Tag: Android Mobile Application Development

Top Mobile App Metrics You Need To Absolutely Track In 2022

Posted on by Hari Patel

Table of Contents

What makes mobile app marketing thrive through the odds just like the world we live in?

Data. Still thinking how?

Let me make it simpler for you to understand. The most effective solution to analyze your app’s performance is to understand what all needs to be improved and move ahead in that direction of your business.

Mobile app metrics are one of the key parameters to assess the success of every marketer. From acquisition to discovery, user engagement rates to lifetime value, ad spend returns to breathe measurement, every marketer must answer these three questions before they begin tracking the mobile app metrics.

  1. How to increase the user rate and downloading rate for your app? ( user acquisition)
  2. How to engage the users for a longer duration in your app? (user engagement)
  3. How to convert the entire app business into a perfect monetization model? (in-app purchases or in-app advertising?)

The fact is, there is no such fixed parameter that can measure them down with some perfect answers. The hard reality lies in the struggle that the companies go through to drive quality users to their apps. So what does it take to turn the tide in your favor?

Get equipped to face the battle. I am going to share with you some of the most effective and most vital app metrics that are going to allow you to track and improve your acquisition, retention, engagement, app performance, and conversion. To save your hard work from getting wasted, believe there is always room left for improvement.

Head over to the below article that will help you in the pre-launch phase of your app development or even if you have already launched your awesome app out there.

Definition of Mobile App Metrics

Your app performance is known by the Mobile App Metrics. It keeps you well-informed about your users’ retention, engagement, conversion, and revenue generation. App metrics are the indicators of your marketing campaign performances. The metrics offer value only when they are combined with other forces that will enable you to move in the right direction.

So, firstly have an idea of the metrics that you wish to choose and analyze how they can help you assess your business, and then consider tracking them.

The Importance of Mobile App Metrics

the-importance of-mobile-app-metrics

It would be impossible for brands to check their app performances without mobile app metrics. The companies that are not succeeding in making precise mobile app metrics are always targeted and suggested to rely on broad measurement indicators like total downloads or total revenues. These indicators transform companies by taking the right actions at the right time and in the right direction.

The Crucial Mobile App Metrics

To put it straight, there are so many mobile app metrics that you must at least know and consider while tracking your mobile app performance. To name a few:

Tracking App Metrics Performance Indicators Tracking elements

Acquisition
  • New Downloads
  • Download Attributes
  • Downloads count on a monthly and weekly basis, App Growth tracking on daily basis
  • The source of fetching new users to optimize market expenditure and ROI improvement

Retention
  • Day 3 and Day 7 retention post your app launch
  • Monthly and weekly retention cohorts
  • Count of users accessing your app frequently for more than three to seven days after launching the app.
  • Active cohorts in the mobile app with duration and to check the in-app behavior impacting in positive and negative ways

Activation
  • Activation rate
  • Percentage of app downloads after the app launch.

Uninstall
  • Uninstalls on weekly and daily basis
  • Churn Rate
  • Uninstall numbers post the app’s growth
  • Users from the start to the end of a particular period. Beginning to know the app growth and revenue

Engagement
  • DAU/MAU
  • Average session length and frequency
  • Active users count for a given month or a day and find the user engagement
  • User count who rolls out your app and the amount of time the average session lasts leading on to know the effectiveness of your app engagement campaign and the user quality experience

Reachability
  • CTR (Click Through rates)
  • User percentage who clicks the push notifications, email links, and in-app notifications

App Performance Metrics

App Latency

It is defined as the amount of time an app wants to create a request and, thereby, get a response from the Application Programming Interface (API). Ideally, it’s expected to be as little as possible. However, zero latency is like a dream for the predictable future.

App Load Time

You would never want your mobile app users to abandon your app. You will wish they witnessed your offerings and so you should take care of app load time. The users like the mobile apps with swift processing and seamless navigation. And, it takes a long time to load, your app is going to suffer.

App Crashes

Similar to the app load time, app crashes are one more massive blockage in the way of your mobile app towards success. App crashes the abrupt shutting down of an app. Moreover, higher app load time is also a minor issue for app crash issues as the users need to begin everything from the start to accomplish their objectives.

So, you need to track your mobile app constantly crashes, precisely the following:

  • How often does your app crash?
  • How many times in a day does it crash while in use?
  • How many users get affected when your app crashes?
  • What were your users doing while the crashes occurred

Engagement App Metrics

engagement-app-metrics

This app metric helps to measure the app effectiveness and the number of connected users. The below metrics will keep you updated on the user engagement activities.

Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users

These metrics guide you to find the app’s usability and its engagement with the users. All those unique users who come to your app are DAUs (daily active users) and all those users who come to your app in a month are MAUs (Monthly active users). These metrics must start fetching better results over a certain range of time periods. And for that, you can use tools like push notifications and other elements to attract your customers.

How to calculate DAU/MAU?

Find out the number of users conducting action on your app on a monthly and daily basis.

Stickiness Ratio

This metric allows you to identify the value count derived by your app users from your mobile app. This is generally measured over months. The calculation comprises DAUs and MAUs count. As a result, the higher percentage indicates more people finding your app valuable and more engaging.

How to calculate Stickiness?

Stickiness Ratio = Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU) x 100

Churn Rate

This metric helps you identify the number of mobile app users who uninstall your app or cancel it or downgrade the subscriptions. The churn rate is not so pleasant metric, however, it can worsen when your valuable users churn and turn on the other apps. It gives a direct hit to your online business.

How to calculate Churn Rate?

Churn Rate = Users at the start of the period – users at the end of the period/users at the beginning of the period

Average Session Length

This metric helps you find out the average time limit your user spends on your app. However, it’s not a universal mobile app metric, but its applicability relies on the industry you operate. It offers you an idea of how valuable your users find your in-app content. That’s why it’s worth tracking this metric. Later, if they don’t find your app, you need to perform some A/B mobile application testing to know your user preferences.

How to calculate Average Session Length?

Average Session Length = Total time duration of all sessions (in seconds) during a defined time frame / total number of sessions through that same time frame.

