With over 230 billion app downloads last year and the Google and Apple stores seemingly full to burst, it’s hard to know where your potential app has a place.
Business apps can do anything from selling products to providing a service or even a customer portal. Most ideas have been taken up, so why start from scratch when someone else has already done the work?
An app doing precisely what you intend yours to do may already exist in some shape or form, but with a clear vision and a better product, yours can surpass the competition.
Speaking to a top mobile app development company, we have summarized the best direction to take when making a new app and why it could even give you an edge over your competition.
eCommerce
If your company sells goods B2C or B2B, an eCommerce app is your most likely path.
Apps designed to sell products to a customer are the most common applications developed. Some, like Amazon, provide a service selling products for other people and removing the need for them to create an app for themselves. Going in this direction, however, puts customers in direct contact with your competition.
Creating an app from scratch, designed for your customers and plastered with your company branding, can give your customers a dedicated place to interact with your business.
Calculators and Costings
If you’re not selling goods to a customer, but your industry is technical, a costing or calculator app may be the direction for you to take.
Looking at an industry like construction or interior design, materials, fixtures, and fittings could be tricky to calculate for the average worker or project manager. Your company could build an app using the camera and augmented reality to place items around the prospective space, assessing its practicality/look.
You can do the same thought experiment with an accountancy firm. Perhaps you offer a service to small businesses to calculate their tax. You could offer an app that provides them with their bespoke pension or 401(k) calculations with variable inputs.
There is so much to do in this space which may already exist, but design it with your customers in mind, and you’ll have some happy users.
Productivity Apps
Finally, productivity apps have had a new line of features added to iPadOS16 this September making developing these apps to be different from the competition easier at this stage.
Productivity apps like planners, task lists, calculators, project management, and workflow tracking are in high demand in the workplace and sometimes in personal lives.
If your customers have a particular problem and you want to solve it with an app, research the market and see what they may already be using. You could take the best elements of all those apps (patent dependent) and make something they want to use.
So, before you venture out on creating your new app, ask what problem you’d like to solve for your customers, and has it been done before? If so, make it better!
