Privacy Policies are not all alike, and there are numerous ways that a missing clause or a mismatch between your legal documents and your app itself can cause catastrophic problems. Quite a few ubiquitous and successful mobile apps have run into massive legal headaches and astronomical fines due to flaws in their privacy policy and a failure to integrate and unify their legal protection with the “private parts” of their app architecture.

Only a few weeks ago, social app Path was fined nearly 1 million dollars by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) for privacy violations. The $800,000 penalty stemmed from two lethal mistakes made by the app:

1. storing third-party names and numbers from their users’ address books, without proper disclosure;
2. failing to comply with the provisions of COPPA, a law that applies to every app that knowingly collects information from children.

This means that if you extract phone contacts from your users, not only must you notify them, you must also explain within the app’s privacy policy how any why the information is used. If you collect users’ birth dates, you can likely figure out if children are using your app and do something about it. You essentially have two legal avenues: comply with COPPA or make sure users represent that they’re over 13.

But there’s more. The FTC published a long document with recommendations for app developers and even platform-specific advisement for big platforms like Android and iOS.

Privacy by Design

The FTC wants app developers to use a (relatively) new approach called “Privacy by Design.”  “Companies should build in privacy at every stage in developing their products.” This means a number of things:

• before building an app or a feature, think of the privacy implications;
• if you collect information, protect it. Follow the security recommendations of the FTC (with special attention to the third-party software you used) and be careful not to overpromise or make generic reassuring statements;
• keep your policy updated! Every time you roll out a new update to the app store, stop for a second and think if you added something that has an impact on your privacy statements. Added a new analytic script? It should go in there. Added “find friends via Facebook”? Go and edit your privacy policy.

What Does It Mean for App Developers?

There are known best practices—some of them coming from the California Attorney General—to give you some legal protection and prevent problems, privacy breaches, and lawsuits. But this is what the FTC actually says that developers should do.

You should have a privacy policy and it must be accessible from the app store.

The simple way to accomplish this is to simply link the policy when you submit the app. But, this means the privacy policy should live on your website. You could also provide the full text of the policy within the app, or a short statement describing the app’s privacy practices. Need a privacy policy from scratch? There are many options: Docracy’s open source standard, a privacy policy generator, and many other free resources you can find on Google.

You should provide “just-in-time disclosures” and obtain affirmative express consent when collecting sensitive information from outside the platform’s API.

You already know that iOS pops up a notification that a certain app is requesting access to the user’s location or other private data. In this case, the disclosure and the consent are taken care by Apple. But, your app might as well collect other important stuff, and a pop-up notification is the best way to make sure the users know. FTC names financial, health, or children’s data, but also a generic “sharing sensitive data with third parties” as sensitive private information, so it’s best to err on the side of caution.

Know the legal implications of the code you’re using.

It’s normal for app developers to use third-party packages, SDK, and the like. You should make sure this code is secure and fully understand exactly what information it pulls, because you’re ultimately legally responsible for it. There’s a long list of questions to ask yourself, including:

• Does this library or SDK have known security vulnerabilities?
• Has it been tested in real-world settings?
• Have other developers reported problems?

Conclusion

Path was fined $800,000. While this is was in connection with COPPA violations, it’s the start of broader policing of privacy practices, even against non-American developers. If you cater to the American mobile market, you can still be fined by U.S. Authorities. It’s time for app developers to lawyer up and get a properly-written, constantly-curated privacy policy. The FTC is encouraging the adoption of public standards and suggests tightened integration among app developers, trade associations, ad networks, and mobile platforms, so this is definitely a topic to keep under the radar. You wouldn’t want a legal problem to cripple your app right as it’s starting to soar.

If you don’t take time to develop a fully-functional, properly-planned app that offers real value to users, all of your efforts will go wasted. We’ve learned some important lessons through creating countless mobile apps for small businesses; here are the five essential elements that play pivotal roles in the building of successful business apps.

A Professional Developer

The first thing your mobile app needs is a professional developer. It’s tempting to view mobile development as a commodity—it’s not. Seeking the lowest price for your development (and ending up with the lowest quality) can result in major headaches, glaring software glitches, and brand damage. You should never try to cut corners and costs by hiring someone with little experience in mobile application development. Professional, seasoned developers know the ins and outs of mobile operating systems, version control, optimization, best practices, and the latest web technologies. With a veteran (or veterans) working on your project, you’ll be assured a mobile app that’s a strong benefit to your business instead of a frustrating hindrance.

An Adequate Budget

You can’t start the development process without an adequate development budget; having a half-built app and no funding to finish is arguably worse than having never started. You’d be amazed at just how complicated it can be for a developer to breathe life into what initially seemed like a simple design. The process often involves a designer, a project manager, and input from executives, marketers, and salesman. You have consider all of the moving parts of your design and how much it will cost to incorporate all of the multifaceted needs of each stakeholder. If your budget is not enough to cover these development costs, you might not be able to make your app as functional as you wanted it to be, and both customers and stakeholders could end up disappointed.

