, by all means, get races and a rating: ask moms, grandmothers, neighbors to put the application on the top five. It is worth saying that the market is full of solutions for guaranteed output of the program to the top. However, this brings little organic users, which does not prevent them from continuing experiments.