10 Characteristics of a Successful Mobile App

Everyone that invests in mobile app development aims to create a successful mobile app. While all have different goals for their mobile app, they all need a satisfied user base. But, with the never-ending stream of new apps in an app store, how can you make your app stand out and find your version of success for your mobile app?

To succeed in the competitive mobile app industry, you need to understand the app features every user expects. Based on these features, successful apps all share a common set of characteristics that propel them to the top.

10 Characteristics that Make a Mobile App Successful

To ensure the success of your mobile app, incorporate these 10 characteristics and app features almost every successful mobile app has.

1. Ease of Use for the Client

The building blocks of a fantastic user experience are a simple user interface and navigation that makes sense. With this one simple quality, you can ensure every user that opens your app can immediately understand its functionality and put it to use.

A straightforward app helps prevent users from looking for different apps that fulfill the same functionality as yours. While the capabilities of the features are important, ease of use is essential for the success of your app. After all, if your users cannot understand how to use your app, its potentially valuable functionality is useless.

2. Excellent Performance

Maintaining fast performance for your mobile app at all times is crucial. However, it is a balancing act between performance and user experience. While users never want to wait for an app to load, they also don’t want to open an ugly app that provides no visual feedback.

So, start getting in the habit of regularly checking the performance of your app on common mobile devices. This habit lets you gather regular data points so you can narrow down any features that might be impacting the performance of your app. Then, you can optimize those features to maintain consistent performance.

3. Privacy and Security

Incorporating privacy and security into your app helps build a sense of trust between you and your app’s users. This component is necessary for mobile apps in a wide range of industries and highly recommended for the rest. The financial services space and healthcare industries require specific privacy and security features to remain compliant.

While privacy and security might not be required in other industries, it still makes a huge impact on the comfort users feel when using your app. Security and privacy are essential prerequisites for a mobile app that can compete successfully.

4. Available on iOS and Android

To maximize your app’s potential user base, it must be available on Android and iOS. These are the two mobile operating systems used on virtually every smartphone available today. You can simplify the process of making your app available on both iOS and Android by using a cross-platform app development framework from the beginning. With this solution, startups can save money when they come into the market with a minimum viable product or MVP.

5. Frequent Updates

A never-ending cycle of bug fixes and functionality enhancements is necessary for a truly outstanding software application. It ensures that your mobile app will continue to enjoy widespread popularity as users continue to enjoy the features they need most. Maintaining regular app updates and adding new features keeps your app fresh for every user.

6. Configurability and Personalization

People have a strong preference for goods they can personalize. So, add personalization features in any circumstances you can without sacrificing usability. Top mobile applications offer a variety of customizable features, including backgrounds, configurations, colors, avatars, and more.

Give your customers the ability to customize the appearance and behavior of your app to suit their needs. Moreover, tailor your mobile app’s contents to your users by regularly assessing user demographics.

7. Analytics

Incorporating in-depth analytics into your mobile app ensures you can always gather the data you need to make an informed decision regarding your app. Analytics paves the way for optimizing an app’s performance and usability by tracking how users interact with your app.

You might already be aware of this, but promotional networks each offer performance measures that help firms measure their degree of success or failure. The same is true for mobile devices. By analyzing these metrics, you can significantly improve your understanding of how users engage with your mobile app. This becomes incredibly important because you must first evaluate how well your app currently works to find ways of improving it.

8. Search

Make sure to pay extra close attention to the search functionality of your app. A high-quality search feature prevents your users from wasting time looking for a specific feature or piece of information. So, make it a priority to ensure that users can access every function and page easily from a basic search.

9. Social Media Incorporation

Nowadays, apps tend to become popular largely through social media. So, always try to capitalize on your ability to grow your app with social media by incorporating share features. Sharing features lets your users easily share the features they like about your app with their audience. This simple feature can help propel your app into mainstream adoption.

10. Offline Functionality

Most mobile applications are only functional when connected to the Internet. There are certain categories of applications, such as those designed for complex businesses, for which offline functionality must be available regardless of whether or not it is desirable. However, this functionality is not required for all apps.

By understanding the use cases of your app and your target audience, you can determine whether or not you need to incorporate offline functionality. Typically, business and productivity apps always need offline functionality as they are most likely to be needed when your users do not have internet. But, a multiplayer game never needs offline functionality as a user does not depend on your app to complete tasks.

Conclusion

Technologies related to mobile applications are at the vanguard of the ongoing digital revolution. Despite mobile device use continuing to rise, standing out in a sea of competition is challenging even for the most experienced mobile app creators. But, with these 10 characteristics in mind, you can maximize your chances of creating a mobile app that becomes a success.