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Building Mobile Apps With Minimal InvestmentBy Paul RubensDecember 3, 2009
Companies of all sizes and in just about every sector of the economy are rushing to commission mobile apps designed to run on cell phones. It's a situation reminiscent of the mid-nineties, when the same gamut of businesses were busy establishing a presence on the Internet with web sites of varying degrees of sophistication. Back then, many companies weren't sure why they needed a web site: They just felt — for whatever reason — they had to have one. As it turns out, they were probably right — almost every business has a web site these days. This begs an important question: Would your business benefit from having a mobile app? And if so, what should its capabilities be, how do you go about getting one developed, and how much is it going to cost you? Today, most companies are developing mobile apps for Apple's iPhone, so it's this market I'm going to concentrate on. In the near future, it's likely attention will turn to any suitable cell phone platform adopted in sufficient numbers. The Android mobile operating system is currently shaping up to be the most likely alternative. To try to answer whether a mobile app would benefit your business, it's useful to think about what it might do. In the most general terms, possibilities include:
Deciding what it is you think you can offer in an app is a key question that must be answered, said Calvin Carter, President of iPhone app developer Bottle Rocket Apps. "Most companies have a gift — some ability or content that their competitors don't have," he said. "So the first step is to work out what you are really good at." But filling a need is also important, he noted. "The iPhone is personal, so you have to ask what the user wants, not what it is that your company wants to provide to the user. You can spend a lot of money putting features in to an app, but if your users don't want them, then it won't be successful." Budget is also a key consideration. If your company is small and you have only a few hundred dollars to spend on a mobile app, then clearly you'll be limited in what the app can be expected to achieve. Again, it's useful to think about web sites: Anyone can put up a few static pages with a description of their company's services, contact information and a map showing the company's location for a few hundred dollars, but for that price you won't get a full-featured ecommerce web site with forums, a support knowledge base and so on. Thinking Big on a Small BudgetWhat may come as a surprise is that if your ambitions are limited, you can get a basic template-based iPhone app for your business from a company like MobileAppLoader for as little $49 plus $4.99 per month, or a more sophisticated one from Swebapps for $200, plus £25 per month. Swebapps allows you to build your app directly from its web site by selecting from a range of buttons you want displayed in your app and typing in or uploading the content you want the app to display when those buttons are pressed. For example, if you run a pizza restaurant, you could choose a button to display your menu, a button for making reservations or placing orders by phone or through the app, a map button giving GPS directions to your restaurant from wherever the user happens to be, and perhaps a button linking to your Facebook page or Twitter feed. Once you've completed adding all the necessary information and paid online, Swebapps handles the submission of the app to iTunes. "Swebapps appeals to small businesses who don't want to sink tens of thousands of dollars into an app," said Magaly Chocano, Swebapps' founder and CEO. "We also see a lot of interest from medium sized businesses who want to try out a mobile app to gauge interest and decide whether it is worth sinking more money into a more complex app," she said. The interesting thing about apps built using Swebapps' system is that although the app itself resides on the mobile device — in this case an iPhone — the content is actually stored by Swebapps. This means you can update the app as often as you like for free (e.g., to change your pizza menu) by logging in to Swebapps' web site and changing the information you previously provided. The update is reflected in the app in real time. The downside of this approach is that the app can update only when the iPhone is connected to the Internet. MobileAppLoader works in a similar way, but with some important differences: You build an app on the MobileAppLoader web site by supplying information and artwork that is inserted into a template. This information is "hard-coded" into an app, which is then submitted to Apple's Appstore. Apps made in this way run entirely on the iPhone, without the need for a network connection. The drawback of this approach is the apps can't easily be updated. They can be updated only after paying a fee, and it requires the app be rebuilt and resubmitted to the Appstore. Using either of these systems, additional information about your app, such as how many times it has been downloaded and the number of times each button in your apps has been pressed, is also available: MobileAppLoader charges $49 for this information, while Swebapps charges $10 per month. If you are going to go to the (moderate) expense of building an app like this, the obvious question is why not simply have a web site formatted for mobile devices? After all, on the iPhone it's a simple matter to place a bookmark to the web site on the home screen alongside all the other app icons. In practice, however, this is not what people want, Carter argued. "Originally Apple planned to have web apps for the iPhone, but they never really caught on. From the day third-party apps came out on the iPhone, they have done nothing but skyrocket. If web apps were what people wanted, they would have skyrocketed, but they didn't." For more ambitious mobile apps, Carter said businesses should expect to pay a professional development company anything from $20,000 to more than $100,000, depending on the scope, and they should count on a development time of up to six months. "We would provide quite a lot of advice, and we work best with companies which have a clear idea of their goal for an app, but want some ideas about how to execute it," he said. "Very often customers will come with an idea, but when we do a cost benefit analysis of a feature, we see that it would be expensive to develop, and wouldn't achieve what they want. We can often advise an alternative way of doing things that would be cheaper." Carter also warns against the temptation of trying to make the perfect app in one go. Instead, he recommends companies allow their apps to develop over time by adding features in successive releases. "We don't think you should put everything into the first version of an app — just aim for one or two cool features which will surprise and delight users. You need to hold back, listen to common requests from your users, and find out what features they really want — not what you think they want," he advises. Even if you do try to put "everything" in to your app in the first version, you should expect to update it — with the accompanying cost — fairly regularly. In part that's because Apple is developing the iPhone OS rapidly, and some OS updates are bound to break certain features of your app unless it too is updated. But OS upgrades may also make feasible certain features that you would like, but which were previously not practical to implement. And don't forget support costs — you may not expect to have to field technical questions from users, but at the very least you should be prepared to spend time (and time is money) getting information from the app's developers and answering emails, especially whenever you release a new version of your app. The final question is what you should charge for your app — or should you give it away for free? Clearly apps designed to increase awareness in your brand or make it easier for customers to do business with you should probably be free, while customers may be prepared to pay for something that offers them exceptional value in itself. The ability to order a pizza at the touch of a button certainly has some value to a customer, for example, but it's doubtful this is enough to entice someone to pay for the privilege. As a rule of thumb, free iPhone apps can typically expect ten times more downloads than ones that cost anything at all, so if you're hoping your app will boost your business rather than prove to be a revenue generator in and of itself then it makes no sense to expect customers to pay for it. It's still early days for mobile apps, and it's certainly not the case that you have to get one for your business at the earliest possible opportunity. But like having a web site ten years ago, there's no doubt that if you provide something useful to your customers, it will prove to be a worthwhile investment. Follow Enterprise IT Planet on Twitter. Paul Rubens is a journalist based in Marlow on Thames, England. He has been programming, tinkering and generally sitting in front of computer screens since his first encounter with a DEC PDP-11 in 1979.
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