Why do great mobile app ideas fail?

When it concerns mobile app development, failure is the first and most important thing you should keep under review. It is extremely vital to be aware of the factors which cause mobile app failure before its development. For many entrepreneurs “failure” is a forbidden word, the worst thing that can ever happen to a company or an idea. But you can not ignore this under any circumstances.

It’s perfectly normal when people read an article like “How to earn a gazillion dollars with your first mobile app?” or something like that and then visualize their “success story”. That’s absolutely natural and everyone daydreams, but let’s get back to reality — app success begins with analyzing why mobile apps can fail, not why a single app out of thousands succeeds.

So, why do mobile apps can fail? How to avoid this and don’t repeat others’ mistakes? Let’s start our journey with vivid examples of why apps fail.

Everpix

It was world’s best photo startup. The core functionality is that Everpix sorts and organizes your photos and stores them online for you, as well as sorting through them all and pulling the best ones using an algorithm.

Something went wrong…

It was a great app: easy to use, clean design, lots of functionality. But great products don’t come cheap. According to Verge, who wrote an in-depth analysis of their failure, $1.4 million of the $2.3 million that they raised on personnel. They spend a year and a half developing the app. By the time it reached the market, Everpix was out of money and out of time to raise the capital. Despite being a great product, Everpix just couldn’t get the users that it needed to sustain growth.

How that failure could be avoided

Developing an app isn’t just about making a great experience. To bring your product to success you need to market it. If you start your app company, make sure you have the skill set to promote and sell your product.

Solution:

Monetization Policy. The monetization model of the mobile app must be decided well in advance. The model should be chosen depending on the app’s content, target audience, and several other factors. You should consider these questions before you go ahead with the app development:

• whether the app will be a free or a paid one
• whether the app will offer in-app purchase
• will you show advertisements

For help, you can study the model of other similar apps and take cues from them. Market and sell your product all the time, don’t rely on it being so amazing that it’s going to sell itself.

Google Wave

It was supposed to be the ultimate communication tool and a solution to the annoying group emails. But that wasn’t enough to ensure its success. Nobody really understood what Wave was about. Google never bothered to deliver a real value proposition to its customers. Moreover, the end product was hard to use and simply didn’t meet the expectations of its target. Unfortunately, Google Wave failed and was pulled about six months after it launched.

How that failure could be avoided:

The main mistake Google made — no one knew what their product was.

Advice:

• Talk about your app. Make sure you can explain your product. Provide your users answers for such simple questions: What is your app supposed to do? What problem does it solve? How is it going to help? These are the questions that businesses and people want to know.
• Keep it simple. Always keep it simple. There are a lot of components involved in building an app that offers a great user experience, but at the basest level, your app needs to be intuitive. If a user struggles to perform basic functions on your app and can’t figure out core functionalities easily, the result is very poor usability.

Hailo

Hailo is the easiest way to hail cabs from your phone. Think Uber, but instead of recruiting drivers with black cars, Hailo works within the confines of yellow cabs.

So what happened?

The problem really boils down to the factor such as an intense competition. Hailo was ready to take New York by a storm, but so was Uber. Unfortunately, Uber started a strong competition on price and it slowly clobbered Hailo until they completely retreated.

How that failure could be avoided

Apps today are always going to face competition. You always should keep in mind that somebody else is out there trying to build exactly what you are. And that happened with Hailo. Someone (Uber) was out there doing the exact same thing.

So what can you do about it?

Don’t ignore the competition. The mobile app market is increasingly crowded. This means most of your job will be about understanding the competitive landscape. To do this, you can begin by downloading other apps and viewing their UX, UI and so on. You understand how similar products look and what kind of feedback other companies are getting from their users.

What we can learn

• Research your target audience. If you decide to build an app without doing the research, defining the audience, and strategizing use cases and features that will appeal to that audience, you may find that you build a product you think people will want, when in reality they don’t.
• Always keep in mind the competition. In the highly competitive world of apps, even the best product needs some serious marketing effort behind it. Be sure to gather as much information as possible about the competing/similar products — and analyze it. Try to know what your competitors are doing — whether it’s the products they are making or their marketing strategies. Consider this and your application will stand a chance in the noisy marketplace.
• Define a viable need for your app before you develop it. Deeply explore the data behind app consumption, analyze the trends, choose popular design decisions and app features, come up with an MVP to test your app idea.
• Create MVP. This is a way of checking your target audience, a solution to check your product/market fit, an answer to all your doubts without overinvesting time and money into complete product launch.
• Provide timely customer feedback. The successful developers gather data, make well-informed decisions and adapt their apps, while others just wait for downloads…and fail. Feedback can help you to gather opinions, recommendations, thus realize what is truly wrong with your app and how you can save it from failing. It might also help you revive your failed app and make it a favorite amongst users.

Don’t give up — tweak and iterate!