Do You Have the Next Great iPhone App Idea?

iPhone apps are all the rage right now, but having a great idea and developing a successful iPhone application are completely different things altogether. The mobile application development process is quite a bit different from a normal software development process and many of these differing factors must be considered as early as the conceptual phases of development. The objective of this article is to provide the reader a process for taking an application from an idea to a live, successful application in the iTunes App Store.

Profitability
The first thing we must consider is the goal as it relates to profitability.

1.    You can release a free application designed to increase membership and generate leads with the intent of monetizing those leads in the future, as the market and your application grow. These applications are foothold applications, or applications designed to gain market share in an area that you believe to be profitable. Applications in this category are the sleepers. They are building databases of members and leads, and in my opinion they will reap the rewards of their investment, as early adopters often do. Mobile is like email circa 1998, and we all know how well those guys made out.

2.    You can release a free application designed to drive membership and build content for the  display of advertisements inside the application. This model is certainly viable right now, but it is also in infancy. The delivery of highly optimized, targeted, trackable mobile advertising isn’t an easy game, and while traditional Internet advertising networks and agencies struggle to catch up, we are seeing some new entries into the market like AdMob.com. By the end of this year, you will see some real competition in the mobile advertising space, and one year from today I expect the solutions will be readily available to facilitate much more profitable mobile advertising dynamically. This model is also often used in conjunction with the free membership model as a way to start generating a small amount of revenue right away.

3.    You can release a paid application (an application that costs money at the point of sale). In this scenario, Apple gets 30% and the developer or publisher gets 70%. Paid applications can be very profitable, but they are very tricky, as the competition is pretty fierce. The apps that are successful usually do one of three things: entertain (primarily games), solve a problem (utilities), or have fad or pop-culture appeal. As of yet the content models (applications that deliver content or rely on user-generated content like chats or discussions) have not performed as well in the paid application category. Paid applications require the highest level of development and a laser-targeted marketing plan.

Distribution
The second factor we must consider is distribution. Traditional software development relies on the Internet or an actual hard product in stores to generate sales, and marketing plans are put in place accordingly to accommodate for all of the factors that these distribution models bring to the table. In iPhone and iPod Touch development (most iPhone applications also run on the iPod Touch), this is not necessarily the case.  You can use traditional marketing tools on the Internet and elsewhere to promote your applications, but the purchase and/or download actually takes place in iTunes.

iTunes exists on the devices as well on as the PCs of the device owners. This relates to distribution because the way in which the applications are presented to the consumer is much different. The most traffic to your application will come from the mobile device or the iPhone itself. This is simply because when people are bored, they often check the App Store. They always have the device with them, and it is presented on the first screen as an easy-to-click button. The simplified user interface (the part of the application that you see when you use it) of the App Store on the iPhone puts the top 25 free and paid apps front and center. At the bottom of the top 25 lists there is a button that displays the top 50 apps. Understanding that the majority of the traffic to the store actually comes from the device and that the top 25 and 50 lists are the most prominent feature in this version, we can easily come to the conclusion that it can be very profitable to make these lists.

The iTunes App Store on the PC and Mac is very different from the version on the iPhone. Users on computers have a much more friendly experience when searching through many applications, looking for a specific type of application, or looking at new applications by category. That being said, this is where things like very inclusive application descriptions (descriptions that are displayed on your application page) can be very important. New applications will get most of their first downloads from the PC and Mac users in large part because they can be found.

Paperwork
Now that we have covered some basic landscape, let’s get into paperwork. I highly recommend that if you are serious about developing an iPhone application that you apply for your own Apple iPhone developer account. If you are planning to hire a developer to produce your application, they may already have an account, but if you pay the $100 and register one for yourself, you maintain absolute control in the end. Your iPhone developer account is where you actually upload your application to iTunes, and the process and paperwork are what allow you to develop applications for the iPhone as per Apple’s terms and conditions. Keep in mind that you can create an account so that your developer can access and use your iPhone developer account.

The Pitch
We now know what to do and where to do it, but without a great pitch, we are effectively going nowhere fast. Above all, an application cannot succeed, no matter how great it is, without a great pitch. The main place that you have to close your sale (generate a download) is on your application page in iTunes. Make no mistake that this is your sales page. The page may not be what a seasoned marketer would prefer, but there are several opportunities to convince your target audience to download the application.

First you must choose a category for your application. This is where it is displayed in iTunes, and this decision can have a large impact on downloads or sales. Generally speaking, you want to review the available categories and the types of applications in each to determine where your application fits. Before you make your decision, I would also look at the popularity of the top applications in the category to determine how popular the category is. If you should determine that the category that best fits your application is an unpopular category, then you can do one of two things:

1) Go back to the drawing board.
2) Put your app in a category that might not fit as well topically or functionally, but where the sheer increase in traffic or interest in the category would make up for the discrepancy.

The description is the main component of the individual application page. This is where you apply traditional sales copy techniques. If you are not well versed in sales copy, then I suggest you get out there and learn from some of the greats. A few copy legends to get your gears turning are Dr. Harlan Kilstein, John Carlton, and Gary Halbert. Do not discount your app description area. This is the main component of your sales page in this case.

The other main component of your application page is the screenshot area. This is where you get to show people what your application looks like. Make sure that you show all of the major parts of the application. People look for specific things when they are looking at the screenshots of your application, and if it’s not there, they will move on.

The other small component that you as a developer have control over is the icon of the application. This is the icon that displays on the iPhone as well as in iTunes when people are looking at your application. It may seem inconsequential, but the icon is very important. Do some research and look at all of the icons at the App Store and find out what is working for applications like yours that are popular.

Bringing an iPhone application to market isn’t easy, but it’s much easier when you understand the market. I hope that I got you at least one step closer to understanding what it really means to develop an iPhone application that generates a return on your investment. In a future article, I will delve into the conceptual stages of the application development process and talk about how to tune your conceptual thought processes so that ideas that won’t work end up in the trash can, and ideas that will work get into development quickly.