Retention Rate

To know your rate of customers who are retained, this metric is helpful. As a result, you are going to become capable of seeing the number of customers you lose to churn. You may calculate the retention rate by comparing a group of users in the recent timeframe with those same app users in the past timeframe. You may also calculate this app metric using your app download or first login.

How to calculate Retention Rate?

Retention Rate = (Number of users at the end of a time – Number of users came during this period) / Number of users at the start of the time X 100

Exit Rate

Unlike bounce rate people presume it to be as good as exit rate, this rate comes with the same drop-off screen from where the users usually take the exit. So target the exit rate for a mobile app especially.

How to Calculate Exit rate?

Exit Rate = Total number of Visits to a screen/total number of drop-offs or exits from that particular screen.

Vanity Metrics

The app metrics that do not impact your business profitability or engagement rates or revenue generation can be taken as a part of vanity metrics.

App Downloads

When you find out the app downloads, you may not be able able to identify specific results. App downloads never give you a perfect picture of the app’s usefulness or app popularity. So all you can get to know is the sources from where the users download your mobile app. You can find out the most efficient channels from where these app users come from.

Average Screens Per visit

This metric tracks the engagement levels. Higher the number of times the user watches, the greater is their engagement level on your app. If the user visits ten screens on your app but is not buying anything, you still have to go a long way. Basically, to find out the actual engagement, you need to check out the on-screen time.

Number of Registered users

To get it, first, open your Play store or app store on your mobile phone and check out the descriptions of the apps. As there are over 60% of mobile app’s descriptions, one common thing you should notice is that when people say they have X00,000 registered users, it includes active and inactive users.

Average Daily sessions per DAU

This metric applies to a minimal number of industries and like other vanity metrics, it doesn’t impact your revenue. When it comes to definition, the Average Daily Sessions Per DAU reveals the number of times your daily active users open your mobile app. It points – how your mobile users are engaged with your application.

Conversion App Metrics

conversion-app-metrics

This app metric helps you measure the number of people who install your application after landing on your App Store Page.

Goal Completion

When you want to evaluate the conversions irrespective of whether it is for your mobile app or website, this metric helps you. Goal completion is generally utilized to track anything and everything. It helps you track exactly what your users are interacting with your platform and derives the actual value achieved from that.

Some of the most crucial issues that can be identified by using the goal completion are:

  • Track the checkpoints that experience various drop-offs
  • Goals that demand most of the time to complete
  • Goals that have notable obstructions and more

Average Order Value(AOV)

So you want to track the average amount of money your customers spend on all the orders that they place on your app? Use AOV metric as it helps you evaluate your marketing and pricing strategies that are directly impacting your revenue generation. Increasing AOV indicates that you are able to counterbalance your customer acquisition costs, enhance your profit margins, and improve your total revenue without even putting more stress on attracting more customers to boost revenue.

How To Calculate AOV?

Average Order Value = Total Revenue / No. of Orders.

Time to Goal Completion

This mobile app metric will let you know if your app users have more time than needed to accomplish your desired actions and meet the goals. It will pose a question on all the possibilities that are the chief reasons behind the inconvenience.

You should understand the users’ intent to visit your platform and make sure they don’t get distracted before purchasing.

Acquisition App Metrics

acquisition-app-metrics

Cost Per Install (CPI) /Cost of Acquiring a Customer (CAC)

I know it becomes so important and expensive for you to attract your users. A low CPI is considered as good. Besides, it will indicate that you are losing every new customer if it goes beyond the customer’s lifetime value (LTV). CPA is usually measured by the total cost of the marketing campaigns that help in acquiring new users. But, it needs to consider a fraction of your product development costs and your operational cost that enable the acquisition.

How to Calculate CPI?

CPI = Total Marketing Cost / Total Acquired Users

Customer Life Value (CLTV)

After you acquire the customers, CLTV becomes an essential metric. It determines the amount of expenditure that you will have to incur in anticipation to your average customer until they uninstall your application. Your CLTV will be an indicator to understand if you are spending more to acquire your users. In that case, you should perform substantial efforts dedicated to boosting your CLTV.

How to calculate CLTV?

CLTV = Average Value of Conversion x Average Number of Conversions over a Time period x Average Customer Life Time

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)

Being one of the most critical app metrics, you must incorporate it into your strategies because it helps to understand whether you can meet the monthly revenue targets. Basically, ARPU is the amount of revenue your average user generates for you.

Apparently, ARPU and CLTC may look quite similar. ARPU indicates the average revenue your users generate and CLTV helps you understand the entire process of revenue generation. This may take you to a place where you may not find a great difference between both. However, with ARPU you cannot predict the whole amount of revenue the user is expected to generate for you in the entire lifetime, while CLTC does it for you.

How To Calculate ARPU?

ARPU = Lifetime Revenue / No. of Lifetime Users

Final Takeaway

Mobile app performance metrics are essential parameters to track your app performance. Moreover, it gives you a clearer picture of your marketing ROI and growth. They can serve as true guides enhancing the user experiences and developing the app that your users will love.

I hope this article has helped you to understand the significance of choosing the right metrics for tracking before your app launches in the market. In case you ever need any professional help to understand each of these metrics and their significant impact on your business, you can always reach me out. Wishing you great success in your future endeavors!

10 Things You Must Ensure To Make Your Grocery Ecommerce A Grand Success

Posted on by Hari Patel

The pandemic brought a sharp surge in the demand for buying online groceries across the globe. Grocery eCommerce became the inevitable line of income generation for the food and beverage industry. Eventually, almost every consumer has discovered the ease and convenience of having groceries delivered at their doors.

As we watch the sector expanding and evolving, get hooked to this blog to know the 10 important things that you must keep in mind to turn your upcoming grocery e-commerce business into a grand success.

We shall also discuss some of the critical challenges that grocery eCommerce merchants confront and the ways they resolve the issues with a knack.

Know The Challenges That You May Confront In Your Grocery Ecommerce Business

Grocery stores rig out their stacks with a variety of products including food and perishable goods that stay in dominance. Here comes the specific challenges and provisions that are industry-specific and you need to follow them strictly.

