Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO
The Apple iPhone revolutionized the mobile industry in 2007 by launching a full-featured portable computer complete with a built-in cell phone and high-speed Internet connection. Apple’s subsequent launch of an iPhone App Store and accompanying application development platform took the revolution to the next level – the App Store now has over 15k applications in every category imaginable. Other mobile device vendors like Research In Motion, Google, Nokia and Microsoft have all quickly followed suit with their own mobile application stores and development platforms.
You cannot just build it and expect people to come to it. The successful build of an iPhone or other mobile
application demands best practices.
The best iPhone apps usually succeed at doing one thing very
well: they promise the end-user a
specific piece of functionality and deliver on it in a simple yet comprehensive
manner. Whethera Tip Calculators, a portal
for US Historical document archives or a
2-player Air Hockey games, these apps succeed because they promise and deliver
on one very cool or very useful thing.
Second, a great app isn’t just a repurposed web site with a
slapped-on iPhone GUI. Typically, it is built from the ground-up to be rich,
fast, personalized and very interactive and fetches content from the Internet
only when it has to. It leverages the touch user interface, it capitalizes on
the brilliant and crisp display, it dares to be fun by encouraging you to
‘shake it’ with the accelerometer and it unobtrusively slips out and fetches
new content from the Internet.
Finally, a great app is working hard to establish a clear
brand identity from all the other me-too apps out there. The good news here is that if you followed
the first two pieces of advice, you are likely to garner great user reviews,
which is great leverage in staying ahead of the app pack.
