Common Mobile Business App Mistakes to Avoid

By late 2012 the Apple App Store had crossed 700,000 apps and roughly 25 billion cumulative downloads, and Google Play (renamed from Android Market back in March) was closing the gap fast. A lot of small and mid-sized businesses looked at those numbers, concluded they needed “an app,” and commissioned one without asking the harder question first: what would this app do that a phone’s browser couldn’t already do better? Here’s where that instinct kept going wrong this year.

Mistake 1: Building an app before fixing the website

Plenty of businesses paid a developer several thousand dollars, sometimes well over $20,000, for a native app while their actual website was still unusable on a phone: tiny text, desktop navigation menus, forms that required pinch-zooming to fill out. An app that nobody downloads doesn’t fix that. If most of your traffic arrives from a mobile browser, that browser experience is the one that needs attention first, because it’s the one every visitor is guaranteed to see.

Mistake 2: No reason to open it a second time

The businesses that got real value from an app in 2012 gave people a reason to come back: a loyalty card, order tracking, appointment booking, something with ongoing utility. Plenty of others built a static digital brochure, essentially their existing site repackaged behind an app icon, and were surprised when download numbers looked fine but daily active use didn’t. An app competing for a spot on someone’s home screen has to earn that space every day, not just on install day.

Mistake 3: Skipping app store optimization entirely

With 700,000 apps in one store alone, discovery doesn’t happen by accident. Businesses that treated their app icon, title, keywords and screenshots as an afterthought were invisible in search results the moment they weren’t being directly linked to. The listing itself needed the same care as a landing page, because for most people that’s exactly what it was.

Mistake 4: No plan for keeping it updated

iOS 6 shipped in September 2012, and Android’s fragmentation across device makers and OS versions was already a well-known headache for developers. An app built and forgotten started breaking within months, whether from a new OS release, a screen size it hadn’t been tested on or a payment API that changed underneath it. Businesses that treated the launch as the finish line, rather than the start of an ongoing maintenance cost, ended up with a broken app doing more brand damage than no app at all.

Mistake 5: Never measuring what happened after install

Download counts made for a nice number in a board meeting, but plenty of businesses had no visibility into what people did once they opened the app, or whether they opened it again after day one. Without that data there was no way to tell a useful feature from a wasted development budget, and no way to justify or challenge next year’s app spend with anything but a guess.

Mistake 6: Using push notifications as a megaphone

A small number of businesses treated their new push notification capability as a free advertising channel and used it that way, daily promos, generic reminders, whatever needed pushing that week. Users uninstall fast when a notification doesn’t feel worth the interruption. The apps that kept people around used push sparingly, for things the user wanted to know about: an order shipped, a reservation confirmed, a price drop on something they’d looked at.

The underlying problem

Almost every one of these mistakes traces back to the same starting error: deciding to build an app because apps were the story of the year, rather than because a specific, ongoing customer need justified one. Before commissioning a build in 2013, it’s worth asking honestly whether a well-built mobile website would solve the same problem for a fraction of the cost and none of the update headaches. For a lot of businesses in 2012, it would have.

---

More on Marketing Strategy, or browse everything from 2012.