Original Content That Will Keep Your Customers Coming Back

You are not going to have thousands of customers lining up to download your app—even if it’s free—unless you have something truly valuable to offer. Many businesses expect a lot of exposure from their app without a real investment into the app’s content. Others make a substantial commitment of content upfront, but then consider the app a completed project instead of an ongoing project. Neither is a good long-term strategy for maintaining and leveraging a mobile app to benefit your business. You’ll want a steady stream of special offers, updates, or other reasons to revisit your business app.

A good litmus test of your app’s appeal is to simply play the role of the prospective user. Ask yourself why you’d notice the app, why you’d want or need it, and what would cause you to keep it on your mobile device’s small screen and limited storage. If you struggle with the answers, you may want to remedy the problem with original, valuable, regular content updates.

Careful Branding to Grab Your User’s Attention

You will need to find ways to grab your user’s attention the first time they load your business application. Clever loading screens and new user tutorials are a great way to do this, but you need to make sure you do not go overboard with your introduction efforts. Mobile users are inherently busy multitaskers; you never want to keep them from their purpose without good reason. You are not dealing with a captive audience; Users can leave your app or turn off their phone at a moment’s notice. You’ve already won the competition for their attention and gotten your app installed on their device; offer them some carefully-designed welcome messaging that’s just as easy to use as it is to bypass.

Loading Indicators that Keep Your Users in the Loop

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to navigate through an application just to be directed to a blank, unresponsive screen. One of the first thing your users will think if you do not have loading indicators is that the application is frozen or malfunctioning. Loading indicators and animations let your users know that the app is fully-functional, working, and waiting on your phone’s network or hardware to respond. A process indicator might be even more useful, because it tells the user how much of the process has been completed and the specific steps involved. This may sound like a small, inconsequential addition to an app, but in the minds of many users, it’s the difference between a buggy, crash-prone app and a snappy, responsive, user-friendly one.

Conclusion

“We need a mobile app” is just the beginning of your planning process. You need to take time to think about what you want your users to accomplish and how you design to suit their needs. Do not cut corners during your design, development, funding, or testing—your shortcuts will likely be noticed in a very public way. But, if you test your app thoroughly, design it thoughtfully, and keep the essentials in mind, it will be a valuable asset worthy of your time, investment, and brand.

Do you have any essentials to add to the list? Have you worked on mobile projects that lack thorough planning? Do you have any hard-earned development lessons to share?

What’s Balsamiq Mockups?

Balsamiq Mockups is a tool that helps developers to create wireframes and communicate with clients and coworkers with visual representations of their design plans. Unlike Codiqa, Balsamiq is offline desktop software. Luckily, you can work with it using the operating system of your choice; it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Balsamiq can help you quickly tweak designs in real time, proposing a design that is intentionally rough and low-fidelity (with sketchy UI elements and a hand-drawn font) to encourage as much feedback as possible. The tool offers multiple ways to share and solicit feedback on the design concepts: mockups can be exported to PDF, and common PNG images and also copied to the clipboard so that you can send them by e-mail or within other document formats.

Much like Codiqa, Balsamiq can assist you in creating interfaces using simple drag and drop components; the program supports 75 built-in user interface components and 187 icons, with the addition of a whole lot of additional components created by the community. Balsamiq Mockups is also available as a plugin for Google Drive, Confluence, JIRA, FogBugz, and XWiki. The trial version lasts only seven days, but you can use it with full functionality for the whole time period.

How Balsamiq Mockups Works

When you open the software, you’ll find several main categories that will help in the creation of your design mockup. They are twelve categories in total. The first one, called All, as you might guess, contains all the elements that you can use during your work. The other categories are: Big, Buttons, Common, Containers, Forms, iPhone, Layout, Markup, Media, Project Assets, and Text.

Let’s see what we can do using the elements of Balsamiq Mockups. As first step, I placed the iPhone shape (it’s the only one available, so it represents the profile of all modern smartphones) and set its size using slight adjustments with the mouse. You’ll see that on the right side of the picture is a box with all the tools you need to edit the selected element. In this case, you can choose the orientation of the device, the background pattern, if you want the top toggle bar to be present, and the layering.

Now, let’s work on the style of the main page and determine which elements we want to show on our brand new homepage. Generally, we might find a header, a footer, a menu-list, a text box for some content, an image, or some Links, for example. Just like in Codiqa, the program offers a simple, intuitive drag-and-drop system that easily adds everything you want with a few clicks. For the first components of our page, we have to open the category called “Big.” Here, we’ll find the following elements elements: title/headline, the text Area, and the image box. So, drag and drop each of these into your mockup. At this point, your design concept should look something like this:

Once you’ve dragged and dropped the elements, you’ll see that each element has extensive editing options. When you click on the title/headline or on the text box, you’ll see a typical text editor, where you’ll be able to specify the characteristics or content. You can modify texts selecting size, text alignment, format, and color. You can also set the background color, set the border color, add a scrollbar, and play with opacity and focus. For images, we can show or hide a border, crop the image, and hyperlink the chosen image to lead to a new URL or screen.