It is not just about being sensitive to the timings and storage protocols, but also about handling a gamut of options. Like some products are sold by weight instead of piece and their conditions differ every single day. For example, bananas and avocados change with time, and the selling challenges become equally severe.

To keep reading and to navigate everything from optimal pick and pack processes to refunds to a replacement, and on-time deliveries. The challenges go endless. But after all, you need to give greater customer experiences. And to ensure the same, you must know what to keep in mind.

1. The Business Model

the-business-model

  • The business model of grocery retail companies is a mix of corporate, franchise, and independent stores. All come under the same retail banner. This creates great complexity at the time of your business model launching phase. There comes local variations in the product assortments, sales prices, and promotions.
  • There is a long history of loyalty programs with bonus points in grocery retails. The customer can earn and burn, and get various personal offers. There are essential sales drivers, and consumers expect the same loyalty features when shopping online. They also expect suggestions on their usual shopping habits, relevant recommendations, and recently purchased products based on historical online and in-store purchases.
  • Low profitability is historically common for pure players and traditional grocery retailers that start with in-store picking. Research shows that home delivery and in-store picking are the main cost drivers and offer considerable potential for increased efficiency.

2. The Products

  • There are many products that need to be stored under very specific conditions until they are delivered to the customer. You need to comply with the regulations around storage temperatures, or the recipient can be required to be 18 to 21 years old.
  • The grocery retailers who sell fresh products and food-to-go products manually pack them in the store adding to further complexity in the product attributes, expiry dates, and minimum order quantities.
  • Perishable groceries are often ordered by weight, and there are different ways of presenting, buying, and picking them. When ordering, for example, a watermelon, it’s not possible to choose the exact weight; there needs to be room for variation. And a variation in weight requires the card amount pre-authorization to reflect the allowed variation. The total price still needs to be recalculated based on the delivered weight, which can get complex with thousands of orders.
  • A grocery store may only sell food and beverage products, but what if you add a range of non-food items? And what if we then include clothing, electronics, and DIY? As in many industries, there are a handful of products that generate the bulk of sales, and then there are long-tail products that are rarely sold but that make a significant contribution to profit. The ecommerce solution needs to accommodate a wide variety of product segments.

3. The Stock

  • With a limited shelf life of the food products, they also come with a very high turnover. But at the same time, the warehouse and storage area have limited capacities. Hence, frequent replenishments are necessary. In parallel, the supply is not always 100% available.
  • In the majority of eCommerce scenarios, you would wish to pick, pack and deliver the items through shipping in the soonest possible time. However, for grocery ecommerce, the order is picked as late as possible- like just before store pick-up time or the time of departure for home delivery. The time between the order placed and then shipped could occur over several days. So when an order is received, it’s almost impossible to know the product stock at the time of picking.

4. The Storage Conditions

the-storage-condition

  • By complying with the regulations, the food products must be kept in specific conditions until delivered to the customer. The food products must be kept protected from contact with household chemicals. This means grocery stores must have complete control over the supply and delivery chain—from receiving a product at the warehouse or store to the final delivery at the customer’s residence.
  • The biggest challenge here is to store the food products in certain conditions during each phase. With self-service 24/7 grocery lockers with temperature zones, there are even stricter requirements to secure freshness until custom pick up.
  • In high-volume in-store eGrocery, it’s important to manage storage efficiency in buffer storage areas before route departure or pick up.

5. The Service Area

the-service-area

  • Ecommerce deletes all the international boundaries now. The exceptional segment is grocery ecommerce. Because, the service area is usually limited to one country and often to an even small geographical area based on the fulfillment center’s location and the product assortment sold.
  • You can set up multiple service centers to extend your reach, but there will always be blind spots. In our experience, optimizing your service area is one of the keys to a successful online grocery business.

6. Time Slots and Delivery

time-slots-and-delivery

  • Unlike the delivery of, for example, a book, your shopping delivery can’t a) fit through a letterbox or b) be left alone for hours on end after delivery. Managing available order delivery times helps you organize your processes, balance the workload (order load) and provide the best service to your customers.
  • Integration with best-of-breed software is crucial in optimizing delivery and courier administration. This integration boosts efficiency and profitability for grocery ecommerce when order volumes increase.

7. Picking and Packing

  • The orders in the grocery ecommerce are typical and diverse. They contain a variety of products, and require a lot of time to pick and pack. The picking process is very time-consuming and of utmost critical. During the process, teams must ensure various factors: like the weight of the product, whether special treatment is needed or not, product cancellation, and the need to communicate with the customer.

8. Selecting The Product

selecting-the-products

  • Let’s take the case of bananas. A merchant may have bananas at different stages of ripeness. Let’s assume they then receive a large order of bananas. Which ones should you pick? If for a family’s long-term consumption, then expectations might differ. But what if the same order is made for a conference, where attendees consume them at the same time? As a merchant, you need a way to anticipate their preferences to be able to create the best possible experience.

9. Price Recalculations, Replacements, and Refunds

  • Once you order the groceries online, you have most likely had a previous experience with the substitute product. Perhaps you ordered juice from Brand A, but it was unavailable, so instead, you got juice from Brand B. When this happens, merchants have to consider the associated price difference—if the replacement product costs less, the merchant will need to refund. And if it’s more expensive, they’ll need to discount the product to match the price paid in the initial order.

10. The User Experience

  • Consumers always wish to search for their favorite products with quickness and ease while shopping online. And this makes it a challenge for e-commerce merchants to create such high-quality user experiences. One way to meet and satisfy customer expectations is with more intuitive navigation and features like favorite products, suggested products and saved shopping lists.
  • There are several shoppers who want extensive product filtering functionality options while shopping for groceries. For example, to avoid allergens, carbohydrates, fat, and sugar, or find vegan and eco-friendly products. The filtering list for product characteristics is long and keeps growing. With such a diverse list of preferences, it’s essential with intelligent and efficient filtering that simplifies the process of finding products.

What Can Softqube Do For You?

You must keep plenty of things in mind before selling groceries online. The most critical challenge is to choose the right eCommerce platform that can help you convert your idea into the exact potential reality. Partner with the right project team.

