Does anyone know how to develop a successful app strategy? That was the agenda for the London chapter of Mobile Monday in July. Industry dignitaries were charged with delivering their knowledge and insight on apps to the developer community eagerly awaiting the secret formula to wealth and ‘appiness’.
The problem is that the developer community is believed to be somewhere between 250-000-500,000 strong. All of whom have grandiose plans for mobile domination. The number of apps available via the multitude of stores is rapidly approaching 300,000, and mobileSQUARED expects this number to double in the next 12-18 months. So what constitutes a successful app remains open to debate.
Success cannot be harnessed without discoverability. And it is the latter which is scuppering the dreams of thousands of developers.
To emphasise the plight facing Apple, for example, if it takes one second to view every app on the App Store, to browse the entire catalogue will take 69.4 hours to complete. Given that the average battery life of an active iPhone is about five hours, to complete this exercise would require 14 full battery recharges. Search will inevitably assist the process of discoverability, but what if the user doesn’t know what app they are searching for: what then?
“The change in consumer behaviour to buy or download content has changed incredibly fast,” says Tony Pearce, CEO and co-founder of TeePee Games. “When I was selling content into carriers, they were taking the best content. The difficulty for all publishers now is getting content discovered.”
And the discovery dilemma is not only restricted to the app stores. “There are 35,000 games and 350,000 apps on Facebook, but the problem is that no one can find them,” says Pearce. “Only the top 50 apps are being found. There is a real problem no matter what platform. Android will be no different.”
As Pearce highlights, anyone can develop an app with the right tools, but they are then confronted with how to market and PR their app. “There are a million standard ways to market and PR an app, but the problem is that everyone is doing the same thing,” adds Pearce. “It is the Wild West.”
The FMCG brands have evolved their marketing strategy to focus on niches in the hundreds-of-thousands, as opposed to the millions of names it historically would target.
Eli Camilleri, associate at Vision Mobile, says developers need to take responsibility for their own marketing. “Why should Apple or Google do it, when I’m the one that wants to put the app on the shelf,” she asks.
To improve the discoverability of an app, Camilleri says developers and brands alike must identify the link between the old platform (such as print) and the new digital platform. “There are sophisticated ways to do this, but it can also be simple,” she says.
This is certainly reflected in Bourke’s experience of launching apps for clients, which includes promoting the app to a selected number of mobile publishers (mix of operators, off-portal providers, and ad networks) to penetrate the App Stores’ Top 25 to generate the eyeballs and organic usage. “Then it starts to build some conversational currency,” Bourke says. “When it falls out of the top 25, it then needs to be given a little push using a bit more of the budget.” A lot of Mobext’s promotion of apps is exclusively on mobile media.
Yet Mike Kirkup, Head of developer relations, RIM, believes contacting influential bloggers is becoming an invaluable tool. “If a developer can convince Crackberry to feature their app, downloads will go through the roof,” Kirkup says. “It can be about using the grass roots kind of marketing that can make developers break away from the pack.”
Nevertheless, apps often remain a symptom of boardroom marketing, or as Bourke describes it, “the CEO’s wife’ iPhone, and having many knee-jerk reactions.” But he questions their willingness to persist with apps when marketing personnel are aware of the device penetration and limited consumer reach. He attributes this to brands being associated with “a cool company” and hopeful that some of Apple’s cool magic dust will rub off, and that the creation of an app will generate strong PR.
Bourke believes the popularity of apps has developed to compensate for the poor mobile web experience because of the lack of mobile broadband speeds. He expects the arrival of 4G technologies and the promise of 100MB connectivity to finally deliver a satisfactory over-the-air mobile broadband experience. “Apps provide, us with the ability to give the end user an exceptionally clean, fun and sophisticated rich-user experience,” he says.
And there is logic to Bourke’s comments. Consumers are now accustomed to what they perceive as a free browsing experience, and could explain why consumers gravitate towards free apps. But it doesn’t provide an explanation behind the rationale for developers to create the business model around their app.
Camilleri says the decision should be based on what the app is trying to achieve. “Is the app an extension of what you do,” questioned Camilleri. “One of the greatest things Nike did was Nike Plus. It extended the brand to provide something extra to remember the brand by. But if it’s your core product, then why would you give it away for free? If people get used to getting something for free, it will be difficult to charge them for it a few weeks later.”