Any mobile device is cool today and can easily become dated tomorrow. Just the same goes for apps. It may be that your business needs a mobile application, or your business is an application. Whatever, once you begin, you won’t stop building, improving it, and driving it to success. On your way you’d surely like to know things you should and shouldn’t do as an app owner, things regarding your own mobile product, be it planned or already existing.

And if you’re into this industry for some reason, what are the things you really shouldn’t do? What can prevent your product from succeeding? It can have the purest quality of all, it can have lots of budget spent on marketing, yet here are other things that can negatively affect your success.

Don’t Cut Development Costs

A good mobile app is a costly endeavor. If you have no sufficient budget and there’s no way for you to grow it, abandon the idea – it’s far better than leaving the app unfinished or allowing it to be of low quality. There are either different ways to raise funds or, if you have budget, but are unsure whether it’ll suffice, a consultation with a development company will do.

There are lots of temptation for the sake of the first ‘don’t”. For example, porting a desktop app to mobile costs surely less. However, it may not work out, since the principles of interaction on desktops and touchscreens are completely different. Different are processing powers and other capabilities of desktops and mobile devices. Vital differences go further among mobile devices, platforms, and even platform versions. Here we move on to the UI/UX issues.

Don’t Mess Up The Design

Here lies the danger of offering bad user experience, which means unhappy users switching to rival apps. ‘It looks good to me’, ‘it’s cheaper’, ‘my friend told me it’d be great and I trust him’ – there are many ways to mess up the design of your future app fatally. At the same time professional advice from a high-level designer might get overlooked – after all, it’s the app owner who decides. What’s interesting, this situation doesn’t always concern design and only design – sometimes things go further into the technical side.

Don’t Jump At All Platforms At Once

Even if you have enough budget for both (which is an extremely rare case), be patient. An app is not a website that can ‘be everywhere’. Usually startup owners and software owners begin with just one platform, predictably iOS, where monetization level is higher, and the owner can expect returns for further maintenance and possible development for Android, and not quite likely but possibly, Windows Phone. Success is never guaranteed, and it’s always better to lose on one platform. An alternative solution is a multiplatform app, but there everything depends on what you want to have in it.

Don’t Copycat Apps

Learn from rival apps, but never ever copycat them. A big mistake that kills the chances of monetizing, let alone any signs of identity. One – your app will be lost in the ocean of similar useless apps around. Two – if some users manage to get to it somehow, they won’t be likely to pay for it or make in-app purchases for something additional – they’d rather switch to a copycat that’s absolutely free.

Don’t Prioritize Profits Only

Never haste running after profits. If you need to make a worthy product, it will require considerable investments, both in development and marketing. Out of these two, development is actually described by many experienced people as the ‘easier’ part. And from the very start you need to prioritize other things: the market and your target audience. If you don’t miss out on these, profits will be more likely to come.