Anti-Patterns in Mobile App Strategy
As helpful as a lot of good advice and positive models for mobile strategy can be, a few painful examples of what not to do can go a long way. These anti-patterns, like all anti-patterns, are typically not the product of poor strategic decisions, but usually the absence of strategy. If you see your mobile app falling prey to any of these patterns, there’s a good chance that your organization is not giving any priority to your mobile app and as a result doing more harm than good to your business.
Wrapping Your Website is NOT a Mobile App
The mobile web is a vital channel for most organizations. After all, with 90% of the population on planet earth browsing the internet from a smartphone, it’s the superhighway for information. Most organizations understand this and have put some investment into making their website experience at least mobile-friendly if not mobile first.
It’s easy to see why these same organizations might be tempted to leverage that functional or even beautiful mobile web experience by turning it into a mobile app. It’s easy enough to create the shell of a native Android or iOS app and stick a single web view in there that points to your website. Done! No fuss, no added expense.
For one thing, there’s a strong chance that Apple will reject your app as it does not meet its published guidelines around minimum functionality requirements. In this document they clearly state:
Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. If your app is not particularly useful, unique, or “app-like,” it doesn’t belong on the App Store.
Even if your website-in-an-app submission somehow gets approved, you should consider why Apple has this guideline to begin with. The point of a mobile app is not simply to be a vehicle for publishing content. Its intent is to provide some novel utility that has a purpose for persisting on someone’s mobile device. Should some of your customers actually go to the trouble to install your website-in-an-app, likely no good will come of it. In a best-case scenario, they use it once and never open it again. In a worst-case scenario, they write a blistering review in the app store, give you one star, and post on social media how pointless your app is.
What about Hybrid Apps!?
Hybrid is a woefully ambiguous term when it comes to apps, but when most people say they have a hybrid app, they mean it uses native app functionality and screens and uses some web content. Hybrid apps are a great solution in the following scenarios:
- You have a lot of HTML content residing in a CMS that’s mostly informational, but relevant and important to your customers when using your mobile app.
- You have a complex and expensive workflow built for the web that you don’t have time/resources to adapt for a native mobile experience right away.
With the exception of mobile-first businesses like games or FinTech apps, most organizations leverage some mix of native and web functionality. It can be a sound strategy, provided you don’t sacrifice user experience in one of the following ways:
- Launch users into web pages that are not mobile-friendly requiring them to pinch, zoom and scroll excessively
- Launch users into web pages that have navigation bars
- Launch users into a web view that allows them to unwittingly navigate out of your app
- Orphan users in a web view where they either get stuck in a broken web experience or can’t return to your app navigation
You Might Not Need a Mobile App and That’s Okay
Having a mobile app because every other company does is not a valid reason to have one. When you ask your customers to go to the app store and download an app, you need to be sure they will be delighted with the experience. The only way this will happen is if you have provided them with some valuable utility they could not get otherwise. For some businesses, a high-performing, beautiful mobile web experience is all that’s required.
There is Such a Thing as Bad Publicity
App store ratings and reviews have a huge influence on app adoption and yet, you would be surprised how many organizations don’t take them seriously. Most people will not consider installing a mobile app with anything less than three and a half stars. Further, most people will only look at the top three reviews and make their decision to download accordingly. So, if your most recent review is negative, it will deter new customers from installing your mobile app.
It’s much easier to preempt bad reviews than it is to turn them around once they’re published to the app store. Companies like Apptentive provide tools for actively capturing feedback and sentiment in your mobile app based on certain conditions, triggers, or behaviors that you define. In the event that one of your users encounters an error or crash while using your mobile app, Apptentive can provide a prompt with an apology message and a comment field where the user can tell you what happened and express their frustration. In most cases, this is enough to prevent that user from logging into the app store and writing a nasty review.
You can also use proactive prompts to solicit positive ratings and reviews whenever you detect that a user has had a successful experience in your mobile app like completing a cart check-out or earning reward points. Without this type of preemptive strategy, your app will likely not get many reviews and the ones it does get will be predominantly negative. This is just the unfortunate reality. As consumers, we tend to be more motivated to provide feedback when we’re unhappy than we’ve had a good experience.
When someone does write a bad review of your mobile app in the app store, the worst thing you can do is ignore it. Both Apple and Google provide you with tools to publicly respond directly to reviews. Responding quickly and courteously to bad reviews does a couple of important things:
- It gives you an opportunity to learn more about what went wrong and how you can address it for this and other users in a subsequent release.
- It demonstrates to any future readers of your reviews that you care about customer experience and that you are actively working to make it better.
Infrequent and Irregular App Releases
Consistency and persistence are hard. These qualities are the foundation for success in most things whether it’s eating healthier, raising children, or saving money. They are equally important when it comes to your mobile app releases. If you only update your app once or twice a year or you do it with more frequency, but not on a consistent schedule, you will lose customers and create chaos in your mobile product teams. Shipping daily releases like Facebook and other big tech companies do is not necessary for most organizations but waiting longer than a month to push out a new release of your mobile app is detrimental for several reasons.
While the concept of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment or CI/CD is not new, a surprising number of organizations with mobile apps have not adopted the strategy. Either they’ve not invested in the necessary tools, or they don’t properly use them. Releasing is stressful for your mobile team. They’ve worked for days, weeks, maybe, but hopefully not months on getting everything perfect to ship the latest build of your mobile app out to the public. About a million things could go wrong and once it’s out there, any issues will be experienced by all your active users. It’s enough to make you want to never release. There’s a strong incentive to procrastinate. But that’s the absolute worst strategy and here’s why.
The more frequently you release a version of your mobile app, the fewer things can go wrong. Fewer changes mean less code which means fewer bugs. Additionally, the many procedural steps required to get a new release candidate through your pipeline and published to the app stores become routine for your team. They won’t have to dust off the manual every time and sweat bullets as their cursor hovers over the publish button. They will have confidence and be familiar with the process.
There is one additional and significant benefit that comes with frequent, regular mobile app releases. With every new release, you can fix issues or add functionality that your customers might have complained about previously in app store reviews. When you respond to those reviews personally and tell them their issues have been fixed, it builds a tremendous amount of goodwill which has a halo effect on future readers of that review.
Want help with your mobile app? The Rightpoint Digital Product team would love to learn more about the challenges your facing. Please reach out so we can set up a chat.
