The last 9 years have witnessed a Big Bang in the smartphone industry. Now you can have the smartest phone in your pocket without burning it. In the last 3 years, the explosion of smartphones with the most sophisticated technology combined with a user-friendly interface has led to the development of many different types of applications. This is a worldwide phenomenon. The power of apps to capture diverse markets and expand business reach cannot be underestimated.
Industry insiders contend that the iOS App Store will maintain its top spot in the app store market and remain entrenched: projected gross consumer spending generated is estimated at more than $60 billion by 2021.
As the Earth continues to turn and the iOS App Store continues to dominate the roost, the importance of localizing apps to making them an effective business tool cannot be underestimated.
What is the apple of your eye? Identify the category of your application.
There are 24 categories of apps in the iOS app store, but they can be classified into 7 broad categories:
1. Lifestyle
2. Productivity
3. Games
4.News
5.Entertainment
6.Utilities
7. Social networks
An application developer must understand that programming style is particular to the category of applications. Some applications may work better with storage outside the application and pull data from a web service when needed; a different category may require the use of 3D modeling software.
Global audience means skillful localization
The iOS App Store handles distribution and payment to help drive your app’s global journey. Developers need to place apps and marketing materials to ease their way.
1. User-visible content such as text, icons, tip files and graphics, especially cult-specific, audio and video files will need to be translated into the target language as part of the localization process. Keeping these files separate from the source code makes it easy to work with internal translations or external localization services and integrate content back into the application.
2. Apple’s Application Programming Interface (API) can be used to accurately express user-visible values such as dates, times, measurements such as lengths and weights, prices, currencies, and currency symbols.
3. Successful localization of the iOS app ensures that the app works with user-generated text in any or multiple languages.
4. Locate app store metadata such as app name, description, keywords, screenshots, and images. Remember: App descriptions should be short, simple, and to the point, listing the most relevant features and functions. Beyond these basic needs, an app developer would be wise to investigate what users of other apps in the same category value.
5. The improved localization needs a sensitized acculturation. For an app to be well received, it is of the utmost importance that the localization incorporates culture-specific content. This requires a deep understanding of local customs and trends, including regional seasons, holidays, taboos, etc.
6. Offering local sharing options, such as messaging, mail, or social media, can go a long way in promoting apps and products to new markets. Researching which mediums are best recommended for specific markets will reduce localization efforts and help app developers hit the mark for marketing.
7. Incite your audience to action. An easy way to make an app stand out is to use the ‘Download on App Store’ badge as a call to turn the casual surfer into a user.
What You Can’t Measure Can’t Improve: Mastering Application Analytics
Application analytics is absolutely essential to understanding customer behavior and retaining existing customers as well as acquiring new ones. However, adding analytics to the app is only half the game. A developer needs to know what to do with the data thus extracted.
Here are some points to ponder about app analytics:
Application analysis must be configured from the word ‘Go!’ Studies show that on average an app loses 77% of its users within the first 3 days of installation. This number increases to 90% in the first 30 days. Incorporate analytics early on for your app and not after 90% of your initial users have left shores.
No data is better than wrong data. If you base your future decisions regarding app features, promotion budgets, and app economics on the wrong metric, you can kiss success goodbye. As a simple example, evaluating purchases by measuring clicks on the BUY button can be misleading.
The accurate measure would be to consider payment receipt receipts, as these are the actual proof of a complete and successful transaction.
More data can be a useless flood that depletes what’s important. It bloats your app and negatively affects the number of downloads. Resourceful developers know how to cut back on resource usage. Channel your analytics down to the target users, the target service, and the user interface.
business sense
Analytics must be able to deliver the answers to the following:
Who is the user?
How do they find your app?
How many users download your app?
How long are users using your app?
How often do they use it?
How much does each user cost you?
How much is a user worth to you?
The magic formula is that the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer must be at least 3 times the cost of customer acquisition (CoCA). This makes an application sustainable and profitable.