In the present times, there are very few ecommerce solution platforms that are optimized for the food and beverage industry. They can hardly support ecommerce entailing fresh food items, rich product attributes, temperature-restricted products, age-restricted items, fragile items, weighted items, and replacement products.

At Softqube, our clients have defeated all these challenges. We are the leading tech experts who can help you out in all things to give intrinsic user experiences. Get in touch with us and talk with one of our key experts. We can help you out in growing your business.

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I – Basics of DevOps

Posted on by Nitin Suvagiya

In the year 2008, the concept of DevOps raised out as a result of a discussion between Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay, project manager, a Belgian consultant, and agile practitioner.

DevOps is a set of tools, Cultural Philosophies and practices, designed to shorten the software development life-cycle process. DevOps signify a change in IT culture, focusing on quick IT service delivery through the adoption of lean, agile practices in the context of a system-oriented method. By adopting a DevOps culture into business along with DevOps Practice and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs and increase the confidence in the apps they develop and achieve business goals quicker.

basics_of_devOps

Benefits of DevOps

benefits_of_devOps

DevOps Vs. Traditional Approach

DevOps Traditional
  • Teams focus more on improving infrastructure
  • Teams spend less time on fixing issues and recovers from failures faster
  • Teams release applications at twice the speed of traditional IT teams
  • Continuous integration and deployment
  • All teams are equally responsible, which leads to better team
    engagement and productivity
  • Teams have limited focus on improving infrastructure
  • Requires more time to recover from failures
  • Teams requires more time to release applications
  • Linear model of development, testing, and deployment
  • Individual teams have have dedicated tasks, which leads to inefficient collaboration

DevOps Tools

To implement DevOps and work within the DevOps life cycle, following tools required

devOps_tools

  1. Code:For Source-Code Management (SCM) ,version control tools such as Git,GitHub, Subversion, TFS, and Mercurial are used.
  2. Build: For automating the build process of an executable application from source code, software build tools such as Maven, Gradle, Ant, and Grunt are used.
  3. In the continuous testing phase, the built software is continuously tested for bugs using testing tools such as Selenium, TestNG, and JUnit.
  4. Release: CI/CD pipelines are created for procuring updated source code and constructing the build into .exeformat using tools such as Jenkins.
  5. Operate:For deployment and operations phase, CMT and automation tools such as Jenkins, AWS CodeDeploy, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform are used.
  6. Monitor:For monitoring system performance and productivity, to reduce (or even eliminate) downtime, monitoring tools such as Nagios are used.
  7. Deploy: For packaging an application with its required libraries, frameworks, and configuration files to efficiently run it in various computing environments, containerization tools such as Docker and Kubernetes are used.

Key Takeaways

  • DevOps is a set of practices and tools designed to shorten the life cycle of a software development process
  • Networking and cost-related issues, tools and software compatibility, and DevOps culture are a few challenges in traditional SDLC approach
  • Agile is an iterative development procedure that promotes constant iteration of development and testing all over the life cycle of a project.
  • Saas, PaaS, and IaaS are the three models of cloud computing services which help to implement DevOps in the cloud.
  • Continuous development, continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring are the five phases of DevOps.

Scope Of Earning Money From An App In 2021

Posted on by Hari Patel

Table of Contents

You are here because you know you can make money from an app right? But the real question is how much can you earn with an app and how sustainable this can be?

Here is to discuss everything that you need to know about your money earning expectations from an app. We shall be discussing the below points in detail.

Amount of money you can earn with an app

With apps, your year-on-year revenues can soar high in billions of dollars. But such kinda apps are very few in number. The ground reality is, it is incredibly an arduous exercise to get an exact number on how much can an app make money for you in consideration of the fact that there are a large number of varied apps floating in the web world.

On a daily basis, the top 200 apps on the app store manage to earn $82,500. Widening the bracket, for the top 800 apps, the daily revenue drops down to $3500. Also, the differences prevail categorically for various types of apps. Like for eg, the gaming apps make around $22k each day. But for the entertainment apps, the figures are as little as $3090 each day.

The app market growth is going to be steady and strong in the future. The Statista reports reveal by 2020, the estimated amount of app revenue will increase by $582 billion.

As per the data revealed by SensorTower, the top 100 application development firm or publishers have generated an average of $130 million in the first quarter of 2019.

To understand how much an app can generate revenue for you, the first thing you need is to find out your niche segment. Also, you must study how different niches are performing within their app ecosystem and find out their average returns to understand your targeted niche revenue approximately.

Earnings from a Subscription App

The subscription apps are one of the most preferred mediums to earn income via in-app purchases. One of the best examples is Tinder. The app is free to use, but it charges the users for its various features like unlimited swipes. The “passport” add-on feature permits the users to match with users in other locations, whereas the “Boost” features permits the users to show themselves on the top of the pile. The audience can avail these in-app features only if they were to purchase them generated. The app generated $404 approx revenue. The Tinder charges $9.99 per month for plus subscription and $14.99 per month for a Tinder Gold upgrade.

The other great example is Bumble. A close competitor of Tinder, with a user base of around 50 million people and growing at the rate of 135%. The only difference between both of them is that Bumble is especially meant for women only.

Besides, other apps are Pandora, Tencent Video, Netflix, Hulu, and iQiyi that are subscription-based and earn millions.

Looking at the other side there are certain apps that generate a significant amount of revenue on a smaller scale but are quite decent to go. Like, the Wattpad app allows users to read online stories and write them. The Sensor Tower report says that Wattpad had more than a million downloads earning $800k in revenue. The core method of earning money is by selling stories to the readers. The app smartly engages the users with lively, conversational, and real-life stories.

Best performing platforms for Revenue Generation

Your money earning scope via an app totally depends on the kind of platform you choose for development. Android covers the largest market share in the mobile industry. The second comes iOS. As per the Sensor Tower report, between 2018 to 2023, the estimated CAGR of user spending on these stores is 16.8%.

While there is no perfect answer to the query of “ How much money can an app make?”, but the current projections indicate that the future of mobile apps is on the right path.

Once you choose the platform and decide to move ahead, you need to make a strategic decision on how well will you monetize your application to earn millions and billions of money. For this you need to check out the three most important revenue models.

