Smartphone apps development — What’s hot, What’s not

Developers keep grumbling about the reluctance of consumers to pay for downloading apps. And why would they, when there are flocks of developers doling out apps for gratis just to get the eyeballs. At some point, irrespective of the utility of any app, price sensitivity decides the popularity. This is pretty much clear from the rising proportion of free apps in total apps downloaded for a given period.

Even the Apple’s colossal App Store, which is widely acclaimed for its revenue model, isn’t unfazed of this phenomenon. This monetization riddle is getting even trickier with swarms of developers turning to the rather topsy-turvy smartphone apps development business.

In such an environment, when the consumers’ pockets have gotten deeper than ever at the backdrop of global credit crunch, smartphone apps development has become a challenging ask. However, the profitability of such a business can’t be questioned. In fact, this enormous crowding steps up the game to having sound marketing strategies, in addition to carrying appealing and useful apps.

A huge chunk of developers and publishers have resorted to what can be named as the “freemium” model, which includes giving away the base-app for free and then upselling incremental things within the app. Another iteration of the freemium model is to give away the basic version of any app for free and selling its upgraded version.

Prompting users to download any app is one thing and ensuring sustained use of the app is entirely another. Updating apps on a regular basis holds the key. It’s important to strike a seamless user experience to ensure your users are satisfied even when they’re offline. Alerts and RSS feeds are also considered important drivers to steer the consumer again and again to your portal. Sending real-time traffic updates as well as breaking news on some topic of interest can do the trick.

People care a lot about status messages and connecting with friends, so bridging social networking features into your app can be a useful tactic. However, don’t push it uselessly if your app doesn’t have the scope for social networking.

App design has to be intuitive and interactive instead of being ultra dull or vibrant. Make its features easy to understand and navigate. Don’t pelt your consumers down with technological jargons and hype-laden words. Offer something of huge value and that too in a simple language.

Apps development isn’t as complex or tricky as it might appear due to downpouring of developers and publishers in the domain. It’s a unarguably a tough nut to crack, but you can do it effortlessly with the help of some useful strategies and common-sense.

Just to guide you through all these rudiments of the apps ecosystem, we have unleashed an extremely handy resource in the form of “Opportunities in the App Economy – The New Paradigm for Winning” e-book. The book explains various opportunities and challenges that are there in the apps economy, along with tactics to harness the goods out of it.

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