Google has declared Android the fastest growing platform for software developers. Yet with a huge number of Android apps being created, Android developers struggle with how to market their products, reaching a larger market, and managing the impact of massive app stores on consumers and businesses.
For developers who want to reach the end user, the real world costs associated with creating apps exceed the initial investment, and the goal is not to scale a company, but to get a product to the end user. It is critical that apps reach consumers through Google Play, which lets apps show up in front of hundreds of millions of consumers within minutes. For developers who don’t have a track record for marketing apps to end users, or they lack the app creation tools available for popular platforms, Google Play provides both.
For developers who want to reach the end user, the real-world costs associated with creating apps can exceed the initial investment. And the goal is not to scale a company, but to get a product to the end user. One of the biggest hurdles faced by developers is negative reviews. An app cannot promise optimal performance from day one. Yet, people do not shy away from leaving bad reviews on apps, games, and many others. Sure, these reviews can sometimes work as feedback and help the developers carry out necessary changes in order to improve the performance of the app. But most of the time, these reviews can lead to declining trust with customers, which can immediately result in fewer downloads. Moreover, it goes without saying that trying to remove negative google reviews could be challenging and might require professional assistance. Developers should always focus on making their applications better rather than getting let down by such issues. Providing a very well-working application could help reach a wider audience.
Scaling to the Bigger End
Platforms like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, sell apps, support app creation, and compete to generate a wide reach of end users, but then provide that reach at the scale of a large company. If developers want to build a product to reach end users, they have to learn to operate at the scale of the big apps like Apple and Microsoft. It is important that developers learn how to do it quickly, while keeping the process simple enough that they can do it on their own.
The Biggest Fear
There is an opportunity here for developers who have created a new app to scale their business. Because the real world costs of creating apps can outweigh the initial investment, it is common for many developers to turn to a service like MarketShare.org, where developers can learn how to create apps, then launch it into the millions of users within just a few hours. As the technology provider that offers MarketShare, we have seen developers get a product to the market in a few weeks, and then get paid within a few months. Once a company has scaled to millions of users, we have also seen companies that sell apps on MarketShare generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month.
The MarketShare platform is not only simple to use, but is used by large corporations to market their products. Microsoft even used MarketShare to expand their reach into the business world, offering a new app for their employees to easily take a photo and post it to their social media accounts.
A Hard Core of Big Apps
But the market for getting a product to millions of end users is hard to crack. Most end users want to see high quality apps, and will usually ignore low quality apps. Bigger apps require larger marketing budgets, and being more expensive can prevent companies from building a small, but powerful, product, rather than trying to scale their business and reach a large number of consumers quickly.
A Solution for Platforms
It is important for big companies to make a few big decisions, and then take control of the rest of their business. A good place for these companies to start is by focusing on being able to create a new app within weeks and then marketing that product to millions of end-users. Sometimes it can be as easy as creating a directory listing type of app but naming it in a different language, like how you would write it as best online casinos in Dutch, Afrikaans, etc. There are specific markets for this.