Introduction
It is important to note that the market for mobile applications is growing and developing fast enough. According to the latest news, research, and publications, the volumes of smartphone sales are stably high. The updated estimates revealed that by the end of 2016, the mobile market would bring nearly 67 billion dollars. However, despite the rate of the market development, it should be stressed out that the mobile applications market is close to saturation, and developers need to conduct thorough market research to be able to assess the viability of their new project. The aim of this research paper is to analyze the application called UniApp that our team has come up with and to identify whether it is feasible to implement such a project or not.
Potential Opportunities and Threats
To begin with, our team came up with an idea of an application that will be convenient and useful for both the customers and businesses in the industry. Our team would like to introduce such a solution that can be downloaded at no charge, will not engage in complex IT activities though furnishing value to all the parties. However, prior to dwelling upon the project opportunities, it is essential to describe the mission and vision of the company and to characterize the industry background.
In general, at present, there is fierce competition for products and services in the application market. Most companies are looking for such a competitive advantage that will allow them to maintain their position. This situation is characteristic of the market for mobile applications as well, at which our product is aimed. It is important to emphasize that before introducing the service, it is necessary to conduct preliminary research, which will focus on the determination of the target audience.
This will help to define the practices of product promotion and strategic actions that will promote the service in different life cycles and so on. In this regard, conducting the opportunity analysis will enable developing a strategy to promote the application, to avoid a situation when the service will not meet the needs of customers or when the target audience is defined incorrectly. However, it is equally important to monitor the service constantly and to analyze the market situation even after the launch of the project. It is necessary to apply the right marketing strategy when the service passes through the stages of the life cycle.
More specifically, there are over 1 million applications in the AppStore. This creates an environment in which the developers have to fight for the users, which increases the cost of their involvement. Each advertising installation of the application for no fee will cost the company about two dollars. Since our application will be free, one advertising download will cost approximately 2.25 dollars on iOS and 1.5 dollars on Android. However, it will be difficult to recover every two dollars per user.
Thus, searching for ways to solve this problem is the main task of our team. Aggressive marketing of companies successful in financial terms also affects the complexity of the situation. Those applications, which bring a good income to the developers, create a situation when traffic for the application is purchased on a large scale, and it will complicate the competition and will continue to raise the price for downloading.
Moreover, the level of promotional tools in the market is quite low. In this regard, it will be difficult to attract traffic. Also, in this market, it is difficult to track the source of mobile applications downloading. The complexity of analytics does not give an opportunity to carry out effective marketing campaigns. The rapid growth of the mobile market led to the fact that the leading role is played by large companies and private investors. This resulted in increased competition and the need for a large budget. Needless to say that the rating system of applications makes the weak applications even weaker and vice versa.
Purpose and Objectives
In terms of the service that we would like to offer, it will be an application called UniApp. It will be a unified mobile app for all the related applications that will serve as a centralized platform. The purpose of it will be to combine the customer data for all the applications in a single place to spare them from the excessive data entry and app merging. The initial idea came from the daily need to use a variety of different mobile apps to take notes, manage and keep track of the core activities, and to measure the expenses.
To be able to do that a regular person has to have numerous apps on their smartphones and tablets and manage them separately while our concept allows eliminating the majority of steps and integrating all the user data in one system from which other apps will be able to obtain the necessary information. In addition, this solution will allow addressing another problem, which is the loss of customer data. The main market opportunity of this solution can be outlined as follows: UniApp will secure the data for all the applications in a unified manner from where it will be easily accessible. Consequently, UniApp will be a single centralized platform for app-based data.
The advantage of using our solution can be expressed in an approach when the users will able to admission their private information in any of the associated applications with due security and will not need to waste their time entering the data in each new system every time they access an app. Moreover, this method of information handling will facilitate easier big data analysis. Unfortunately, our team has little experience in this market; however, the opportunity analysis will allow us to build on that experience.
Nevertheless, there is no existing intellectual property to license, but the team can consider IP the app. It is worthy of noting that the emergence of the application will be unique in its nature since previously only gadget synchronization was possible but with the introduction of UniApp data sync across all the apps will be possible as well.
Market and Data Analysis
In terms of the market, UniApp will be aimed at the mobile application industry. Currently, the approach, at which we are targeting, is used by 15% of the industry developers. It is the approach BaaS, which is backend-as-a-service. It should be mentioned that, at the moment, crowdsourcing on such websites like Kickstarter and similar is perceived as the most feasible option. Overall, this market is considered attractive due to the fact that it can allow reaching big profits in the future.
As discussed earlier, the experts in the industry have estimated the profit of the app market to be close to 67 billion USD by the end of this year, and they predict it to be even higher in the next year. The revenues justify the mobile app market growth and expansion due to the decreasing mobile data expenses and the increasing use of smartphones. In addition, more and more developers offer their services for free or at a low cost, which has been promoted by high advertising.