Best revenue models to earn money with mobile applications

One-Time Payment (Premium Apps):

The premium mobile applications charge a one-time download fee on the Google play store on the iOS app store from its users. It is believed by many that premium app doesn’t make money as the users don’t want to spend. But the fact of 2017 says that the paid apps accounted for nearly $250 billion in revenue.

On the other hand, education apps perform much better within the paid app category. Like WolframAlpha app made $20000 in revenue through the downloads. In the play store alone, it could make it 1000000 downloads and now the application is a powerhouse in the educational category.

In-App Purchases (Freemium Apps)

These apps are a great way to fetch revenue. The users can download the app and access its features completely for free and can put up a paywall on some premium features. Fortnite is one such example and has made around $203 million in revenue. The game remains free to play for the users

Subscription Model (Recurring Payments)

This model is very popular in the app industry because of its extraordinary services. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are famous operators in this niche segment. The customers have to make recurring payments for accessing the app on time to time basis
‘
Netflix stands to be the giant with $52 billion of revenue in the third quarter of 2019. A similar kind of apps is the Pandora music streaming application that uses a similar subscription model. This ongoing trend exhibits the power that mobile apps have in the year 2021 and the way they will help business owners earn huge amounts of money via the digital landscape.

Kinds of Apps that have money-making potential in 2021

The gaming applications are the largest revenue models and contribute the highest in the global app revenue. In 2018, the iOS app store mobile app revenue exceeded the $33 billion mark, while Google Play revenue games stood at $21.5 Billion.

For the first half of 2019, the total growth revenue was 11.3% summing up to $29.6 billion. Technological advancements in the gaming app industry such as graphics, control, and Gameplay have risen sharply. The major contributors to this boom are the e-sports gaming apps. Mediakix reveals a 56% of mobile gamers play games more than 10 times a week. This shows the amount of addiction amongst the users generating mobile-based entertainment revenue.

In 2018, gaming applications accounted for 77% of the total app revenue. The gross mobile game revenue stood at $54.7 billion. The AR-based game “Pokemon Go” earned a gross income of $3 billion in 2019.

Besides these, E-commerce mobile apps are also spurting for a long time. The urge to buy online among the younger generation is going to grow significantly over a period of time. By the end of 2021, the experts estimate $3 trillion-plus of commerce sales via mobile.

To cash on this kind of market, mobile apps need a payment gateway integration within the applications. This will allow them to sell products and merchandise on their mobile apps. By 2021, nearly 21.4 billion people across the globe will be using e-commerce services. Probably the largest audience in contributing to the sales so far.

Revenue generating applications

You will get to an endless number of categories via the internet when you research and study to find out the best suitable niche to build a successful app. However, the proper approach is the widest research, to streamline all that is missing, capitalize on the app via the mobile application, and ensure success and scalability from the very beginning.

The below listing is to just give you a broader idea of the apps that are sure to make money. These are the most popular types of apps that can serve as a benchmark for you to create and build revenue-generating apps.

  • Music apps (Spotify)
  • Personalization apps allow users to change the overall orientation of the smartphone or any other device. (Zedge)
  • Performance optimization tools. (CCleaner)
  • eCommerce/Shopping Apps (eBay)
  • IoT apps (Vialatm)
  • Sports and health apps (My Fitness Pal)
  • Social media apps (Facebook)

The Future of App Development Business

The mobile app market is full of great potentiality and a lot of possibilities. In 2019, the final quarter showcased an estimated consumer expenditure of $21.9 on apps across the Appstore and Google Play store, with a 22.9% increase from the last year.

When the business identifies all the considerations, the apps can make a lot of money in developing countries like India. The market here is still sky-rocketing.

At Softqube, our mission is to always help businesses grow via a perfect mobile app developed by our experts. In case if you are stuck finding how much investment you need to make in the business that is booming in the digital market, do contact our app development consultants. We have a bunch of experts who are available at your service to help you grow your business from the scratch.

What is The Cost of Developing A Facial Recognition App?

Posted on by Hari Patel

Presently, facial recognition systems are gaining a lot of traction. They are getting deployed in several public places for safety reasons, private properties to access control systems, and now also as an application on mobile phones for various purposes.

Facial recognition technology has widespread usage. The system has become so inevitable that no other technology can replace it in the future. As a result, developing such systems is tricky and needs careful planning for each case individually. As an entrepreneur, if you need such an application for your business, you must enlist the costs and expenses that are incurred to develop such a system along with the probable pitfalls.

The blog shall help you to know about each stage of your cost plans for developing facial recognition apps. Also, we shall discuss several problems that you will need to solve while in the process. It is not only about developing apps, but it is also about the hardware architecture that will allow the app to work efficiently.

You need to address the below matters before you head on to develop a facial recognition system.

Facial Recognition App

1. Hardware Challenges

  • Hardware Configuration
  • Camera Choices and Their Locations
  • Edge Device Usage

2. Software Challenges

  • Datasets
  • Personification and Possible Bias in the Pretrained Model
  • Software Scalability
  • Image Retrieval Speed

3. How Much Does It Cost?

Hardware Challenges

Before beginning with the facial recognition app development project, the tech solution provider must consider hardware configuration, cameras, and edge devices, etc, and such important aspects.

Hardware Configuration

At the time of building a facial recognition security system, you must know that the optimal hardware configuration differs from task to task. The suitable hardware should be chosen with great care. When the chosen hardware lacks enough power, it leads to highly undesirable delays in processing in some quality solutions. For other tasks that don’t require a lot of computational resources, the choice of powerful hardware could cause a too expensive solution, which could be no longer in demand because of its price.

Camera Choices and Their Location

When you put enough care and become cautious to complete a specific task, you must always check with the type of cameras to be deployed. The configuration choices vastly depend on quality image requirement, angle of view, and coverage area. Besides, when choosing video quality and several cameras, the network bandwidth must be taken into account. This has commonly become one of the crucial bottlenecks in building high-quality facial recognition systems.

