My 9 week exploration into the iPhone App Market

[Image via Intomobile.com]
This past summer I took a MCDM Mobile Applications course that focused specifically on researching, planning, developing and marketing an iPhone app. When I put together my goals for this class, I hoped to learn about both the iPhone and Android platforms but now that I’ve completed the course I’m glad we focused specifically on the iPhone market due to the complexity involved.

Anyone interested in getting an app to market knows that it takes far more than just developing the interface however few understand just how much work gets done in a short amount of time to develop the majority of successful apps. In my post Hitting the jackpot with an iPhone app, I mentioned that the problem with low/no budget app development is that it’s usually not sustainable. As I’m putting the finishing touches on our strategy for SeattleParks, I’m beginning to see that there may be a way to get certain types of apps to market much quicker than others using app builders like RedFoundry and Appmakr. Once the app has an audience and a budget from investors, advertising or app sales; the developer can spend time or resources on developing the functionality beyond the limitations of the app builder and leveraging the current users to create a buzz for marketing.

One of the things I find most intriguing about the relatively new mobile app market are the guerrilla marketing techniques used to corner companies into financing an app. Apps such as Order Pizza have stepped past the traditional funding options and instead have looked at how they can position themselves well within the scope of what, in this case, pizza franchises need.

Positioning an app in any kind of market requires finding out everything about your competitors you possibly can. Simply searching the app store and reading descriptions is not enough. Market research requires opening apps, working through scenarios, reading marketing materials and scraping reviews for pressure points.

Brad Ellis from RogueSheep showed us their app Postage and talked about icon sets the second week of class but it wasn’t until I started working on SeattleParks that I realized just how central icons are to mobile apps. Because of the creativity involved with illustrating these icons, creating a coherent icon set can be a big challenge to the one man app developer. When looking through the American Airlines (iTunes), Alaska Airlines (iTunes) and Southwest Airlines (iTunes) apps our group noticed that one of the key differences was the creativity and branding portrayed in the icon set. The Southwest Airlines app was by far the most colorful, but the American Airlines app looked far more professional. Because of the screen size of mobile phones and the use of touch gestures, icons must be quickly recognizable and follow brand principles.

Many of the learning goals I outlined in my post at the beginning of the course stayed the same although we really didn’t touch on the Android platform. Now that the course is complete, I feel like I have a much better understanding of overall strategy, market research, business plan development, UI design, wire-framing, app submission, promotion and designing an update road-map.

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Sometimes I like to compare my job to the movie Office Space. This clip really sums a lot of the work I do taking online marketing campaign specs from the customers, developing a strategy and passing the creative pieces off to professionals. The various aspects of mobile apps that I’ve learned in this course have enabled me to more clearly explain to clients what can be done in the mobile space. It has also allowed me to better articulate clients’ expectations and branding concepts to developers.