Most importantly, this industry is not subjected to the economic crisis and volatility characteristic of the current situation in the global stage. Consequently, the market has the potential for further growth and profit. In particular, the users have performed almost 100 billion downloads, and the tendency is for an increase. The service is targeted at the European and American markets mainly, and the age of the segment ranges from 16 to 40.
Primary Data
According to the survey conducted among the potential app users, they are in need of a single secure place where they would store their personal information and from where it can be transferred to the referring platforms. As per their responses, 99% of them use Dropbox. According to the information gained from the Internet, almost 200 million customers use it, which allows predicting the growth of UniApp since it offers a service that can be applied to this concept. The survey also revealed that 96% of the interviewed would utilize the proposed solution. It allows stating that bearing this in mind, the potential market size of UniApp can be equated to more than 190 billion clients.
In the same manner, the surveyed were asked to clarify whether they pay for the service or not and it turned out that more than 4,75% of them pay for it. Consequently, the customer segment evidences the efficiency of the proposed projects and suggests decent growth even during the first year. Overall, it should be stated that the survey revealed that the mission of the company could be fulfilled and the project is viable.
Secondary Data
Internet research revealed that prospective customers mainly use Evernote, iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive to store their information. However, these are data synchronization tools for gadgets whereas UniApp will be a solution for independent data saving. Apart from that, currently, the app developers spend a lot of time developing data storing options, which requires a lot of resources, time, and often results in the poorer interface. Meanwhile, the new app will spare them from managing their back ends. As stated earlier, BaaS will be utilized to implement the project; therefore, UniApp will take full responsibility for data storage and securing.
In order to reach potential customers, such tools as social networks, App Store, Hackathon, and the app’s website will be used. Most importantly, there is no such application at that moment, and it is considered that this way it will be easier to position the service in the market. It was mentioned above that the potential threat is the possibility that large-scale companies might pursuit a similar project. To be more precise, such BaaSes as StackMob or file storage services as iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox are the potential rivals in that matter. Considering the fact that they already have gained their market share and have a rich audience, these providers do put the project in danger; nonetheless, there is a possibility to IP UniApp.
Barriers to Entry and Project Outline
One of the core difficulties in project implementation is the necessity to gain a connection with the developers of other applications. It might take time and effort to link the application databases with UniApp. Nonetheless, when this task is accomplished and the project is licensed, the rivals will no longer be able to enter the market with a similar proposal. In terms of the business model, the steps to the project implementation are as follows:
- Attracting the developers to work on the platform;
- Attaining beta testers;
- Developing the MVP (Model-View-Presenter);
- Linking the referring apps to UniApp;
- Fixing bugs;
- Releasing the application;
- Attaining featuring;
- Constructing the user base.
The Results
Based on the data and project objectives, it can be concluded that we should not aim at making the application fee as a primary factor for success. This can be justified by the fact that getting to the top of free applications is hard enough; respectively, it will require a lot of downloads to make our app gain leadership. For example, in the US, it takes about 90,000 downloads to become a leader, which is indeed costly.
Moreover, the possibility exists that the app will have to compete with the competitors that are more popular due to the fact that the idea is not licensed yet. In their turn, the influential companies have greater access to the investment and can make a more active promotion of their services.
However, there are several strategic decisions that can help to solve these problems. For example, it is possible to obtain featuring from Apple Inc. so that its wide audience becomes knowledgeable about UniApp. Also, a sharp increase in downloads can be facilitated by publications, though, this is not a stable channel to drive the traffic. In addition, it is possible to reduce the cost of downloads through virality. Nevertheless, the most important tool for determining the marketability of the service should be analytics. This is one of the leading issues in decision-making regarding the promotion of the mobile application.
In this approach, the team will be able to characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the services statistically and determine what it is necessary to analyze more accurately, for example, advertisements, metadata, and so on. In addition, the statistical analysis will improve the application itself, determine the competitiveness of the product, and allow planning the marketing strategy more comprehensively. Moreover, the analytics will provide an opportunity to assess the quality of the product, the number of conversions, the advantage over the rivals, and retention.
Conclusion
Thus, this research paper has reviewed and analyzed the project called UniApp from different perspectives. Initially, the project was developed as a free app available for all the users; however, the analysis revealed that this feature should not be the driving force of service introduction. A comprehensive analysis of the opportunities for the new service was conducted. The factors that may affect the popularity and success of the new product were considered, among which were such issues whether the product meets the expectations of consumers, focuses on strategic action and whether the team has a clear plan of work on the further implementation of the project. It was determined that most of these factors should be based on a preliminary study of the market that cannot be done without marketing research.