Let’s see how we might create a mockup for the last page of a game in which the final score is displayed, icons are offered to share the score via social media, and three continuation options are presented: save, go back to the homepage, or exit the game. First of all, we have to duplicate the shape of our mobile phone. Then, drag and drop three small rectangular buttons from the “Buttons” category (the first shape from the left). After that, drag and drop an icon and then duplicate it four times (I’ve decided to insert the icons representing Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Delicious). Repeat the same process for the three remaining icons to finish our social bar.

Lastly. let’s edit our buttons. Change their titles to “Save”, “New game”, and “Exit”. Add a link for each to their desired destination pages, and change the color, font, and icon to suit your style. At this point, our work should look like the following:

Let’s do another example—imagine that you want to create the mockup of a survey. We’ll use the “radio button group” from the “All” category. For all of these form elements, you can change color, size, style and associated hyperlink. Look below for a better idea of the robust form element options.

You can quickly build whatever wireframes you want on Balsamiq. You’ll discover many others components that you could add to your mockup, such as lists, menu bars, progress bars, accordions, calendars, charts, checkboxes, datagrids, tables, scrollbars, dialogs, and so on.

Differences Between Codiqa and Balsamiq Mockups

Compared to Codiqa, Balsamiq has a far wider work area that lets users work on different pages simultaneously (Codiqa does not, and it limits your ability to envision your full app). Balsamiq also offers a greater number of design elements, so that the possibilities are not limited to the most common components of web pages. Both Codiqa and Balsamiq are remarkably easy to use. These two applications can even be used by clients to help them illustrate their ideas.

Conclusion

We’ve seen how easy and intuitive Balsamiq Mockups are, and how fast we can create a mockup using this software. You can use these mockups as starting points for the creation of the structure and the graphic of your mobile applications, and you can also use them to help you get through the difficult client approval phase of any mobile project. Modifications are always just a few simple clicks, and changing your mockup is far easier than changing a fully-constructed mobile app.

To view Friday’s schedule, additional resources, or other ways to prepare for Friday’s Windows Phone Camp, visit our preliminary overview of the Windows Phone 8 training event. Don’t forget to download the Windows Phone SDK and check out Microsoft’s supplemental training resources. We hope to see you there tomorrow!

Microsoft’s next Windows Phone Camp is this Friday, December 07 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (GMT—8). It’s open for anyone to attend online or in person, and unlike a lot of similarly intense and intensive training, it’s free of charge. This Friday’s event will be hosted physically at Microsoft HQ, and virtually on SitePoint.com. Here’s a look at Friday’s event information and schedule:

Date and Time: Friday, December 07 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (GMT—8)

Location: Microsoft 1065 La Avenida, Building 1, Mountain View California 94043, USA

Schedule:

• 9:00 AM – Welcome / Windows Phone 8 Overview for Developers
• 9:30 AM – Break
• 9:45 AM – Sharing Code Between Windows Phone and Windows 8, NFC, Lock Screen, Live Tiles
• 11:45 AM – Lunch
• 12:45 PM – Voice Commands, In App Purchases, Nokia Maps, App to App Communication
• 2:00 PM – End

If you haven’t had a look at Microsoft’s other Windows Phone 8 developer resources, they’re impressive as well. Their Windows Phone Dev Center provides a ton of tools for the aspiring Windows Phone developer. If you’ve got more than a day’s time and want to make the most of the opportunity, consider the following preparations:

• Download the Windows Phone SDK – Without it, you won’t be able to replicate the techniques demonstrated in the Phone Camp.
• Register at the Windows Phone Dev Center – This will join you to the Windows Phone developer community, and it will allow you to publish your finalized Windows Phone apps.
• Complete the Windows Phone SDK Training Course – Developers can complete beginner tutorials and advanced courses at their own pace. These courses are a perfect place to start, and an ideal followup to a Windows Phone 8 Phone Camp.
• Explore Microsoft’s 30-day guided exploration of Windows 8 Development – Microsoft’s training is tailored for many purposes, including Windows game development, and utilizing your web skills to build Windows 8 software.
• Read BuildMobile’s earlier post: 5 Reasons To Start Building Windows 8 Apps Right Now – This overview highlights the many developer accommodation that Microsoft has made to attract talented mobile developers like yourself.

We hope to see you on Friday!

Since the mid 2000′s, the industry—especially in terms of software, apps, and web interactivity—design has absolutely boomed and gone through immense advancements in every way imaginable way. This is because during the last decade (and even more so during the last five years), mobile phones have gone from being simple phones to being fully-functional pocket-sized computers, with a mobile equivalent for almost every single feature of a full-blown desktop or laptop computer.

This general trend has naturally led to the development of an enormous industry that can basically be divided into two interrelated parts: mobile app development and mobile-friendly design. Mobile development has grown alongside thousands and eventually millions of increasingly-sophisticated mobile applications developed for ever-growing smartphone marketplaces. Modern mobile applications take advantage of built-in hardware abilities in astoundingly clever ways and perform robust web-based and organizational functions.