Edge Devices Usage

Most of the facial recognition system is dependent on heavy, deep neural networks. Such networks most often need GPUs for evaluation with appropriate speed. The modern facial recognition systems emphasized that companies have machines with CPU and GPU. To ensure the work completion, the servers would require extra support in time and demand some location. Jetson devices solutions are used to reduce the support for end customers. Human support also gets minimized.

A lot of nuances must be considered while setting up optimal hardware for the system. It is also hard to choose it without experience. Hence, what we believe is that the experienced specialists create a final architecture solution for a specific facial recognition system. They determine the optimal configuration for every particular case.

Software Challenges

Here we shall discuss major software issues coming around the face recognition technology industries.

Datasets

Robust facial recognition application is created with the deeper learning-based methods. These deep learning models are notoriously known as very data-hungry. When a company lacks its data the very first step is to use open-source datasets. The dataset licensees are worth reading before using the data to train a face recognition model.

Personification and Possible Bias in the Pretrained Model

You must consider the demographic profile of the system users. Most of the open-sourced data sets comprise white adults, the final reports are quite biased and may not work properly on other races. To understand in a better way, you must collect additional private datasets consisting of similar demographic profiles to the one you expect in real life. The model bias can be reduced by adopting fine tuning on the collected data.

Software Scalability

Companies deploy facial recognition systems to expect them to become scalable and expand enough to a wider audience. The software hence needs to possess the high flexibility architecture of a system to be very thoughtfully devised. Overall, the software part can be built in a way to get quick updates to a larger number of users with inexpensive costs. Based on our practical experiences, we found that we need a well-designed system architecture from scratch to extend the software that is not designed to become scalable.

Image Retrieval Speed

Several face recognition systems face serious bottlenecks when it performs searches in the database that consists of millions of data samples. In this scenario, the company ensures that the algorithm used to search through a database is much more efficient and scalable.

Facial Recognition App Devlopment

How Much Does it Cost?

The cost of developing a robust and scalable face recognition application complexity depends on the project requirements. Besides, many variables have the total price of the bespoke face recognition application.

To provide the best solutions to clients and to meet the challenges, we take up such projects through the below stages.

  • Business objectives analysis
  • Data analysis and identification of the scope of work
  • Definition of high-level architecture and appropriate tools and technologies selection
  • Risks identification
  • Building proof of concept
  • Definition of the expected results as well as costs and resources estimation.

The investigation stage permits idea validation at an early stage, risk minimization of a project failure, and substantial savings of money. The Cost of the Investigation stage is generally in the range of USD 10000 – 30000 based on the project size.

Wrapping Up

Both software and hardware challenges must be noted before going ahead with design plans of a facial recognition application system. Have an experienced team that can help you with the uneasy work. It helps a lot in the long run. Good and robust facial recognition applications are developed with great time, effort, and solid technical skills with great expertise. This ensures that the project is very scalable, reasonable, and reliable to take it forward for further processes.

How to Find App Investors For A Startup Project – The Ultimate Guide

Posted on by Hari Patel

Table of Contents

To find investors for your app is always the most formidable challenge any entrepreneur may face. As a founder, you may know everything you need to, yet you come across several gaps. You need a catchy and the most enticing pitch to woo investors. You gotta show them that your idea has great potential. How exactly did you manage to do this? Do you think you need a great pitch to present before the investors?

Let us go straight into the answers to all your questions. Each point is elaborately explained to help you know how to prepare the right pitch and how to set yourself apart from your competitors and show your investors that your business idea is worth investing in.

Present Project Viability With Market Research

Great ideas are not what investors look for all the time. Your next big idea must consist of a passionate visionary that is well-planned. You need to show them your extensive research work, how deep your vision is, and how the project is ready to hit the ground running. They must be extremely confident that you can execute this idea, create a wonderful app and make it go with sustainable profits in the long run.

So the very first job is, to begin with, the research. The tangible groundwork needs to be put up and you must know the exact market potentiality of the project. Your app must solve the core problem of the target audience. How effectively do you solve their problems? Answering these questions is the groundwork you need to do. Lots of research, cracking hard numbers, and data analysis are all that grabs the attention of the investors. You need to be damn serious about what you are showing to your investors.

Take interviewers, find the results, do surveys, and prepare an impressive statistic analysis of all your findings. Present this report to your investors. Do this in reliable ways. Online survey tools like SurveyMonkey is always there to help you. Pay a minor fee and conduct an online poll covering adequate people. This will give you tangible proof of the concept you are working upon. Circulate simple surveys amongst your friends and acquaintances and gather enough data. Start a blog or a microsite and post short articles that are interesting and that talk about your idea. Take the help of people who love to engage with your idea and can talk a lot about it.

These measures however it may take time, this groundwork bring sureshot results in the long run. It will show the investors that you are quite serious about your idea and toil enough to pull it off for great success.

Find Your Niche

Apps are really a good business you can ever choose. Everyone knows it very well. Your idea may probably be built into an app in the least similar if not in an exact manner somewhere. So, face the brunt, your idea may not be a great discovery or an invention. Let us face this. Investors may not like to invest in similar ideas. They won’t prefer to invest in other ‘types’ of the app. Find something that is unique and that can differentiate yourself from the competition.

Apart from choosing another travel app, see if your app can cover women travelers exclusively to ensure safety and security. Apart from another e-commerce app, find an app that can connect with the local stores to support the local businesses that can help enjoy the convenience of the ecommerce.

Define your suitable target audience comprising a specific niche. It is not all about wooing the investors, but it is all about building a sustainable business that has better longevity and traction as compared to your competitors.

Investors get intrigued by a target-specified app idea. These apps have great value and are identified at a different level. Users find that the app is exclusively designed to fulfill their needs and hence, they like to engage more with the app. At the onset of widespread generalization, everyone likes exclusivity. Knowing and understanding all this, investors get ready to invest in such niche ideas.

Prepare Your Best Elevator Pitch

Every investor may not be willing to deep dive into your idea at the very first instant. With very few minutes available to present your idea, you need to be well-prepared and use the given time very wisely. You can give spontaneous answers, clear concepts, and talk about the real purpose behind the idea in these few minutes. You can stand to land a meeting where you will get enough time and attention to present your idea.

