Remember the nineties? Every company wanted a website. The first websites were slow, difficult to navigate and looked, well, ugly. Today, it's the same with mobile applications (apps).
Apps may be the new Web. But so many mobile apps are clumsy, slow, or only available for certain platforms. Lots of companies fail to use them to actually engage with their customers.
There are a few mistakes you can make. Firstly, writing an app for the app's sake is never a good idea. You need to know what you want to achieve with it, which is usually increasing the loyalty of existing customers, finding new ones, or selling more of your products and services.
Don't build a 'me too' app - be different. Just consider this for a minute: There are an estimated one million mobile apps representing 40 billion downloads by consumers across the globe.
So how do you make yours special? Well, make it work hard and fast, for one thing. Also, make it work on any device, for any user.
Blackberry may be on its way out and iPhone has had its issues recently but you should not assume that everybody out there is using an Android phone, either. Some of your customers may still have old devices, some will upgrade every time a new phone comes out. Using your app simply has to be a great experience for all of those customers.
Now for the working hard bit. Slow apps are bad apps. And many apps just don't perform. We have all had the experience when using a mobile app, where we get frustrated by poor response times. How annoying is it when the information we want does not load or the directions we need do not adjust to our current location?
This situation is only going to get worse because these services were built using programming methods that, at their core, assume good connectivity; they were never really designed for mobility use.
Google engineers discovered that if it takes more than 400 milliseconds – literally the blink of an eye — for your computer to respond to a click or a tap on the keyboard, it is too long. Similarly, a study by Web traffic controller Akamai Technologies found that if a site takes longer than four seconds to load, three out of four viewers wouldn’t return to it.
Apply the same principle to mobile apps. If nobody is motivated to look at your app long enough because it doesn’t perform, then it really doesn't matter how good it is.
Sadly, network bandwidth is limited and networks are not as reliable as you would like. If a user loses the network connection, it's doubly annoying when the app can't remember where he dropped off, and has to download all the data all over again as soon as he picks up the connection.
Why doesn't your phone have a brain that tells it what part of the information it already has? Then it would only have to download the data that is missing - Bytes instead of Megabytes.
There is actually a technology for that. Look for specialist software that removes 'old' or 'stale' information from the data stream, so that only relevant versions of the data are sent. That way, there is much less data going backwards and forwards and the app is much faster.
Another consideration should be how to handle user demand.
So you have launched your app and it's proven more popular than you thought? Congratulations, but can your setup handle that many connections, all at the same time? If you hadn't thought of developing your app on a scalable platform, your customers may experience serious issues.
If you are planning to create an app, go right ahead. If you get it right, your customers will love how fast and reliable your app is on every device. But, if you don't, you may end up disappointing your customers, driving them away and losing revenue opportunities.
By Sean Bowen, CEO of Push Technology.
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