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How to Choose the Next App Feature For your Mobile App

Building a mobile app is a beginning, not an end. In order to make sure your users download your app on mobile devices, use it everyday and talk it up to new users, you need to add compelling app features.

But which new features should you add when you build your mobile app? Would it be better to add more social engagement, or increased multimedia? How can you know where to focus your work so you get the most bang for the time you spend?

Which new features should you build into your mobile app?It’s a tough question to answer. But Andrew Chen, general partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the man behind many successful startups including Uber and others, has some great advice on how to decide.

His blog post, “The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product,” offers some very simple, straightforward tips.

The Most Valuable Mobile Features

First, he says, you need to recognize that it’s extremely difficult to retain new users of your app for even 30 days. He says that typically, of all the people who download your app and start its registration process 80% finish onboarding, 40% use it the next day after signup, 20% use it the next week after signup, and only 10% use it after 30 days after signup.

Add mobile app features users loveThose are pretty dismal numbers. Your job, as an app developer, is to bend that curve, and get far more people to continue to use the app.

Most of the time, new features don’t accomplish that, he says. Here’s why, in his words:

  • “Too few people will use the feature. In particular, that the features target engaged/retained users rather than non-users and new users.
  • “Too little impact is made when they do engage. Especially the case when important/key functions are displayed like optional actions outside of the onboarding process.”

Create mobile apps for businessTo choose a new feature that will really make a difference in your mobile app design, he says, you need to understand your user lifecycle.

The Best Features for Mobile Applications

As for which features to add into your mobile app design when you develop mobile apps, he says, “First and foremost is maximizing the reach of your feature, so it impacts the most people. It’s a good rule of thumb that the best features often focus mostly on non-users and casual users, with the reason that there’s simply many more of them.”

He adds, “Similarly, it’s important to have deep insights on what users need to do to become activated, so that their first visit is set up properly.”

He concludes, “When a product is still early, when you’re searching for and building game-changing features, the resources those features eat through can be massive. The risk that your company takes in building them might be too high, and your team might overestimate the probability that a feature will meet your expected growth goals for it. There is always a chance that the next feature will bend the curve, but it requires being smart, shrewd, and informed.”

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Build Apps Users Love with the best featuresAlpha Software offers tutorials, app templates and advanced training that guides you through the process of mobile app development with valuable features users will love. You'll learn to gather business requirements and determining the features that will best serve users.  We'll instruct you how to  And you can build all the business apps you need for free with Alpha Anywhere Community Edition. Download this on demand webinar to build a mobile app in an hour.

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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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