So be ready with an elevator pitch. A pitch as concise as 30 seconds covering your idea and the ultimate purpose. So work and rework until you are not sure of what you are going to present in front of the investor.

Do not mistake your elevator pitch as a storytelling opportunity. However passionate you are with your idea, you need to clearly describe what your app will do for the users and why they would sit and download and use it. Keep it simple, precise, punchy, enticing, and meaningful. Focus on the larger purpose and the biggest value it can give to your investors. This can be your biggest selling point. Once you get ready for all this, your elevator pitch can land you an investor up close and personal.

Create A Prototype

It is always good to show rather than say. The biggest takeaway to get any type of investor. However good you talk about your idea in the most effective communication pattern, but to really show your commitment to the investors, you need a prototype.

Fancy words will never save you. Building a prototype is very easy. Build your unique prototype if you are a developer. Or contact a suitable app development company to build a good one for you. Simple prototypes get passed quickly due to their affordable prices and extensive work done upon that to show the investors how your app is going to work.

Similar to a low-fidelity representation of your app, a prototype is much essential. This step can give you a great chance to show off your app’s design, logo, and branding. You can make all this possible only if you are determined to work on your app’s design, layout, and basic features. If you have a prototype to show it to your investors, you are representing your app features, your hard work, and your commitment towards building the idea into a reality. You show your investors that your project is worthy and dependent enough.

Prepare a Compelling Pitch Deck

When you are all ready for an investor meeting with your brilliant idea, the best research, and a solid prototype, what works more is your pitch deck. This can be typically a PowerPoint presentation that runs on the screen highlighting your key points as you keep explaining.

Do not make your pitch deck a transcript of all that you are saying. Make highly visual slides that speak sense and are concise. Use them for showing charts, graphs, and diagrams. Highlight the most important keywords. Consider this as your golden chance to show off your app’s branding pitch. So, what you need is to invest enough time in preparing a logo, a slogan, and a color theme to establish credible branding for your app. Give your app a suitable personality and ensure that investors are well aware of how prepared and dedicated you are to make this idea a potential reality.

Final Thoughts

As you follow all the above steps, the investors will find that you have a great idea for an app. Not only that, but they will find that you are a go-getter and an astute in your profession. You pull the things off to make it happen. The startup history teaches us that apps with great execution matter more than apps with a great idea. Even if your idea is taken by the world, the purpose of execution that you have created sets you apart from the rest of the world. Investors will be heartily willing to fund your awesome project.

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Which Mobile App Database is the Best For Applications – A Complete Guide

Posted on by Hari Patel

Table of Contents

Synopsis – To find an appropriate database that matches your application becomes arduous amidst the gamut of offerings available in the market. You need some general awareness of the basic criteria with a few use cases that can guide and help you develop and create scalable and robust mobile applications. This blog sheds the light on the same.

In either of the two situations of creating a new mobile application or adding more features to your existing app, finding a suitable database becomes quite exhaustive. Possibly, when you find your present database becomes insufficient to manage millions of users and frequent updates, it’s time to choose the right database.

There are several instances where a database dramatically begins to compromise the quality and performance of an application.

In the face of disruption, Uber had to migrate their database from PostgreSQL to MySQL. Uber took this decision as they confronted the inefficient database replication features and a constant migration happening from one PostgreSQL version to another.

Types of Mobile App Databases

Some of most popular database to build Android apps and iPhone apps are as below. Based on your requirements, you can choose the best database for your mobile.

MySQL

An open source, multi-threaded, and easy to use SQL database.

PostgreSQL

A powerful, open source object-based, relational-database that is highly customizable.

Redis

An open source, low maintenance, key/value store that is used for data caching in mobile applications.

MongoDB

A schemaless, JSON document database which is known for its flexibility and scalability.

Mamcached

A distributed cache system which is multi-threaded, and used primarily for caching objects to speed up applications by alleviating database load.

MariaDB

A popular open source relational database which was created by the original developers of MySQL.

Cassandra

A free and open source, NoSQL database which is designed to handle a large amount of unstructured data at any scale.

SQLite

Embedded database, common usage is to provide local data storage capabilities on mobile phones.

SAP HANA

SAP HANA is a column-oriented, in-memory relational DBMS developed by SAP SE. It is written in C++ and was first released in the year 2010.

HBase

Another venture by Apache Software Foundation under the domain of Apache Hadoop, is a distributed database written in Java.

FileMaker

FileMaker is a cross-platform database application developed by Claris International.

IBM Db2

IBM Db2 is a family of data management products developed by IBM. Initially, it was released in the year 1983 and is available for Linux, Unix-like, and Windows Operating systems.

Solr

Solr is an open-source search platform written in Java. It was released in 2004.

AmazonDynamoDB

It is a NoSQL database offered by Amazon as a part of AWS. It was released in the year 2012.

SAP Adaptive Server

Also known as a Sybase SQL Server, it is a relational model database written in C and C++ language. It was initially released in 1987.

Some of the other databases include Neo4j, Couchbase, ArangoDB, Riak DB, CouchDB, RethinkDB, and Memcached.

Basic Criteria to Choose Right Databases for Mobile Apps

What is the structure of your data?

The structure aims to help you know about the ways you need to store and retrieve your data. Mobile applications deal with data in a variety of formats. Offline apps store the entire data on mobile devices. Online apps depend on server access for their stored data to function. Like, Ecommerce apps fall into the online apps category.

Other types of apps are called Synchronized apps. They store all their data on mobile devices. Hence, it can be used offline. However, the stored data may be updated on the server when the device is periodically online.

What is the size of your data?

As simple as the question, the answer is the quantity of the data you need to store and retrieve as critical application data. The quantity may differ based on the data structure combination that is selected and the ability of the database to differentiate data across multiple file systems and servers.

So, choose a database focusing on the overall volume of data that is generated by the application at any specific time and the size of data to be retrieved from the database.

Speed and Scale

This refers to the time taken for servicing incoming reads and writes to your application. Some databases are created to optimize read-heavy apps. And others are designed to support write-heavy solutions. A great time-saver as it helps to reduce the time that you put in acquiring data from the database. This saved time can be used to improve the efficiency of the android database application.

