Omnilogic Systems

Mobile and Custom Apps!

Your App Doesn’t Need to be Top 25 in the App Store

Have you seen all the articles claiming how you have to be a top 25 app to be a success? This is one-size fits all advice of the worst kind. I’m here to tell you the opposite! Your app doesn’t have to be the most downloaded app in the app store.

There are several common categories of apps that can be hugely successful on as few as 10 installs. Nope, not a mis-print. You don’t need 100,000 installs, you might only need 10.

Let’s examine a few different types of apps and the impact each can have even with a much smaller set of users.

Apps to Create Business

If the app is used to drive in business, then how many people do you need to have your app installed? If 150 of your customers and potential customers installed your app on their smartphone, you would have:

  1. A direct link to interact with them via push notifications, messages, latest news and info, contests, and coupons.
  2. A way to hear back from your customer, through feedback, requests, or even new orders (why not let them scan the bar code on their last box of supplies?)
  3. A way to remind your customer of upcoming sales, renewal dates, and other triggers that cause them to come back to you.

Do you need hundreds of thousands of installs, or would 100-200 fans of your business make a serious impact to your bottom line?

Apps to Make Business Function Better

Build an app that supports your organization by:
  1. Making your staff more efficient.
  2. Letting you provide better, faster service to your clients no matter where either of you are.
  3. Automating work you do manually right now.
  4. Providing all your sales and marketing information at your fingertips for consultation and forwarding to your prospect.
  5. Allowing staff to fill in forms and details right now, rather than submitting paperwork back to the office to be re-entered.

With that type of impact to your organization you can justify the ROI of investing in building an app with as few as 5-10 staff or major customers making use of it.

Apps that Communicate and Educate

Let’s take a current example out of the news – concussions in minor sports. As an organization that wanted to reduce the number of concussion-related injuries, perhaps you decide to build an app that assists coaches and parents in evaluating a player’s symptoms after an instance of head contact.

As that organization, would you judge the app as successful if it was installed and used by a few hundred coaches and parents within your province, causing 50 players to seek treatment rather than returning to play this year after suffering a concussion?

But if The App is Your Business…

Aiming to sell the app for $2.00 per install as your only source of income? Yep, you absolutely better aim to be the best app in the app store. This is a different approach as the app is your business and given the low price on most apps you need a huge number of installs.

In most other scenarios your app serves a specific purpose to support, build, and increase effectiveness of your business or organization.

Conclusion

Don’t allow what is seen as “common knowledge” to deter you from examining whether an app is appropriate to your organization. There are more factors to consider than only the total number of downloads to determine whether you will be successful. Determine the goals for your app, whether they are based in profit, client reach, expense reduction, people educated, or whatever is appropriate for you, and then track against those goals.

Best of luck to you in your app endeavours!

Contact us for a free consultation to determine if an app can assist with your goals!

iOS Image Loading Rules

Apple documentation is not the best. One of our mobile apps requires display of images from multiple dynamic sources based on a list of precedence rules, prompting us to dig into Apple’s rules for image handling and priority. To save you time, here’s what we’ve found:

  • [UIImage imageNamed:@”my_image”] will first check the .xcassets asset catalog. If that fails, it will fallback to searching for any embedded images in your project of the same name.
  • [UIImage imageNamed:@”my_image”] will not scan any file system directories for images.
  • [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:path] can be used for either images embedded in your app or ones saved into the device file system, given the correct path.
  • The above functions will automatically take screen density into account. If you request “my_image.png”, they will automatically use “my_image@2x.png” if appropriate and the properly named file is available.

Now to write some custom image handling based on top of these built-in rules…