Before You Design Your Mobile App

If you are in the initial planning and design phase of your service or already have a web-based service up and running and are wondering whether you should have a mobile app for your service, it’s always a good idea to do thorough market research in your niche before you get down to writing a mobile app for your service.

I know I just said that mobile devices have the market penetration and are bringing in the majority of the traffic, but there is no one size fits all strategy for approaching the market for businesses. I want to give you a quick example here. I own a technology website, and almost 80% of my visitors are from the desktop. My business does not have a mobile app, and it’s doing just fine.

So, there are several things to consider before you decide whether you really need an app for your business. Yeah!! It may be a good thing to have, but is it a necessity? Writing a mobile app has significant costs associated with it to the point you may have to set up a dedicated mobile dev team for your business.

If you are feeling courageous and thinking of writing a mobile app all by yourself, let me tell you this: it has a steep learning curve. Speaking from experience, you will begin thinking, “Well, I know the backend development. How tricky can writing a mobile app be?” And, along the way, you would be like, “Oh man!! I never thought getting my business on mobile would involve so much work. Will this ever end?”

Hand-held devices are battery-powered, and the resources (CPU, Storage, RAM, Data) and user’s patience are limited. It requires an entirely different mindset when writing mobile apps as opposed to when writing web applications that would run on the cloud. Big players like Facebook, Instagram, and others do a lot of research and strategizing when developing their apps.

We’ll talk all about that, but before let’s be clear on terms like mobile-only, mobile-first, mobile-friendly. So, what do these terms really mean?

Mobile only#

Mobile-only means that the business operates just via mobile. It may have a mobile website or an app on the play store or both. Generally, it’s the apps that the businesses move forward with when going mobile-only which drive most of the traffic.

Mobile websites run on mobile browsers and are primarily built for engaging traffic coming in from the Google search. From there, the users are routed to their respective apps. TikTok, Pokémon Go are examples of mobile-only businesses.

Mobile first#

Mobile-first means the service’s user interface is designed with the idea that most of the business’s users will use its services via its mobile client. The desktop-based website interface is secondary. The mobile interface is the interface that a business would want to show to its customers first as opposed to its desktop interface.

A mobile-first website will contain all the features that a user would need to fully experience a service. In a mobile-first approach, it’s possible for the desktop interface to contain fewer features.

When the designers start to design the interface, they first design the mobile interface. Then based on that, they build the interfaces for other platforms like desktop, tablet, etc. In a mobile-first approach, a business typically goes to the market with an app or a browser-based mobile website.

Myntra.com, India’s leading online fashion retail business, is a good example of this. It started with both a desktop website and a mobile app. The majority of the revenue was generated from the mobile app over 70% with over 90% traffic. So, they started focusing more on the mobile app and eventually killed their desktop website.

But over time, because of customer demand for the business to be on both platforms, Myntra re-opened its desktop website but is still a mobile-first business.

Mobile friendly – Responsive#

Mobile-friendly as the name implies, are websites that are friendly for mobile but are originally built to render on desktop browsers. They are popularly known as responsive websites. They have a grid-based design and adapt themselves based on the screen size of the device. We can also call these websites web-first or desktop-first.

Generally, a responsive web page is divided into rows and columns containing grids. As the screen size gets smaller, those grids rearrange themselves based on the screen size.

So, with this approach, we don’t have to do anything additional for mobile. Just develop a desktop-based responsive website and it will automatically render for all screen sizes.

This may sound convenient, but there is a slight hitch. We may not have 100% control over how the responsive website renders on different devices. Some elements of the page may get hidden or may not render in a way that we would like. To tackle this, we can write CSS-media queries, but still, it won’t be as good as a mobile-first built website. This is why businesses prefer to go ahead with the mobile-first strategy if most of the traffic comes in from the mobile.

What approach should you choose for your business?#

When picking the right strategy to approach the market, we need to be informed on things like:

• How are the users of the existing businesses in the same niche, if there are any, accessing their websites?
• Do these businesses have an app on the popular app stores or are they operating just via their websites? If they have an app, how many downloads do they have? What are their primary traffic and social discovery (how users find the service) sources?
• What is the revenue generation platform-wise? Sometimes it’s hard to get that kind of info if the business doesn’t declare it publicly. However, we can look into the traffic on their app and the website and assume (though it’s not always true) that the platform getting the maximum traffic will generate most of the revenue. For all this business analytics information, there are a plethora of freemium tools with browser extensions and services available online—just Google.

Besides these key points, the type of service offered to the users plays a decisive role in creating a strategy for approaching the market. It makes it easy to figure out if we need to move ahead with or without a mobile app.

For instance, say, we intend to bootstrap a service in the health niche that would enable the users to track their eating habits and suggest healthy alternatives. The service would also have some social features for user engagement and retention.

What do you think would be the best strategy to approach the market in this use case? Do we need a mobile app? Or will a web-based website suffice?

To track meals throughout the day, it would be inconvenient for the user to open their laptop or rush to their desktop every time they want to input or check the calories of the meal they just ate. On the other hand, if we offer the end user all the services via an app that they could install on their mobile, they can easily track all their meals throughout the day anywhere they want, be it at home, the office cafeteria, or when stuck in traffic. It’s an obvious fact that a mobile-first approach will work best for our use case.

We can also have a web-based interface. This is a good to have but not a necessity, atleast in the initial stages of starting up. From a technical standpoint, there are technology offerings like Firebase that enable us to write an app without investing too much time in setting up the backend infrastructure. There will be more on that in the upcoming lessons.

Real-world examples#

Myntra.com was making 30% of the revenue from its desktop site, but they took the decision to ditch the web version of the business for the mobile version. This is because dedicated platform teams have costs. Focusing on a single platform is both peaceful and economical at the same time.

Speaking of my technology website, the majority of visitors, almost 80%, are from the desktop. Here is the Google analytics image for the traffic on my website.

So, naturally, a mobile-first approach isn’t for me. A mobile-friendly approach is ideal for my use case. Therefore, my website has a responsive user interface. However, say I was selling something on my website, and most of the sales would be happening via the mobile client regardless of the fact that the maximum traffic was coming in from the desktop. I may have to think about writing a mobile app for my business for one simple reason: money. It would then make perfect sense for me to have a strong presence on both platforms.

Here is one more example with regards to this. Pixel Federation, a browser and app-based gaming company based out of Slovakia, launched a game called Seaport in 2015. The team started with the desktop browser version of the game integrated with Facebook. This is how I discovered the game. In 2017, they launched an app that got over 8.1 Million downloads.

The app launch helped the game earn over 7.6 Million €. The game has approximately 305K Daily active users, and out of them, only 50K are desktop users. However, those 50K users bring in almost one-third of the game revenue.

So, I believe you got the point. Researching in your niche is essential before you start writing code.

In the next lesson, let’s talk about the responsive user interface.