Not a luxury, but a necessity. Why has a mobile app become a key to business success?

Modern business doesn’t exist without Internet. That statement sounds like a mantra not only the last decade. It is repeated like a mantra every now and again during various trainings, courses, conferences and other events, where business luminaries share their own experience and admonitions of sales and profit growth. It was learned like a mantra in the fullness of time by everybody, who is a founder of successful and worldwide famous startup today. That statement is still actual now, however its meaning got changed with no replacement of words and letters. If it is understood wrong, you’ll get a lot of both financial and moral problems instead of golden treasures.

What was meant in the past? What was kept in mind about the reasons, why the Internet has turned from bonus into necessity? The answer has already obtained by all around. Website or account on the Internet, a personal representation of a company in the virtual universe. Its main goal is to transfer offline sales to online space. In toto, website hugely successfully manages its task now, however that initial profit, those initial advantages of website as such are becoming less evident every year. Why does it take place now? First of all, more over than 80% of developed and developing businesses have their own website nowadays. But if we speak about an international business, there is a huge amount of 98% and their number is approximating to the absolute. More players in the game, stronger competition, fewer opportunities to maneuver. By the way, every website was created to meet the «buying without leaving home» demand, which today has consigned to the past. The keynote at present, “buying any time and anywhere”, is poorly achievable for a site. A man has become more mobile and he needs something mobile too. Previous sales methods and PR-strategies still work but not so effective as before.

What is meant today, when people say that modern business doesn’t work offline?

Evidently, the majority keeps in mind a mobile application, which is capable to satisfy all basic demands of modern client. Despite the apps appeared enow away back, they are habitually regarded only as developing trend in business environment or even frequently as a high-hat or additional and dispensable bonus. As practice demonstrates that approach is blundering and fundamentally wrong and that’s why:

• Modern man is immensely mobile. Together with this, he has an abysmal shortage of spare time to engage in any continuous process, especially if he can speed it or avoid. He needs to sit down at his PC or notebook, enter some link or text in Google and browse, browse, browse, sitting in one place for a long time and doing all these actions only to explore a standard website of an ordinary online shop. But a mobile application can be used at any leisure time at almost random place: waiting for doctor’s appointment in the halls of hospital, in the back of the cab or public transport, during a dull play at the theater and in tens of such situations.

There’s always time for smartphone (Photo: Big Picture)

• It’s debatable but fewer competitors sometimes contributes to more dynamic development of particular interesting apps and more potential users of them. For example, among all business, entering the mobile apps market, a contingent company «X» may easily become the pioneer in its specific field. It will seriously contribute to an explosive gain of both company’s own web users and web users of its competitors. By the way it is a key to a probable leadership in the whole specific sphere.
• The majority of apps needs no Internet connection. That one of technological advantages lays, that the majority of apps vice versa needs Internet to work. Choosing, buying, exploring and just watching — these actions can’t be done without online connection. An application, in turn, performs most of its functions, except the most important one, buying, offline and is available to use even under the ocean or in space, updating the views of the basic windows and its range automatically and without user’s help, when active Internet connection has set.
• Mobile application gives an opportunity to get through to client quicker and surprise him in a positive sense. Today an average user keeps his phone handy almost all the time. It is a good cause to notify him, for example, about sales campaign one more time, to send a useful information to him, to convey to him a beneficial data, because he will surely want to see instinctively, what his phone has got and why. The user will be able to see interesting information, which was generated and sent to him by app, in a trice with the help of pushes. On average, he checks his email in 4–48 hours and sometimes reads only 50–80% of got letters. Precious time can be lost during these hours and information, sent to the user’s email, can lose its relevance.
• Mobile apps as such also have their competitor. Although almost 70% of modern Internet traffic are related to the mobile phones, it doesn’t mean applications dominance. There are special mobile versions of websites for phones, which transforms a standard website to the comfortable variant to browse it with the cellphone. However, that problem solution has one great inborn vice, which can be easily won, but always turns to sin of many businesses. A mobile version of website itself is based on a standard one when developing. It does the same things, shows the same views and transfer PC website tools to the smartphone look to the limit. Not always but from time to time some developers pursuit of oneness and get a lamentable result: inharmonious, uncomfortable and unusable product. It can be used as it has the same functions as PC-version, but from the users point of view, its user-unfriendly interface is conspicuous at first sight. Mobile application, in turn, is developing from scratch and even it demonstrates the same idea, which constitutes a website, it is creating without regard for it. That’s why it looks more entire, more practical and fair complected and wins the competition over the mobile website.

Some websites look like labyrinths with minimal chances to escape (Photo: Time Out)

The greatest problem of modern business applications for commercial companies as well as the greatest reason why an app can fail on the market is based on the lack of clear vision of the seller of how to adopt an app to his fields of activities and why he really needs it. Such remaining open global questions lead to the fact that long, hard and very painstaking development with the brightest and the quaintest design and the most innovative idea with the full-scaled content can turn to just a time-wasting in an instant. It logically results in client’s resentment, app’s downtime without enough downloads and company’s abhorrence of mobile apps as such. It is necessary to understand one primary thing to avoid such scenario: a mobile application isn’t a panacea for growth and it isn’t worth to expect explosive sales increase only thanks to that you have got your own smartphone solution.

An app is only one of several required parts of the common campaign of modern business Internet activity. An app is a way of the loyaler attitude of customers to the company. An app is a technique, after all, to become more attractive to the buyers.

A development itself is a rather laborious and continuous process, therefore before ordering an app, the client has to have his own strategy of progress, his sales level growth, his promotion. A development can last several months and it requires the conception of how to rebuild client’s business taking into account the future mobile app, how to build it in his promotional campaigns and how amplify the company with the released application. By the way, it is necessary to have clear understanding of not only why business enters the mobile market, but how the wishful product should look, how to serve, what needs it should cover, as every change on a course of development can cause delayed dates and additional costs.

IceRock team matches serious experience in development and a modern approach to business partnership

Our app workshop, IceRock Development, approaches the matter of creation carefully. We start from the beginning, from the idea forming. We fully realize both an already completed client’s concept and help him to form it, if it is necessary, expressing additional thoughts on the side and showing the potential points of growth advantages, that weren’t noticed by the client. After our app layout approval we begin to render the design and to start the actual development. Finally, a finished product is tested far and wide and after testing completion it is transferred to the customer, together with the whole groundwork. Besides, our company supports an application in the first stage of its operation. If you have made up your mind to upgrade your business by building-in of mobile application, IceRock Development will be tho most perspective solution to implement everything planned into life.