By the beginning of 2022, almost 4 million apps were available on the App Store. That’s a lot. You might think these apps are diverse and serve various purposes for various businesses, but do they have anything in common?
From the perspective of a developer, founder, or designer, identifying key features most apps share is relatively easy. Over the last few years, almost every app has included a few fundamental features. What are those exactly? Let’s look at them from the perspective of business and development.
MINIMUM BUSINESS FEATURES
Purpose
Your app needs a purpose. Period. It would be best if you considered what value you could bring to the end user because apps with a sense tend to be more successful. It doesn’t matter whether it’s clicking rainbow cats or booking a hairdresser; unless your target group likes it, you won’t scale your business or make money. Creating a new calculator or mailbox is not enough in 2022. You need to ask yourself what difference you can be made right now and evaluate your idea as soon as possible by creating a minimum viable product (MVP). I believe it’s still worth asking how it can help others in addition to yourself.
Marketing Plan
With good marketing, you can remain recognized. End users will not know you have created something useful because search engines, like Google or Apple, will not show it. A few strategies you can follow include:
- Know who is your audience
- Precise your budget for reaching clients
- Establish communication channels with targeted users
It is ideal for working with a known person or label. Begin by planning and adding it to your milestones.
Monetization
Okay, so your app is getting more popular. Have you considered how to earn from it yet? Why ads are not necessarily good for you? How can you increase user impressions?
You need to consider these questions before the app gets popular. Why? Some of the monetization pre-configurations require setting before the official release. What’s more, some are very hard to change on the fly.
MINIMUM DEVELOPMENT FEATURES
Legal regulations
Authentication
When was the last time you saw a mobile app without a login? Or without at least one of the following buttons:
If you have, you’re lucky! Nowadays, almost every app identifies its users. Even if it’s not straightforward, you might still need to authenticate with your phone number or advertising ID and never even notice. Apps use authentication for storing users’ preferences, allowing communication and chats, tracking activity and many more. It’s hardly possible to deliver a fully functional piece of software without any form of authentication. You can take it for granted that your app will get connected to external APIs or services.
Local / Cloud storage
Everyday situation, you enter your home screen. Choose your favorite item. Change it according to your preferences. And someone calls you, you naturally close the app. Losing progress would be frustrating, wouldn’t it be? And how cool is sharing your preferences between your devices? Eventually, you can’t deny local database is just useful. And cloud storage even more so. At the end of the day, it’s an almost impossible job to complete business requirements without them.
Analytics & error tracking
Google and Facebook like them a lot. Recording users’ activities is a daily thing for the vast majority of the mobile app owners. You want to know which layout is the most interesting so that you can evolve your product according to the real needs.
Diving into error tracking, note how extremely important it is to monitor your system and see what works and what doesn’t. Let’s say someone is located 3000 km away from you and says deleting a photo is impossible. It’d be nice to diagnose the issue remotely. Add bug fixing on top of it.
Notifications
Everyone associates push notifications with irritating advertising. But maybe it’s time to change that. Notifications are the way to communicate with your clients. It’s your safety fuse. Consider this — you’ve changed crucial data or you’ve stopped maintenance. Some users who forgot to update the app could lose the possibility to use the services they had bought! Responsibility means letting them know about the changes. That’s why you should implement the tools to stay in touch with them.
No matter whether you’re an amateur, a small company or a big fish, it’s very likely you’re going to implement the business and development features from this post in one form or another. The scale of your business doesn’t matter here. These are simply the essentials.
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