Make your Android App Fail Proof

Make your Android App Fail Proof

The mobile app industry is booming and is expected to be worth $25 billion by 2015. Thousands of apps are being launched every day. In July 2014, there were around 1.3 million apps in the Google Play store. This figure clearly shows that the global market for Android mobile applications is becoming increasingly competitive.

How can mobile app developers make sure that the Android app crafted by them gets noticed in this rising sea of mobile applications?

Apart froma crowded market, the success rate of Android apps is another big challenge businesses face. Even apps from technology giants like Facebook (Slingshot) and Twitter (Music) have seen low success rate.

So, how can you ensure that your app does not fail to impress the ever increasing community of Android users?

If you are a company interested in developing a brilliant app for your business, here are the ingredients for success:

1. Don’t Emulate Other Popular Mobile Apps

A very obvious point and yet ignored by most app development companies!

There are thousands of apps hitting the Google Play store every day. If your app resembles another (very popular) app in the category, there are high chances your app will fail to make a mark with Android users.

The key to developing a successful mobile app is to craft an innovative app that is either extremely useful or amazingly entertaining for the audience.

However, with the app market already flooding with apps, coming up with an original idea and building a totally new kind of appthat is not present in the Google Play store is a challenging task. One way to stand out from the crowd is to ensure your app providesatleast one good ‘user expected’functionality that similar kind of Android apps(your competitors) fail to provide.

2. Provide Immersive User-Experience(UX) to Android Users

A huge number of apps are removed by users’ from their Android phones right after their first use. The biggest reason apps get uninstalled immediately after they are downloaded is that they provide bad user experience.

Users are left unimpressed by its functionality and design.

To ensure this doesn’t happen with your app, offer flawless functionality and great design, which will resonate with your Android users. To offer a great user experience, you need to employ a user-centered design approach. Understand the needs of your Android users and streamline your app to deliver features that meet user needs and requirements.

A good tactic for providing the best UX is to give feedback to users for their actions. For instance, if they press the ‘Proceed to Pay’ button, prevent them from wondering whether the button was pressed or not by providing them with appropriate feedback for the action such as ‘Your request is being processed.’

3. Pay Attention to the Speed Factor

This is a mission critical subset of good user-experience. But since speed has a massive effect on the retention rate, this has been covered separately.

Generally, mobile apps are used on the go; users, therefore, want these apps to work fast and offer easy-to-use features. Apps that take too long to open or perform an action are discarded by the Android community immediately.

So, ensure your app provides reliable app experience to your audience by designing it in such a way that it performs all the tasks included in it in double quick time.

4. Optimize for Google Play store

App store optimization is the process of improving the visibility of an Android app in Google Play store. It is closely related to the term ‘search engine optimization’. If your app is ranked high on search results pageson the Google Play store, you will find a large number of Android users visiting your app page on the store.

Ensure you include relevant keywords pertaining to your app and industry in your app’s title and description to improve search rankings in Google Play store.

However, be cautious with keywords as forced usage of keywords will be noticed by Google and may result in your app being suspended from the play store.

Google clearly states that any “Repetitive and/or irrelevant use of keywords in the app title, description or promotional description can create an unpleasant user experience and can result in an app suspension.”

5. Have a Solid Marketing Plan

It is not just about clean design and providing excellent user-experience!

There are a large numbers of Android apps that fail even though they come good on these qualities. The reason being they simply go unnoticed by the Android audience.

So, why does this happen?

At times, business owners and marketing managers fail to have a solid marketing plan for the app; this results in people being totally unaware of the fact that an excellent app there were looking for, does exist in the play store.

One of the mistakes in marketing is to market the app only after it has been published on the Google Play store. If we take a leaf out of some successful app marketers’ book, we find these apps were promoted long before they hit the market.

Businesses should even leverage social channels to market and promote their new apps.

6. Keep Testing

Testing is an important phase in the mobile app development life cycle.

Only 16% of users said they would give an app a third chance if it failed to impress them in the first two attempts. This figure clearly suggests that users have very low tolerance towards buggy apps. This makes it mandatory for businesses to thoroughly test their apps before launching it.

Test on different android devices before you launch your app.

Once your app is published in Google Play store, ask for feedback from your actual app users either by offering them the form in the app itself or through other channels like email or social platforms. Based on the reviews that you receive through all these channels, tweak your Android app and launch new versions to meet users’ expectations.

Ensuring the app is bug free will ultimately boost the retention rate of your app.

7. Add the Right Trust Factors to Your App

With the increase in occurrencesof phishing and malware, it has become really important for businesses to prominently display trust indicators.

When a visitor visits your app page in Google Play store, they will form an opinion about your Android app in a few seconds. This is an extremely small window of time to convince visitors that your app is trustworthy.

One of the ways they judge your app is by checking the ratings and reviews on the page. Ensure you have a good strategy to collect a number of positive reviews from your users without coming across as desperate.

Also, make sure your app description page describes all the information about your app including the permission to access other features (like location, identity, photos/media files, etc.) from user’s smartphone.

If you want people to download your app and remain loyal, you need to keep in mind the aforementioned points before crafting your app.

Author Bio:

Vivek Patel is the content marketer at MoveoApps, an android app development company. He writes about mobile applications, technology and analyzes current technology market scenarios and loves to share his ideas on the web. You can follow him on Twitter @VivekrPatel.