With the rising advancement of high-speed, large-bandwidth mobile networks like 3G, WiFi, and 4G, consumers can access the web on their smartphones as quickly and reliably as they can via a normal computer. At the same time, the growing access has prompted an explosion in the number of mobile-friendly or purely mobile websites; this in turn has increased demand for mobile design enormously, and that’s where developers like you come in.

Today, the mobile phone market is outstripping ownership and use of landline phones in virtually every country on Earth, the steady conversion of more and more of these phones into smarter, more multimedia-friendly devices that work off WiFi, 3G, or 4G networks suggests that the future of mobile development and design will only grow stronger.

Let’s go over some of the major ingredients that led to the rise of modern mobile design.

The First Cellular Networks

Starting from simple wireless analog-based (1G) portable phones, it wasn’t until the late 1990′s that cell phones turned into more sophisticated devices as the technology inside them started to spawn an ever larger number of features (features that nonetheless seem basic by today’s standards). These first phones gave basic calling abilities to users and their convenient portable capacities are what established them as widely-used communications devices.

2G/GSM Networks and the Rise of Mobile Media

It wasn’t until the mid to late 1990′s that a new communications network, known as GSM—or 2G, as it was less often called—began to develop in which more mobile services could be offered. At this point, the first pre-smartphone devices began to appear, and the fact that data transmission over these next-generation devices was digital instead of analog allowed them to carry many of the more basic smartphone features that we use as the basis for modern app development. Capabilities such as text messaging, downloadable content, and extremely basic web access gave consumers the ability to send emails, view a small selection of online multimedia, and download simple digital applications such as ringtones and music files.

The growth of the GSM, or 2G networks, is what really expanded mobile phone use so broadly that mobile devices eventually eclipsed landline communication tools. Despite the 2G networks explosive popularity amongst users of all income levels worldwide, these machines were still pretty basic compared to today’s mobile devices.

3G Arrives

It wasn’t until the early 2000′s, with the development and service offering of the first 3G wireless digital networks that true smartphones arrived. In 2002 and 2003, network operators began to offer widespread 3G access based on more powerful wireless transmission technology that depended on efficient packet switching data transmission found in computer-based web connections instead of the 2G networks circuit switching mechanism.

With the arrival and rise of 3G, the modern era of wireless mobile smartphones as pocket-sized computers truly began, especially after 2005, when High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) was implemented into 3G and expanded its data carrying ability even more. The resulting explosion in online media accessibility created a tandem explosion in online media creation. At the same time, in order to take full advantage of all these web-based data options that phone networks now offered, mobile applications started appearing for smart phones—at first in small quantities but later at a rapid development pace. Also, the devices themselves had to be redesigned so that they could better display digital media and other interactive systems, taking full advantage of the growing apps market.

4G Replacing 3G

Currently, even 3G itself is being slowly replaced by the much more powerful, purely packet-switching-based, data optimized 4G network. With this new technology, ten-fold increases over 3G in data transmission ability are coming into the picture, making access to digital media even more robust and further bolstering the demand for media-rich mobile applications.

Bye Bye Buttons

This is where the touchscreen phone with its large visual screen interface comes into the picture. Today, this is the replacement to the antiquated button control and small display screen based phones of several years ago.

The end result of this mix is the rapid replacement of old phones for new touchscreen devices and the deliberate obsolescence of older networks in favor of 3G and its even more powerful successor, 4G. In many countries, anything older than 3G is no longer even available and almost all new phones being sold feature a predominantly buttonless touchscreen design.

As of the most recent figures, there were over 1.6 billion 3G/4G mobile subscribers worldwide (up from only 297 million in 2007)

Mobile Operating Systems and App Marketplaces

Finally, we come to the growth of mobile device operating systems. Since modern smartphones are more like computers than cell phones in a classical sense, they naturally needed a fully-functional OS of their own. Because of this, several companies such as Research in Motion, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all came out with their own competing mobile operating systems that gave a full-scale interface to digital media access and software applications compatibility

Thanks to all these features, the mobile apps development landscape has exploded like few other industries ever have in history. Since 2010-2011, app marketplaces have grown for mobile operating system developers such as Apple with its iOS platform, Google’s Android OS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

As of 2012, the Apple mobile apps market alone houses over 600,000 smartphone apps and has had over 30 billion downloads to date. Similarly, the Android OS market gives access to hundreds of thousands of additional applications and sees some 3 million downloads per day from its online platform.

These applications are developed by both major mobile market players and, even more overwhelmingly, hundreds of smaller third-party companies and teams that sell them through the major apps markets for a majority percentage of revenues per app. This mutually-beneficial sales relationship ensures an extremely robust mobile app market that constantly sees new innovation flooding in.

