Mobile App Strategy: Look Before You Leap - It’s a Slippery Slope

Mobile App Strategy: Look Before You Leap – It’s A Slippery Slope

by Bill French on 06/01/10 at 11:29 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Today, mobile apps (for most companies) are typically regarded as novelties, market differentiators, or convenience tools for their customers. Roambi is a good example of an exception to this overly generalized observation; its iPhone app is an integral part of its business model.

I suppose it would be helpful to define (at the outset) the types of apps I’m referring to as “mobile content apps”; good examples are apps that serve as branded RSS readers or mobile alternatives to a web site whose general objective is business marketing. Our own extension of the MyST platform was developed precisely to meet this requirement for our clients. I touched on this issue previously in “4 Steps To An iPhone Supercharged Online Marketing Strategy”.

Content consumption is shifting away from the desktop and more to mobile devices. Mobile social media consumption in Japan is growing at five times the rate of social media consumption on the desktop; this is not a fad. Some experts believe the mobile apps market is already creating a bigger impact than the online advertising industry.

Build It And They Will Come (Maybe)

Businesses generally fund these app initiatives as marketing expenses; their hope is to draw customers (and prospects) in closer by increasing brand impressions and hopefully remain top-of-mind with their customers and prospects. Some apps in this class include utility value as well – not just outbound marketing propaganda. Imagine a high-profile restaurant providing a mobile app with seamless reservation integration and a tip calculator, special discounts, and food critic content. Utility value is what keeps users coming back to a mobile app.

In-app purchase may indeed turn out to be useful for addressing the economic issues of building and justifying the true costs of a mobile strategy. However, I always get a bit nervous when a client says they want to "monetize content". I think it’s more appropriate (and far more market-savvy) to think about monetizing the audience – which is really just to say that you’re going to think about these issues from a customer-centric perspective.

Businesses that build mobile content apps typically regard them as adjuncts to their overall online content strategy, often times reusing their own online content in a mobile application or supplementing their own content with other syndicated information. But companies that think this is a near-zero-cost endeavor they may be in for a few surprises.

The True Cost of Mobile Apps

Defining a comprehensive mobile media strategy is a slippery slope and mobile content publishers need to understand the nature of the mobile app beast before laying the revenue model (or cost recovery) foundation while also considering customer expectations. It’s likely that the buzz and excitement of jumping into a new distribution channel has blinded your organization to the harsh realities of supporting an entirely new platform; an initiative that may not be sustainable.

I see lots of companies tossing together an iPhone app and attaching a price to it hoping to recover the cost of developing the app without giving adequate consideration to the true ownership costs. Consider an iPhone app with a flat purchase price of $2.99. Is this a quasi-promise to your customer base that it will never rise? Is this a commitment that you’ll never ask for an upgrade fee? Is your company obligated to make it available without charge on another platform when your customers tire of their current platform?

The bigger issue I have with flat fees for iPhone apps (and mobile apps in general) is the paradox created when you need to update the app. What happens when you need to create an Android version that may cost 9 times more to develop? What happens when you want to add support for Mac Tablet or other devices that are slightly different form factors or possess more features that require new development costs to support? Do you keep developing without the prospect of new revenues to cover your development costs? Do you spread the costs of multi-OS apps evenly across all apps?

End-of-Life is Inevitable

These are difficult questions that are typically unforeseen and the impact of these decisions can be significant. Dropping an app can be just as costly in terms of sustained customer bad will, as maintaining or upgrading it. All apps should be planned with an end-of-life strategy whether it’s a transitional approach to expected changes in technology or industry, or simply a realization that the app has an expected lifecycle with appropriate policies in place to manage customer expectations.

Creating a Mobile Strategy

A sound planning process should include how your organization will address the questions mentioned in this article. Here are some key ideas that will help you formulate a comprehensive mobile app strategy.

Business Objectives – Make sure you cross the t’s and dot the i’s; without sound business reasons to back up your mobile strategy, you’ll be hard-pressed to explain the costs and worse – your company won’t be marching toward the same goal.
Think Local – Almost everything that impacts our daily lives does so at a local level. Mobile apps are about the here, the now. More than 60% of the time, we reach for our devices to find something – local search is a key business driver so ask lots of questions about local search in the context of developing your mobile strategy.
Native or Web? – This is a an excellent starting point and cornerstone of a mobile app strategy – do you build it as a native app (which is installed into the users phone) or as a web service (which can be easily updated and supported across many mobile platforms)? Serious consideration should be given to this question since mobile browser technology is advancing rapidly and with HTML 5, web apps can run offline. Neven Mrgan’s Glyphboard is a great example of this. It uses HTML 5’s offline caching technique.

All businesses can benefit from a mobile strategy; not all businesses will benefit from the development of a mobile app. Is it possible that your mobile strategy is best served app-less? I think this is an idea that should be given a reasonable amount of air-time. An app-less mobile strategy would likely focus on key competitive methods for your business and its products to be found or readily discovered by mobile users.