The Ghost of App-Launch Future: 6 Reasons Your Amazing App Flopped.

You’ve spent eight months developing your app, and you just know it’s gonna be big. It’s a real doozy...

You breeze through App Store and Google Play approval, and quickly find your app proudly listed for the world to see — you’re a published developer!

But, much to your dismay, an initial wave of interest quickly wanes into a barren wasteland of user accounts who downloaded your app, opened it once, and then disappeared forever. Or, even worse, that interest wave never even swells in the first place...

Where did you go wrong?

Creating, launching, and maintaining a successful app is already enough of an uphill battle without you getting in your own way, but that doesn’t stop many first-time developers from making costly mistakes along their journey.

As we work with numerous app developers bringing their ideas to life on a daily basis, here are a few key missteps you’ll want to avoid:

Mistake #1: Your app didn’t need to be an app in the first place.

That’s right, we’re a company who earns our bread on convincing people to use us to make their app projects, and our first point is still “you might not have needed to make that into an app.” Hopefully, that adds at least a little bit of gravity to this point.

One of the issues people run into is that they try and force a concept into app-form that might be better suited in another medium (web, etc.), or — worse yet — didn’t have any demand in the first place.

We get it, apps are popular and people use them every day, but you need to make sure that your idea is best served by an app in the first place.

For example, Kayak.com’s app for booking plane tickets and hotels helps make a complicated process more manageable by using native components and smooth animations, something that couldn’t be handled as well if they simply relied on sending people to their mobile website.

On the other hand, someone who simply translates their blog content into an app without offering any additional functionality or a valuable reason for their readers to do so might just be wasting everyone’s time.

Before you sink months into development only to be disappointed by product reception, ask yourself “is a mobile app the most enjoyable and frictionless way for end-users to perform this task or consume content?” If the answer isn’t a resounding “YES!”, then you might have some reconsidering to do.

Mistake #2: Your app wasn’t as intuitive as you thought it was.

Once you’ve determined an app is the best way to bring your idea to the world, make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot by letting it get in its own way. Clunky interfaces, non-intuitive layers of complexity, and unnecessary hoop-jumping can all quickly ensure someone only ever opens an app once — there’s a reason a market for UX professionals has materialized rapidly over the past couple of years!

Here are a number of specific user experience pitfalls to avoid altogether:

1. Don’t put every button on your app’s homescreen. When developing websites, we’re used to menus that let us reach everything within one click of the homescreen. In an app, however, try and predict the most needed features and present those first, then embed other secondary features where they can be discovered at the right time along the user journey rather than overwhelming or confusing them at the start.
2. Don’t over hand-hold. In some cases, forcing onboarding and tutorials too early can be a big turnoff and cause people to close out of your app. Often, you might have a better time with triggering tooltips and onboarding only after a user has shown interest in a specific feature in the app.
3. Don’t think everyone else already has it figured out. It’s easy to glance at a competing app and think that they have a reason for every little button placement, animation, and color choice, but the reality is often that they’re also experimenting (if they’re smart) or just guessing (if they’re not). Instead, trust your own knowledge of your target market’s behavior when making UI/UX decisions, and don’t be afraid to reach out to lots of people and ask directly for their opinions!

These and 6 other common user experience mistakes are explored in more detail in a great writeup by Nick Babich, which you can find here.

Mistake #3: Your app had bugs.

This point doesn‘t need much exposition, does it? If you launch something that behaves poorly, crashes, or has broken buttons, people aren’t going to have a good time.

So instead of going on and on about how important it is not to have bugs, here’s a list of a few ways you can make sure you avoid them:

• Test your app on as many devices and operating systems as you can get your hands on (got that old iPhone still running a dated iOS version? Break it out!).
• Recruit as many family, friends, and unfortunate souls as possible to be your beta testers. People often make the mistake of keeping their testing sessions too close to the chest, but it’s important to recognize that different people think and interact in different ways, and so letting lots of people test your app increases the chance of running into issues or suggestions you would have never encountered on your own.
• Make a prioritized list of the expected functions of your app, and divide your testing time between them according to importance (core features get more hours/people, fringe functions sit further back in the queue).

Mistake #4: You (or your app) were really, really annoying.

Yes, you can send push notifications and review-requests as soon as someone installs your app… but does that mean you should?

If you’re anything like the average user, you pause when a new app asks permission to send you notifications. In fact, if you don’t anticipate wanting to hear from a new app constantly, you might just hit “Deny” by default.

If someone does give you permission to send them notifications, treat it like a privilege you could lose

Mistake #5: Your app was made to provide value to you, not the end user.

Don’t let your app be a useless machine.

“…make sure that your app’s biggest, most obvious purpose is that it solves a problem for the end-user.”

One of the most costly mistakes a company developing an app can make is to create an app with the purpose of bringing more utility to the company, not to their consumer.

Yes, it’s nice to get free data collection about your customers. Yes, it’s nice to be able to serve up ads to app users and earn some extra cash. Yes, it’s nice to have an extra channel through which you can keep in touch with and send messages to your customers.

BUT, if any of these reasons are your primary reason for developing an app, you will probably see pitiful download metrics and even lower retention rates.

Always, always, always flip the script and make sure that your app’s biggest, most obvious purpose is that it solves a problem for the end-user.

A good commerce app succeeds because a customer wants to be able to purchase a certain good or service via mobile, and you make the process smoother.

A good game succeeds because it entertains the customer, makes them smile, or otherwise offers worthwhile escapism.

A good social network offers something unique and fun that the current offering lacks.

You get the idea: successful apps are successful because they do something useful for the people who use them; the success of the developer or company behind an app is a byproduct of this, not the main purpose.

Mistake #6: No post-launch plan.

In the ever-popularized “startup world,” it’s very common right now for the founding duo behind a company to be made up of a ‘technical’ founder and a ‘business’ founder — respectively, this usually means having one founder to help kickstart technical development of a product, and another whose background lends itself to marketing, building relationships, making a roadmap for exposure, etc.

While the system is generally one of good synergy, it’s also very common for people to work on their app ideas completely solo. In these cases, depending on one’s background, a stellar app might be hamstrung by a lack of any solid launch/post-launch promotion plan.

Despite the bleak doomsday-like statements made about how hard it is to make money off of app development, there are plenty of success stories. By and large, however, these people have done a few key things:

1. They’ve made their app name unique and the app’s purpose obvious to aid in app store discovery.
2. They’ve worked to built their reputation with Apple and tirelessly applied to have their app featured in its category, — often times despite being rejected tens of times before they get a placement.
3. They’ve had a plan for promoting their app on related forums, via relevant reviews from influencers on Instagram/other social channels, via sites like Product Hunt, or even through more traditional ad spend.

There’s plenty more to be thrown into the equation, but those who are intentional about getting their app in front of the right people find themselves winning more often than those who just upload and pray.

This isn’t much of a surprise, but it is a reminder that you should make sure you have a plan for promoting your app both leading up to, during, and after-launch.

Now it’s your turn.

We’ll be honest with you, there are more than just six little pieces to the puzzle when it comes to successfully publishing and marketing an app, but hopefully these can stick around in your mind as you make the journey yourself and discover the rest.

And, just like any advice, remember that the road to success is not one-size-fits-all, so don’t be afraid to buck the trend from time to time if something here doesn’t sit right with you — we’re rooting for you to pull out the win no matter how you get there.

The App Academy is a Medium publication dedicated to helping current and aspiring developers succeed with their project. Its content is curated by app development platform Aquro.