Mobile Website Design

Finally, the last major branch of the mobile development landscape—with the enormous growth similar to that of mobile device development—is mobile website design. The ever-faster Internet connectivity of modern devices virtually guaranteed their use for web browsing. As of early 2012, some 61% of American users were regularly accessing the internet through their smartphones or tablets, and of those, at least 30 to 40% are almost exclusively mobile Internet users who rarely if ever bother browsing from a desktop or laptop.

Naturally, this creates an immense demand for web design that’s compatible with the much smaller and simpler screens of mobile phones and tablet devices, and this search for mobile web compatibility in online domain pages has been the latest trend in web design.

Thanks to this trend, most major site owners today have both a regular site for their URLs and a mobile-friendly version that is either automatically accessible as a special domain with its own mobile designated prefix or as a downloadable app that functions as a website. In general, these mobile versions of pages are visually stripped down versions of the full-scale original website that maintain core functionality.

Do you remember the “old days” of flip phones and low bandwidth? Did you develop or utilize primitive phone apps from years ago? What do you predict will be next for the mobile industry?

This is a very common scenario to encounter, and it’s hardly a reason to worry. Being a brilliant app designer doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re also a brilliant financier. You’d be very lucky to have both complementary skill sets, but you may have accidentally (but wisely) used the “focus on one task at a time” approach to your benefit. Now that your app is ready for release, let’s focus on the next steps of monetizing your app and rewarding you well for your thoughtful app design and meticulous work.

Designing Apps is Hard… Selling Apps May Be Harder

The first concept to keep in mind is that apps are not “get rich quick” schemes. (I’m sure you already knew that.) Getting rich with your app alone is as tough as tough could be. In fact, only about 5% of all app developers become truly “rich” thanks to their app. This shouldn’t be discouraging; if you’re like most developers, you may need a family of several apps to garner a good return on your work. You’re on the right track; those kinds of families are built one app at a time.

For a better statistical understanding of your competition, here is a quick summary of all the benchmarks you need to meet if you want your app to rank in one of Apple’s lists:

Appearing on Apple’s Top Lists (# of daily downloads required)

• Top 25 free Apps (38,400 daily downloads needed)
• Top 25 paid Apps (3,530 daily downloads needed)
• Top 25 Free game apps (25,300 daily downloads needed)
• Top 25 paid game apps (2,280 daily downloads needed)

As you can see, the competition is definitely stiff, but keep in mind that downloads are not sales, and that your ultimate goal is revenue, not simply appearing on a Top 25 list, as thrilling as that would be.

App Monetization Methods

There are four basic tried-and-true methods used to gain value from apps:

1. Getting paid by the app store up front for each download. As you know, prices are usually between $1 and $10, and most mobile markets send 70% of that sales revenue to developers.
2. Enabling in-app advertisements. This is fairly common and straightforward. Revenue is directly proportional to the amount of active users.
3. Developing sophisticated up-sales within the app in the form of in-app purchases, such as weapon upgrades for games and new features for more practical apps.
4. Gaining exposure with your app and using it to promote other projects. There are quite a few apps that return value simply by increasing the exposure and visibility of other projects, businesses, or brands.

As you know, the competition in the mobile marketplace is fierce, and sticking to one of these basic methods will not guarantee you a rewarding profit whatsoever. What other methods could you try? Well, there are few unorthodox methods that fall outside the standard mobile marketing playbook.

Sales Commissions

Affiliate marketing has been popular for some time on the web. If you have an audience and point them towards certain carefully-chosen purchases, a merchant will often reward you for any resulting sales with a percentage-based commission. With enough users, you’d be surprised how much revenue you can gain from a properly-designed app that provides the author comissions for each sale of recommended products or services.

One of the strongest aspects of this method is that you never have to ask any of your app users for payment directly. Price tags, whether on the apps or on in-app purchases are a major pain point for customers, and it can turn them away even if your app is well worth the price. This commission-based revenue method allows you to stay competitive while still garnering a fiscal reward for your difficult development work.

Building Your App Family… And Your Users

Savvy app developers are gaining value by cross-pollinating users from one app to another. This generally occurs when a user installs a new app after a recommendation (complete with a call to action) coming from an existing app that’s already installed on their mobile device. This is how that aforementioned “family of apps” can work in your favor. While this doesn’t result in immediate revenue, it accomplishes a larger, more loyal user base, as well as a form of diversity that will serve you well if one of your apps suddenly becomes unpopular. (Finance experts love talking about diversity, and this is a perfect example of its benefits.)

A user will naturally have more trust and more patience when using an app that’s been vouched or vetted by one that’s already earned its keep on their limited mobile screen space. And, some of this trust may translate back to the author company and serve you well in your monetizing efforts.

Employing Multiple Monetization Strategies

The vast majority of apps, whether smash hits or average apps, usually employ only one method for gaining revenue. It rarely occurs to developers to diversify their in-app income possibilities, but the decision to use multiple monetization strategies alone can offer some extremely valuable insights.

Not only does this multifaceted technique create multiple income streams from a single app, but it allows developers to identify which revenue models are most effective. Using this information, they can capitalize (literally) on particularly effective revenue ideas and abandon those that aren’t as effective.

