Have a Mobile App Idea? Validate it with These Steps

The staggering popularity of applications for mobile devices only goes to show how far technology has come. Barely a decade ago, mobile technology took its nascent steps towards mobile internet services. And now, smartphones with round-the-clock internet services are everywhere. With phones of storage capacities of 16 GB and above being incredibly commonplace nowadays, there’s a crazy rush for downloading trending applications. Games, language tutorials, guitar tuners, taxi booking, multimedia players, dating services; mobile applications are delivering almost every service imaginable to consumers, and this has paved the way for mobile apps development to become a successful career choice as well.

However, the ease of brand new applications getting noticed and then becoming commercially successful no longer exists. Head to either Apple’s App Store or Google Play, and the mind-boggling plethora of applications for each and every category is sure to conjure up some choice issues. For aspiring mobile apps development professionals, it’s a risk to make huge initial investments without any guarantee of success. A failed product may result in substantial financial losses, and the developers’ credibility may take a significant hit. Therefore, if you happen to stumble upon an idea that has something going for it, keep the following tips in mind before you launch it as an app.

Know What’s Hot and What’s Not!

The root of every commercially successful mobile application lies in the idea, and how popular it is with the masses. You might have an idea up your sleeve, but is it good enough to make the grade? Thankfully, there are tools to find out.

Apple’s App Store has in house statistics that reflect the apps people are willing to spend on, the apps that have generated most revenue from in-app purchases, and also apps that are free downloads. For Google Play, there are third-party tools and applications that reveal information about market trends specific to Android users. Google’s Keyword Planner tool lets you type in commonly associated elements with your idea such as benefits and problems that it solves, and gets back to you with statistics regarding both local and global demand. All this information could be of immense value to you to assess the potential your idea has, both in terms of popularity and probability of long-term financial rewards.

Micro-Testing

Once you go ahead with mobile apps development, you would be faced with another important question; launch the application on a full-scale basis or test out the waters first?

A full-scale application launch means full-scale investment, and that can mean upwards of $1,000. With the competition in the mobile apps development market growing fiercer by the day, a better idea would be to invest a fraction of the full-scale investment, and offer a basic demonstration of the app’s core qualities. In business terms, this is commonly referred to as a minimum viable product. If your product fails, then the initial investment won’t be too damaging in the long-term scheme of things. But if it does receive rave reviews, you can be assured of commercial success once you do come out with the final product.

Another popular method is building a landing page and running an ad campaign. This method may or may not involve any app demonstration, and mainly showcases the problem-solving abilities and the benefits provided by the app. Once the landing page is completed and ready for sharing, it’s time to run ad campaigns on social media websites a la Facebook and Twitter. The most basic ad campaigns barely cost $50, and Google AdMob is a great place to start out.

As soon as your app demonstration is out for the public to download, you should turn your attention to tracking results. Google Analytics and a host of similar analytics tools would come in handy during this process. Let it run for at least a couple of days, and you would begin to see a clear picture.

The ever expanding market for mobile applications offers huge career opportunities for aspiring mobile developers. A reliable mobile apps development training course is all you need to kick start a rewarding career that requires you to be both creative, and technical.