Mobile applications had generated a revenue of $3.3 billion in the year 2023 with a growth rate of 18% compared to 2022. Indians have downloaded apps 26.4 billion times in the year and the usage is growing exponentially due to infrastructure development, increased usage of mobile in all demographics, reduced data cost, etc. Indian startup ecosystems are fueling this growth with the introduction of various online products and services that offer convenience, competitive pricing and increased experience to the targeted audiences in the respective sectors. For example, quick delivery services in food, logistics, groceries and home services have received warm responses from the audience, even in tier 4 cities of India.
The business promotes mobile applications to their users to enhance the experience and engagement.
Improved experience
Mobile platforms offer better and simple user journeys to the users making it easier to purchase products or book services. With data stored and locations managed, the user journeys can be completed in very minimal steps. Also, the post purchase or booking tracking has also been made simpler.
User engagement
The mobile applications enhance the engagement with push notifications, chat conversation with better UX, real time location tracking, etc. Push notifications made it easier for users to get real time updates and track without even opening the apps. It’s also possible to re-engage users through the app notifications if users do not use the app for sometime. Zomato’s app notifications have gone viral in the recent past with personalised and emotional messages on food.
Convenience
If the user is frequently using the services or purchasing products from a platform it’s advisable to promote mobile applications to those users. For example, the automatic location selection and mapping to user address, displaying restaurants based on locations reduces the effort of the user to avoid many steps in booking food.
Easy payment
UPI has changed the way customers are making payments while booking services. The number of steps to make payment and dependencies like waiting for OTP have been fully mitigated with the introduction of mobile apps like Google Pay and PhonePe. UPI has witnessed 172 billion transactions in the year 2024.
As said, mobile apps nowadays are critical for B2C as well as B2B companies to grow their users and positively engage them. But, as we go to develop them we should consider your audience. This means, before taking the decision you must have clarity on who your audiences are? What’s the objective you achieve with the mobile platform? What kind of or level of service do they expect from the mobile app? How frequently they expect to be using the mobile application?
Platform selection
This is based on two factors, the frequency of usages and the geography. If your services are not frequently used and that does not require frequent follow-up; consider enhancing your web platform compatible for mobile. This requires enhancing the user experience as good as a mobile application, compatible with all major browsers in mobile platforms, and loaded as fast as mobile app cookies to provide a better experience. Two, if your audiences are in the US (United States) or Middle East countries, you must prioritize iOS applications, but if the focus is South East Asia or Africa, Android apps should be your priority. As per statistics, approximately 95% of the mobile users are using Android devices and 5% by rest. But, at the same time disposable income to spend money on Luxury products are always with users who use iOS and a very certain percentage of android devices.
Objectives of the application
As the business expands, you need to define the objectives of the mobile application, primary and secondary. This helps you better design the UX focusing on achieving core objectives and defining the user journey delivering results. The objectives can be a better and easier checkout process, enhanced experience, frequent sales, create better conversation, etc. Identification of objectives and prioritization is critical for success.
User experience
This is defined based on the objectives you are prioritised. The user experience is derived from multiple factors, such as the easy check-out process, booking journey, easy to identify products, faster loading, easy signing, automatic data fetching, etc contribute to user experience.
Security
Users should feel that your application is safe to use like your credentials are stored securely, payment options are up to industry standards, customer mobile number is not shared with a vendor, etc. You should make sure that users’ personal and financial information is well protected.
Feedback option
You should provide the option for customers to share feedback on product or services you offered and a mechanism in place to acknowledge the feedback. The acknowledgement brings trust among users that you are accepting the feedback and taking action to improve in future. Also, the option to reach out to customer support, either through chat or call, is critical for creating trust in services.
Technology selection
Based on the complexity of the application that you design it is necessary to adopt the better technology and architecture that is robust and scalable. A basic E-Commerce might be requiring a MySQL DB, PHP and flutter application to develop it. But, if you want to build a personalized, data-driven, complex e-commerce application it’s better to use a mix of MySQL and noSQL database, python and node based APIs and react front end followed by react native application.
User Journey
The user journeys must be simple with less number of clicks to final action. Always remember, the more clicks the higher the risk of losing customers.
Analytics
The user journeys must be tracked and analyzed using appropriate data, analytics platforms like Google Analytics, MS Clarity, etc. The journeys must be closely tracked and it’s necessary to enhance based on the data received.
