Blog: 'Appy days on The Apprentice

Andy Nugent of app developers Ravensoft has written a guest article for msp with his thoughts on The Apprentice and the second challenge its contestants faced this series  - to come up with, design, build and market a mobile 'app' in 24 hours...

"They made it look so easy. All you need to do is come up with an idea in 15 minutes, wait 24 hours for it to appear in the app stores on hundreds of millions of phones and then stroll along to the offices of Wired, Pocket-Lint and TechCrunch where you have a 50/50 chance of getting featured on their front page. Before you know it, you have a winning app downloaded by 10,000 people.

"Wait - what's that sound? It's a million app developers' voices, screaming at once. I now (almost) feel sorry for anyone who works in sales or marketing, is this how infuriating the tasks are for you to watch each week?

"There were several things wrong with the app episode of The Apprentice:

Market research
Asking a couple of people on the street? How about having a look in the relevant app stores and seeing if your idea has already been done and, if it has, if you could do it better? If you can't, it's time for a new idea.

Development process
Giving a very loose description of an app and letting the developer go away and do whatever they want and just accepting the result? I wish!  Generally we go through the requirements with our customers, pointing out those features that are time-consuming to implement but offer little value and streamlining to get the best app out in the relevant time frame. We then deliver alpha versions as the development is ongoing, making small adjustments as required.

Testing
There are currently 92 devices supported by Nokia's Ovi Store and 100+ Android devices, all with different hardware & OS versions. Even the variety of Apple devices is creeping up. You should check your app on at least a few of the more popular variations.

Publishing
It takes about a week, minimum, to hear back after submitting an completed app to any of the app stores. If the submissions fails, for whatever reason (we had our Twitter client Tweets60 initially fail because the tester didn't have a Twitter account, and so couldn't log in), you have to go through the entire process again. Having gone through it several times we have a good idea of the potential pitfalls, but unless you're backed by a successful show on the BBC it's never going to be instant.

Marketing
There are currently over 400,000 apps in Apple's App Store. In real life there's no 50/50 chance that you'll get featured on the major tech sites, although It's something definitely worth pursuing (our Battery Extender app was featured as an app of the week on a high-profile tech website and we had the equivalent of about 2 months downloads that week). You should also look at more specialist sites (for example, if you do a fitness app, send it to Runners World not just BBC Click). Make it easy for people to advertise the app for you by integrating Twitter and Facebook so that every post comes from your app. Most of all, make your app good so that people want to download it. Make people want to show their friends.  Make those friends want to try it for themselves. Even (whisper the words) pay for it. 

Success criteria
The Apprentice judged success purely on numbers downloaded. But that is only part of the picture. Did all downloads come from one region or demographic?  If so, this could mean potential to quickly release tailored apps targeting other areas. How many people who downloaded it used the app more than once? How long, on average, did they use it for? Whatever you're looking for from an app (advertising revenue, purchases of upgrades, brand awareness, etc), it's how many people use your app and how often that's important, not simply how many people downloaded it (only to delete it after one use). We generally build this stats gathering into our apps so we can judge what's been successful on a more meaningful measure than pure downloads.

"So that's how The Apprentice got it wrong and why here at Ravensoft we take longer than 24 hours to develop an app for our clients. If you like our approach, please get in touch and we would be delighted to discuss our services and expertise further.

"Although, if you have the connections, aren't bothered how rushed the app looks and feels, think testing on more than a couple of devices is unimportant and are willing to pay us excessively to work through the night, we'll (reluctantly) listen!"