Despite sounding totally obvious, this is a very commonly overlooked process for developers, many of whom refine their app to the last pixel but never even begin refining their revenue methods. Without multiple revenue streams, there is no comparison to be made, and this in turn makes it very difficult to determine which revenue ideas are working, which aren’t, and which are comparatively better than others for your unique purposes.

How do you monetize your apps? Have you found certain methods to be more effective than others? Do you feel that the pay-per-download option is reserved only for high-budget, well-established apps, or can an average, typical app still command a small up-front price tag?

Offering a robust free app is a proven method for conquering mobile competition and winning customer trust, but it doesn’t reward the developer for their investment of time and money. Quite a few mobile apps ranging from games to strictly-business productivity apps have struck the difficult balance of besting their competition in the app market, building a large user base, and simultaneously reaping a solid return on thier investment. Let’s look at a few examples of apps with well-designed in-app purchase models.

CamScanner

The CamScanner app for iOS and Android is a remarkably versatile app that allows multi-page scanning straight from your smartphone. Even the free version offers serious functionality to professionals who need to digitize documents quickly and easily. Users can scan documents, align and crop them digitally, and email them directly from the app. As an in-app purchase, CamScanner offers fax technology that enables users to send their digitized documents to fax machines. This impressive app can effectively replace a scanner, but equally impressive is the in-app purchase of faxing, which effectively replaces a fax machine as well. This in-app purchase serves as an attractive complement to a free, fully-functional app that already has all of your important documents on file and ready to fax.

CSR Racing

This popular racing game garners a 5-star rating and is free to download, offering little reason to refrain from trying it. While the game itself is free, in-game currencies and vehicle upgrades as sold as in-app purchases for real-world currency. Some of these upgrades cost upward of $50. If those in-app purchase prices sound too steep to be a viable profit strategy, consider this: NaturalMotion Games Limited, the creator of CSR Racing made $12 million in a single month exclusively through in-app purchases.

Best Practices for In-App Purchases

If you examine mobile apps with effective in-app purchase models, you’ll find quite a few commonalities. The technique has proven to be effective for a vast variety of app types, but they all shared the following qualities:

• The free apps are fully-functional and offer value before any in-app purchase is made. This may seem counterintuitive to many mobile marketers, and old-school salesman might feel that offering full functionality and simply hoping that the customer takes you up on in-app purchases is a perilously risky model that could sink and entire mobile project. But, from a purely objective standpoint, it seems to work. Games and business apps alike have been able to thrive exclusively on in-app purchases that are purely supplemental to free apps that are already great.
• The apps make the most of developer tools and recommended techniques. Companies like Apple still get their 30% cut of each in-app purchase, so it should come to no surprise that they offer extensive documentation and developer support to help mobile publishers make the most of this nascent pricing model. Android has its own set of helpful developer resources, which serves as another testament that the curators of these mobile platforms like the business model as much as the customers and end users.
• The apps are impeccably designed. Offering an app as a free download is a great way to get it installed on customer’s mobile devices, but in order to persuade them to make in-app purchases, your free offerings have to be truly impressive—not just free. Case in point: the two examples above (CamScanner and CSR Racing) both boast stellar ratings. If your app doesn’t garner a similar response from customers, it’s likely not ready to reward you with in-app purchases, and your time is better spent refining the app instead of monetizing it.

Conclusion

In-app purchases (IAP) offer a new and notable option when it comes to competing with similar apps, convincing customers to download your app, and reaping fiscal rewards from your hard work. It only works well under the right conditions, but examples prove that it has immense potential. Developers that implement this technique properly and carefully can end up with wildly-popular, seriously-lucrative mobile applications.

Have you considered implementing an in-app purchase model for your mobile apps? Does it favor the customer too much, or is it an overlooked opportunity for mobile developers to win customers and unlock unprecedented earnings?

It’s possible that many of the apps at the top of the pile owe their success to a large streak of luck. With enough developers crafting apps to solve common customer problems, at least one or two will inevitably shine and outperform their imperfect competitors.

But, in all likelihood, the best apps on the market didn’t get to where they are purely by luck. They got there with careful planning, steady iterations, and by doing something that developers overlook all too often — studying and besting their competition.

In that sense, the mobile software industry is just like any other. If you fail to keep an eye on your competition, you can expect to live or die based on either luckily and miraculously beating your competition despite being oblivious to its weaknesses, or — more likely — watching your app slowly fall into obscurity and blend in with a sea of flawed fellow apps.

Fortunately, you don’t have to act on hunches or gambles; there are quite a few services that let you meticulously study your competition, as well as the latest developments in the mobile marketplace in general. Here are four notable services that can help you get a firm grasp on your competition and pave the way for your app to offer truly distinct appeal.

