Shaquille O’Neal is known for many things. He’s one of the most dominant centers in basketball history. He’s also a spokesman, an investor, a horrible rapper and an even worse actor. But as we discovered earlier this week, he might also be the world’s biggest fan of paid mobile apps.
According to himself, he spends $1,000 per week on mobile apps – mostly hunting games.
“Last week I bought like 20 deer hunter games,” he told a reporter at SXSW. “I like hunting the deer on my phone.”
Clearly. Even if these numbers are a bit exaggerated (I’ve done the math and it doesn’t quite add up), they help us make an important point regarding the mobile app landscape: The paid app is not dead. And not just because of The Big Aristotle.
Back in October, TechCrunch noted that It’s Over For Paid Apps, With A Few Exceptions, in which they discussed the overwhelming tendency of developers to keep their applications free, but to make up for it in other ways (e.g. advertising). As the title suggests, there are a few exceptions. Writes Sarah Perez:
So where might paid apps still have a shot? In other words, are there categories where those specialized apps are selling? We spoke to app analytics firm Distimo, which examined grossing data on the App Store’s leaderboards to determine where paid apps are doing well.
In the following categories, the firm found that at least half, if not more of the top ten apps are currently paid: Productivity, Medical, Business, Healthcare & Fitness, Navigation, Catalogs, Lifestyle, Photo & Video, Travel, and Weather.
They forgot deer-hunting games, but it’s a good list nonetheless. And since paid apps still occupy a spot in the mobile landscape, I wanted to share a few lessons – inspired by Shaq, no less – that are worth reinforcing for their respective development teams.
- Expectations of quality are higher: Your app might only cost a dollar, but if it suffers from performance issues, has security vulnerabilities or lacks a consistent user experience, users will still complain about the price before anything else. This is obviously magnified for apps with higher price tags. Bottom Line: Asking a user to pay for an app – no matter what the price is – raises the stakes in terms of quality expectations.
- There is always a free alternative: I’m not much of a deer-hunting enthusiast, but I would imagine that for every one paid deer-hunting app, there are ten free versions. If you want your app to succeed (and to keep making money) is has to exceed the free version in every single category. No exceptions. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before they abandon ship.
- Quality is Your Business Model: By now you know the many ways in which “free” apps make money. There’s advertising, in-app purchases, subscriptions and so forth. But for many paid mobile apps, the only source of revenue is from the actual download itself. In fact, one of the main reasons why people pay for mobile apps is to avoid the ads from the freemium version. So if you’re dangling a two-star app in front of users, it has a direct impact on your bottom line.
Anyway, it seems like there are only two routes to launching a successful paid mobile app these days. One is to develop a new $1,000 deer-hunting app for Shaq every week. The other is to focus on quality. Choose wisely.
The post What Can Shaq Teach Us About App Quality? appeared first on Software Testing Blog.