Does Your Business Really Need a Mobile App?

Today, there are about 6 million mobile apps in GooglePlay and AppStore. Apple recently announced a purge of obsolete products. AppFigures calculated that about a third of the entire store could fall under the criteria. Google also periodically conducts events to remove “dead” apps. Many of them ended up in the exclusion zone because of a lack of market research. Our criteria will help you determine whether your mobile app will be unclaimed if you create it right now.

We have identified three groups of criteria:

• business criteria: related to your business task;
• user criteria: based on communication with users;
• technical criteria: depends on the properties of mobile devices.

This separation allows you to take into account different aspects and not miss anything important when making a decision. The criteria will help you independently analyze the potential benefits of creating a mobile app and not waste resources on auditing your idea.

Business Criteria

You want to create an app for employees

Will the mobile solution facilitate or speed up business processes in the company? If the activity of employees is tied to working with a computer, and all face-to-face meetings do not require urgent recording in internal systems, then most likely not. In this case, you can:

• review the business process for certain tasks;
• use the capabilities of a corporate website: for example, create a widget;
• consider a bot option: it is suitable for informational messages (e.g, about birthdays) and simple operations.

You want to create an app for your clients

• You do not belong to Instant Commerce — a model where your business (or a single sales channel) is unthinkable without mobile technology. For example, the taxi or food delivery service.

You should not completely abandon the idea of ​​developing a mobile application, but for now it is better to focus on existing channels that bring profit. For example, continue to develop social networks and make a mobile layout for your website.

• You do not collect information about your customers — statistics and metrics.

The application will be useful if it is important for you to deeply understand your audience in order to develop your business: what materials encourage you to make a purchase, what features are used most often, etc.

User Criteria

• You decided to create an application for the target audience, but did not identify and check the problem.

To make sure that the app will solve a specific problem and you will not invest in vain, start the Discovery Phase — a preparatory stage before development and the first step from an abstract idea to the implementation of the plan.

• No interaction with users is needed: for example, you are not going to conduct various surveys, send them push notifications with reminders, post stories, etc.
• You do not need an individual approach to the user — you do not strive to form targeted offers and targeted services.

One of the advantages of the mobile app is the ability to build a customized recommender system. In this case content is tailored to the user experience: for example, suggestions for preferences or even an adaptive home screen (advanced level). But if you don’t aim at boosting sales in this way, then it is easier to expand the audience through other channels.

Technical Criteria

• You do not plan to use the technical capabilities of devices: camera, geolocation, barcode scanner, document recognizer, AR, etc.
• There is no need to work offline with the app.

Summing up

If you want to take your business to the next level and:

• capture new markets,
• move your business from offline to online,
• increase sales due to loyal users, etc.,

then analyze what you are missing now using the proposed criteria.

If you decide that you are ready to create an app and want to explore the possibility of its implementation deeply, contact us! Feel free to write to request@simbirsoft.com. We will offer the best solution!

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

Join our Medium community to keep up-to-date with our experts’ insights: Top 6 Business Tips to Avoid Mistakes in Product Development