App Annie

App Annie offers a detailed, up-to-the-minute look at the app ecosystem, and it has a few clever accommodations of the data that are very helpful for obtaining a macro-level understanding of what’s selling and what’s changing in the mobile marketplace. Their Top 5 Matrix provides a bird’s eye view of the most popular paid apps and free apps in each major category, as well as the highest grossing apps for each niche. Viewers can also explore the app market trends for any country with an iTunes presence. Were you aware that the most popular apps in the United Kingdom are vastly different from those in the United States? If you didn’t, you could be missing insights, sales, and opportunities by ignoring this readily-available data.

App Annie’s matrix provides a fast overview of the market’s latest hits.

App Annie has distinct sets of data for the iPhone, iPad, and the Google Play Store, and these distinctions can be surprising. If you thought that apps generally enjoy the same success (or struggle with the same lack of notoriety) across all mobile platforms, you should take a second look using App Annie’s mobile metrics.

AppTrace

AppTrace offers similar mobile market information, but it’s presented in an app-specific way that allows you to study historic information for specific apps. If you already have a clear idea of who your competition is, you can look at your rival’s performance over time, including the upticks or slides in sales caused by new version releases. If you’re wondering if your competitor’s latest updates caused a rise in rank or a nosedive, AppTrace is the ideal place to find out.

AppTrace is 100% free, and they even offer to deliver a weekly app data report via email, leaving you little excuse to stay in the blind and every opportunity to keep an eye on your competition.

Xylogic

Xylogic calls itself “the most comprehensive source of free app stats,” and it’s hard to argue against that claim. Not only does Xylogic offer robust monthly reports on every mobile market and platform, but they also have resources that guide you towards turning their information into actionable next steps. This is a welcome complement to the reports, especially for data heads who become hypnotized by page after page of riveting results and never end up making use of the insights within.

Xylogic spans every major mobile market, including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. If you’re undecided on which mobile market to enter with your latest app idea, Xylogic’s comparative statistics would be a great way to make an objective determination and a confident, informed decision on which platform offers you the best chance of success.

AppMonsta

AppMonsta probably wins the award for the most detailed data. They offer their mobile market insights in the form of a sortable, flexible spreadsheet, usually boasting over 15,000 rows of data. For developers who want very specific figures and who enjoy manipulating their own data instead of enjoying pretty, more palatable reports from the other mobile market watchers, AppMonsta will be a perfect fit.

One particularly impressive offering form AppMonsta is their Sentiment Analysis, where they take subjective, often-long-winded app reviews from customers and aggregate and quantify the information with an “Exuberance Index,” an “Addiction Index,” and a “Crash Index.” That’s a lot easier than pouring over more than 60 million hand-written app reviews.

Conclusion

If you haven’t been keeping track of your competition, or if you’ve been basing your business decisions on hunches, rumors, or personal experiences, you’d be well-advised to gain a more global perspective and watching the mobile marketplace with your choice of mobile market research services. Don’t take a shot in the dark with your next app; study your competition, probe for weakness, and build with a purpose!

Do you keep a sharp eye on mobile marketplace metrics? Do you have a preferred source?

It’s been about 6 months since I had a chat with TheAppBuilder team. I have been following JamPot’s updates ever since, and I must say they’ve been working so hard that the product is now completely transformed. While the core of their business still lies in providing a super easy workflow to create multi-platform mobile apps, they have implemented some serious changes and new features.

This time, I interviewed Michael Barr, co-founder of JamPot. We discussed their latest updates and future plans.

The obvious question: how did the whole thing start?

It started just about two years ago. It was just me and another technologist. We had both been working in various sections of the IT community. I was mainly involved in building content management web solutions. We had both been asked to start thinking about mobile solutions for a number of clients. We got together and said: there must be a better way to build mobile apps fast.

We were predominantly focused on iOS apps at the time. I pretty much enjoyed building stuff in Objective-C, but not everyone has those technical skills. So, from there we solidified the idea, secured the funding, and found few like-minded guys. Long story short: we brought TheAppBuilder to where it is today. And that is far beyond what we expected.

Tell me about your story with the CMS you originally worked on. TheAppBuilder could be looked at as a type of CMS. How do they relate?

It was at a small company in Northern-Ireland called WebBelief. It’s focused on delivering content managed web solutions based on the .NET platform. This business model was successful in the days when you could charge a reasonable amount for a content-managed website. However everybody knows that it was gonna be a short-lived time in the web. Many of the solutions move away from being developer tools to cater directly to the end user.

This is exactly the idea we have behind TheAppBuilder. We didn’t want to build another developer tool after we’d seen what happened when professional software such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver and CMS options like WordPress did to the industry. We wanted to allow anyone to create an app, same way that WordPress works with websites. We want to cater to the small business owner who just wants a presence on mobile marketplaces. He/she might not have coding skills, but they really shouldn’t need any to use TheAppBuilder. Those who want to take things further and have some HTML5 skills can use some really fancy techniques. We’ve even seen people building and embedding games using HTML5 canvas.

Are you planning to implement some kind of e-commerce solution to help app owners boost their business through the app?

