As Techies are widely known as top software development company, we gets lot of inquiry to develop mobile applications. For those of you who are considering mobile app for your company, this article will help you to decide wisely. What are the pros and cons for mobile app development? In our previous article, we have discussed in details about website application development. In reality, do you need a website or mobile application, or both? We will answer by discussing about the reason of mobile app usage.
Why Mobile App?
If your business already have a large pool of audience, the mobile app will surely help your business grow. Unfortunately, many people are too hasty. Some of them do not have enough audience yet, but already want to boost their presence with mobile app. As a result, the mobile app has been not profitable. Please follow our advices in this article for building mobile app.
One of the advantage of mobile app is having sufficient database to judge how users interact with application. In addition, you will have the data of what application features the user is most interested in. From there, the mobile app development process will be much easier. By using an existing web based app, integration with the mobile app will be much smoother. The database design will also be more organized. Then, how can your mobile app increase user engagement in reality?
1. Interactive Engagement in Mobile App
Mobile apps are able to increase engagement in unique ways. Starting from gamification to personalizing promos for each user. However, the promotion must also be considerate. We have to avoid price discrimination on the users of your application. What is price discrimination? It is a form of dynamic pricing features embedded in the mobile app which often frowned upon by regular users as they see your product’s pricing changes often.
Another advantage is mobile app can also take advantage of the notification feature on the cellphone to attract the user’s attention. Well, if the notification is successful, then the user will be happy to open the mobile app. Usually, notifications in the form of promos, discounts, news, are the things that users love the most.
Many marketing / campaign activities are currently running using the mobile app as an interactive medium. Starting from changing the application icon to adjust for big events such as Chinese New Year, Christmas, Merdeka Day, to large shopping programs such as 12.12, mobile apps will be very helpful. But one thing that needs to be underlined; the mobile app has had quite a lot of users.
How do you get optimal user acquisition? Web app, because that is the goal, right? You surely still remember this from our previous article.
2. Optimizing Mobile App Features
Have you seen an ad where people are shaking their mobile phone to interact with it? The mobile phone features an accelerometer & gyroscope sensor which can detect “cell phone movement” up and down right and left. When the cellphone is shaken, the sensor will send a trigger to the mobile app to bring up the action. Yes, this is one example where we can maximize the phone features for your benefit.
That’s just the optimization of the 2 sensor feature on mobile. Just imagine how many sensors there are in the mobile phone. Certainly more and more every year. With the mobile app, you can optimize the features on your phone to improve the experience of using the mobile app.
3. Increase Customer Retention
Back to the notification feature, the mobile app can send notifications in the form of messages that contain a call to action. So, for example, if you buy an item on the e-commerce / marketplace mobile app, you will get a notification if you haven’t paid for the order, the item notification was sent, the item notification arrived, right? Yes, it is very similar to the mentioned example. Or maybe if you leave a lot of items in the basket without checking out, you will definitely get a notification.
So, what will you do after receiving the notification? Will you check out your items immediately? Most probably, yes. In essence, the mobile app is able to build better “communication” with the user. Communication here is not necessarily a straightforward message. But you can engage your user through the notification feature, etc. Isn’t that a good feature of mobile app?
Check out some of the myths or facts from the mobile app:
- Having a mobile app is trendy
This is a myth. Because not all mobile apps are “trendy”. Many mobile applications end up being idle on the user’s cellphone and are never used. Poor UI / UX, features that are rarely used by users, to many bugs in the application are usually the reason. Why is that so? Costs, doing mobile development is not cheap, unfortunately many companies are trying to cut costs at this stage, which is important to have a mobile app.
- The mobile app is really up to date!
This is a fact. There is no need to deny that the mobile-first world has led application developers to adapt and compete to innovate mobile app technology. The proof is, on the iOS operating system, there has been a jump in the number of mobile apps that are present in the app store in recent years. It is quite different from what happened in Google’s operating system, Android where in 2018- 2019 they experienced a decline of 25% of the total mobile apps on their app store.
This indicates that Google understands very well if there is an increase in demand for mobile apps. That way, Google must ensure Android users are safe from malware threats embedded in the malicious mobile app on the Google play store.
- Mobile apps are doing data mining
This is a fact. That is the reason why in this article it is stated that in the early stages of application development, it is better to use a web app. When you have a mobile app, you have control over what data you want to get from the user. And this is dangerous, if you don’t know what data your company needs to improve services, don’t think about creating a mobile app. If you misuse your user data, you can be prosecuted under the identity theft criminal act.
Nowadays, data is important. You need to build user trust in the application that you built first. Users will be smarter about what they will install. In addition, from the company side, it will also be overwhelmed in performing data management. Instead of being cost efficient, it will cost a lot to manage unnecessary data. Seriously, don’t try to retrieve unnecessary data, because user trust will be at stake.
Then, is data mining acceptable? It’s okay, as long as the user knows what data you will see. Just provide policy data when they register on the mobile app. You can also include what access the user must provide when downloading and using the mobile app in the description on the google play store or app store. So, the user will consciously validate the data sharing with the owner of the mobile app.
We hope that the discussion above is useful for you. The knowledge of pros and cons for mobile app development are definitely worth to be considered before making decisions for your startups.
To be continued in our next blog – How to use both web and mobile app for our business?
If you would like to know more about web and mobile app development, feel free to drop your contact here so we can arrange a quick meet-up over a coffee:
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