Not every app has a flappy ending

If you build it, they will come. Well, that obviously is not true. Just publishing your app in the App Store or Play Store will not be sufficient. On both Google Play and the Apple App Store, 9 out of 10 apps that are published by developers see fewer than 5,000 downloads, ever. There are so many apps already available. How will people ever notice your app?

No matter how good your app is, it will drown in an ocean of apps without a good plan. To succeed, you first need to ask yourself some important questions:

• Who needs your app?
• How will people find out about your app?
• Why would someone download your app?
• Why would they keep coming back to use it?
• How would others hear about the app?
• What stops others from copying your app once it is successful?

Apps that make it to the top of the charts dwarf apps that don't by a large order of magnitude. There's a case to be made about long-tail characteristics in a marketplace. Amazon is known for having said that they make more money selling books that were never stocked earlier than the ones that are. Their marketplace has strong, long-tail characteristics, with several niche books finding an audience.

However, the App Store dynamics don't work well in favor of niche segments. The discoverability of an app continues to be a challenge, making it hard for publishers to succeed in niche categories. Apart from discoverability itself, there's just a little more friction involved in someone having to download an app over just visiting a mobile website.