We have a pretty extensive roadmap with some exciting ideas. Payments is one of those things we are currently looking at. People are constantly asking us how they might enable purchases within the app. We are looking at some of the big players in the payments and e-commerce field to see how could we implement their technology. There are some other interesting third-party solutions that we also would like to enable in our apps.

Let’s move on to the updates. The last time I spoke to you guys, the product had just gone public. How has the product been evolving in the past 6 months?

When I look back and see how many things have happened it’s almost scary!

In the early days, in order to deliver the apps across all major platforms, we had to use a few specific tools. One of these was the Adobe Air platform, which really helped us to deal with both Android and iOS. Although Air was a good introduction to the world of cross-platform development, the apps produced were not of sufficient quality for us to use, and our customers were not happy with the user experience that the cross-compiled solution provided.

We have since moved on to completely native clients: Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, and C# for Windows Phone. We have also launched our new Windows 8 client, and we are the first app building company to support native Windows 8 apps. (Check out the Steve Ballmer app in the Windows 8 store.) This is especially interesting, because Microsoft are focusing a lot on the transition between PC’s, tablets, and mobile phones and providing a consistent UI and environment for the user, regardless of what device they choose to consume their content.

For a while, we kept Adobe Air for the desktop editor, but then we realized it could be far better if we moved everything to a fully web-based interface. That’s probably the biggest change. The whole app creation workflow is completely web-based from start to finish, and it’s accessible even from tablets.

We also added a whole new templating mechanism. To achieve this, we really had to look into how people use our app builder. If you start creating an app, the first thing you will find in TheAppBuilder Wizard is a selection of templates. If you are about to create an app for a restaurant, you can pick the Restaurant/Bar template, which is geared up with the relevant tabs and functionalities. Of course, you can customize all of these just a few steps later. We are planning to allow our users to submit their self-designed premium templates, which others can purchase. This will be a great way to allow our community to feed in and even return a bit of their time investment as well.

One of the most exciting new addition is Maps. It’s an easy way to set the geolocation of your business or any of your upcoming events. This can also be displayed in an augmented reality view on compatible devices. Up until now, it has been only using Google Maps’ API, however with the launch of iOS6, it’s set to work with Apple’s map back-end too.

We added a few other new sections as well. Gallery provides an easy solution to upload and manage your photos. Lists are extremely useful if you want to upload a selection of products. We also made a separate section for events. Apart from Twitter and Facebook, we also have YouTube gallery, which provides easy access to your videos. Of course, if you need any additional functionality you can always add an HTML5 tab and apply your own custom code.

We also introduced private apps. We saw a need for enterprise apps that aren’t designed for the public. These provide a way to distribute news and updates for a selected group of users, and we are working with some large enterprise clients who are looking to disseminate internal information to their employees via custom mobile apps.

One of our most recent updates includes nesting. This allows users to place any type of module within a standard list view, which opens up a world of possibilities to create very powerful apps. For example, a single content section can contain many sub-galleries, a news feed can be broken down into different sub-sections, users could even create product catalogs with categories and sub-categories.

Do you see any potential in NFC (Near Field Communication) at the moment?

Absolutely, we could probably do great things with it, but we need to wait until manufacturers catch up on the hardware side first. Then the technology can become mainstream and it will be worth dealing with it.

Do you still keep up with the look and UX of the different platforms or do you plan to go your own way?

We remain completely native, and we have embraced the features and behavior of the various operating systems even more closely. Our Android apps are now in line with JellyBean’s native UI, and the iOS apps bring you the distinct iPhone that is familiar to iOS users.

If you build an app, you also get an iPad beta version of it. This is a slightly different accommodation that’s tailor-made to this faster and larger device. The main point is that the app owners really just need to take care of the content and we do the hard work of releasing the apps on as many major platforms as possible.

Are there any other ways you are planning the community to get involved?

In the next few months we are planning to open up a developer API. That will allow people to discover the app structure via web services, which will allow developers to build native clients for devices that we don’t currently support.

Now you offer the HTML5 version of the applications for free. Do see growing interest in web solutions opposed to native?

We are starting to see a huge uptick in the web solutions and maybe a bit of a slow down on the native side. This is partially due to the strict approval processes of the app stores. Apple, Google, and Microsoft really wants to control what goes public, and this can sometimes make gaining approval difficult. Not necessarily because of the content itself, but the structure and behavior of the apps.

If you put together an HTML5 web app, you have the freedom to do almost anything you want. This free, easy solution allows regular people to create apps for purposes like birthday parties, or perhaps for non-profit organizations to stay in touch with their community in a really cost-efficient way. Some high-end applications may require access to hardware that only native code can allow, but HTML5 is quickly closing the gap to native code.

At the moment we have over 50,000 apps submitted and we see more every day. We’ve been really lucky to have such momentum without putting any particular effort into advertising.

Have you created any apps with TheAppBuilder? Do you feel that HTML5 capabilities are coming progressively closer to that of native code, or do you think that truly robust apps will always need Objective-C, Java, or C# to meet their needs?