Like, MongoDB is faster than MySQL when it comes to managing large volumes of the unstructured databases. For structured data, MySQL is much better.

Data Modeling

Before choosing any database, you must perform Data Modeling. This modeling becomes a representation of the data structure to be stored in the database. It is a very powerful expression of the business needs.

In case if your app contains features such as search queries, reporting, location-based features, etc, data modeling becomes very helpful. Such apps need multiple databases to manage different types of data. Like for example, Uber uses MySQL, MongoDB, and a lot of other databases.

Data Security

While using decentralized and synchronized storage it becomes essential to access, store, and transmit data in a secured manner. To ensure complete usage, you must address authentication, data in motion, data at rest, and read/write access.

You need a flexible authentication that can allow using standard, custom, and public authentication providers. For many apps, it becomes important to support to the anonymous access. For data at rest on the server and client, you need support for both file system encryption and data-level encryption. Similarly, for motion data, the communication should be over a channel like SSL or TLS. For data read/write access, the database should offer granular control over what data can be accessed and modified by users.

Facilitating Multiple Mobile Platforms

If you plan to support multiple platforms like iOS and Android along with devices and wearables, you need to plan it now. A gamut of mobile applications evolve adding web companion app or a native desktop app.

Building mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms need React Native Framework. It is quite easy to develop apps for Android and iOS if developers share code on both the platforms. As it supports all the types of databases.

Use Cases To Frame Selection Criteria

Synchronizing data between local database and backend server

There are mobile applications having features that work offline and need internet connection to save the local data in to the app’s server. Data synchronization is a critical part while developing a mobile application. You need to carefully analyze the use cases for your application and find out what is applicable at its best for each of them.

Users have both the choices, either to only read the data or to modify the existing data. You can choose the local database that provides sync service and automatically stores the local database to the cloud server and vice-versa.

Popular databases like Couch and Realm provide data synchronization between local database and backend server.

Mobile Apps Having Multiple Layers of Data

Applications that contain multi-layer data model have one set of “fields and tables”. This set is dependent on another set of “fields and tables”. In such apps, it becomes very difficult to manage the data.

Most of the apps generally change-over time and require modifications and changes in the database structure. Whereas, in a structured database like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, you will not be able to make frequent changes.

Unstructurd database like MongoDB brings flexibility to change without taking you through the tiresome process involved in structured databases. It allows you to work with unstructured data in multiple laysers and adds new app features with great flexibility.

Users Having Low Network Issue

Databases like SQL may lose netwerk connection with the client side storage. This will further generate and error medatabasesssage instead of transferring the data needed. In such cases, you need to re-configure your database. Besides, there are several other challenges to be dealt with MySQL and network interruptions, like as below:

  • Local Data persistence that contains unsychronized transactions and app state.
  • Getting mobile transactions and operations back to the main server-side database

To avoid such problems, maintaining a database that offers better reliability and connection resistance is a better option.

For Scalable Mobile Applications

The moment you think to scale your mobile application, you need to add more resources in the form of servers and make the database engine highly efficient. The database must be powerful enough to utilize the resources and handle several processes together. In short, you need a multi-threaded database.

Multithreading helps database schedule parallel tasks efficiently and minimizes workload on the server side. Also, distributed design of a database is significantly important for gaining scalability. It can help you split up the services on different threads to minimize the workload on main database.

Handling New App Updates and Database Changes

To push new updates to the mobile app needs lot of changes to the local database. The developers needs to keep up with the old database versions.

For example, some of your app users are using V1.0 version and you recently pushed V3.0. Now V1.0 users update to V3.0. Note that these users have skipped V2.0 altogether.

The local database you choose should be able to handle such scenarios. The database should be able to add new fields and tables as well as can manage old APIs and database structure for the users who use the latest app version.

You can choose SQLite with any server-side database, and it would work fine. SQLite has built-in OpenHelper tool to check database versions and to call functions such as onUpgrade or onCreate.

Resolve Data Conflcts Between Devices

Mobile applications that modify same data on multiple devices together will confront several conflicts. The database needs to support a mechanism that can resolve the conflicts. The flexibility of the conflict resolutions mechanism is important. It should allow resolution automatically, on the device, in the cloud, by a human and by an external system.

Check out the below specific use cases to determin which database would be more suitable for your specific requirement.

Best Practices To Work With Mobile App Databases

Predictive Caching

This is applied to improve your mobile app performance. You need to look on various aspects such as how, when and where your users are using your application. You can identify and serve a segment of users with specific information that they always look up to depending on their behavioral traits.

Good news are that, that the data can be made available and cached locally before the users even log-in to your app. MongoDB offers predictive caching that allows developers to serve users with predicted and cached data before they even ask for it.

Databases Using Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) Method

MVCC support allows simultaneous access without blocking the threads or processes involved. MVCC also allows reader to view a snapshot of the data and helps you read and write operations to continue in parallel.

For example, in the below table, databases have MVCC implementation.

Low Latency Challenges

This is inevitable for any real-time applications and online gaming applications. High latency leaves a bad impression to the app users. Anything falling short than 500ms is considered to be in high latency.

Latency optimization is a continuous cycle. Each database comes with its own limitations in terms of replicating and optimizing. We have various methods to reduce latency. Replication is the most popular one. Several companies replicate their prodcution database to separate read/write, static content creation and request queries.

The below are some databases with lower latency than the average:

  • MongoDB
  • PostgreSQL for transactional operations in real time
  • RethinkDB built for real-time application
  • PipelineDB, SQL database for streaming applications

Caching Databases To Lessen the Load

Quite often we add a caching layer to reduce the load on servers. When we cache data on the chaching layer, we intent to prevent a recurring request for the same data. This reduces the number of requests going to the server and renders server efficiency and performance.

Final Thoughts

Any changes in the mobile app whether it is feature improvement or new feature update, it will affect the database. These criteria helps you to determine the right databases for your mobile app. The most important part is to find a database that is highly flexible.

With an experience to develop a myriad of enterprise mobile applications for our clients, we look up to the future requirements and comprehensive features to choose the right mobile app database. Get in touch with us if you are facing the scalability issues or in need to build data-heavy applications from the scratch.

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