A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Mobile App Ideas and Turning Them Into Reality

For 6 years on the market, we've worked with hundreds of startups, seen a lot of exciting cases, and heard dozens of stories about how one or another idea for an app came to stakeholder's mind.

We decided to write a comprehensive guide for you based on our experience. It's intended to help you find out how to come up with an app idea as well as understand whether it's viable and perspective.

First things first. If you have a strong desire to found your own tech company but have no ideas, there are several ways how to find worthy app development ideas.

Mobile apps are created to make our lives simpler. Don't forget this.

To succeed, your new app development ideas should solve specific problems of users and do it better or differently compared to existing solutions on the market.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to run into a genius idea solving all the problems of humanity. Look around, study mobile apps focused on something you're good at (e.g. work or hobby), think critically about your favorite apps. Is there something they don't cope with well enough? What exactly would you like to change to make them better?

For example, the founders of Airbnb Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the idea after their move to New York. They were unemployed and were having some problems with rental payments. Once, they noticed a local conference attracts so many visitors that all apartments in the city are booked. They saw this as an opportunity to earn some extra cash, bought several airbeds, and quickly built a website called AirBed and Breakfast (initial name of the company). As the name suggests, they were offering a place to sleep and have a breakfast for their visitors.

In fact, there were a lot of booking services in 2007. But the Airbnb's founders had seen the problem from a different angle and chose the right way to solve it.

The point is, don't give up if you have found mobile apps covering the problem you wanted to focus on. Instead, try to analyze them and understand how to improve them.

Another way to come up with new mobile application ideas is to study app categories you are interested in. This way, you will be able to identify what problems other solutions try to solve and how they do it. Use Google Play or App Store for this purpose.

In case, you're unsure concerning what type of app to choose for brainstorming the mobile application ideas, you can check the Top Grossing Apps chart. This section is present in stores for both platforms.

If you have already decided what niche to pick -- browse apps by categories to see their representatives as well as understand preferences of your target users.

In general, the work with app stores brings you a lot of valuable insights. For example, the feedback from a target audience (comments & ratings), list of features, monetization models etc. All this may serve as a good ground for further stages.

Sometimes great app ideas aren't hidden in plain sight and you have to dig deeper to find one. Which means, you should go beyond app store research and immerse into the news and events of the tech industry. There are a lot of ways to do so, but we recommend the following:

That's the last piece of advice we can give you concerning finding successful mobile app ideas. Brainstorm a bit about the future needs of customers as well as of technologies that will be in use. Think of what kind of apps will be used in 5 or 10 years from now.

Of course, it's barely possible to predict what technologies exactly will be used in future since they're evolving extremely fast. However, you can move forward based on today's trends. AR, Internet of Things, wearables, blockchain, AI and so on.

The same thing with mobile app ideas. If you can't decide what category to jump in, just explore the trends. They'll help you to define the most perspective one. Here are the latest statistics on what kind of apps are popular nowadays:

You've got the mobile app idea. Well done! It's high time to check it's viability. What does this mean? You should get more information and weight pros and cons before turning to mobile development services provider.

Validation is a vital stage and you shouldn't skip it to make sure the time and money you're going to invest in this project will pay off.

Here is how to validate your app idea:

Now, you have the app idea and you should be ready to answer the question 'Who's going to use this product?'

Most apps are targeted at a specific audience. Even if yours isn't one of them, it's still a good idea to narrow the circle of customers. At least to better understand what direction you should move.

There are two ways to identify the target audience of your app:

• Explore general facts;
• Conduct a secondary research. 

Let's say, it's a fitness app allowing to find and build running routes in the US. Taking into account these general facts, we can claim the app's target audience is US citizens who want to keep fit. However, who exactly?

During the secondary research, you dig deeper and analyze any information you find valuable (e.g. app category, existing competitors). For example, you can make use of statistics related to users' gender of popular fitness apps and draw conclusions.

We bet you've spotted a lot of apps that match somehow with your idea. It's time to analyze them. That's needed to understand how to position your app and benefit from it.

For this purpose you can use the following services:

Apart from that, pay attention to how competitors fill their apps' pages on app stores. Take a closer look at icons, descriptions, screenshots, videos etc. This may save you a lot of time in future.

We've already touched on app store optimization. It's time to understand how it works. Spoiler: a lot depends on the presence of keywords in title and description.

So, think of 5 keywords that fit good for describing your mobile app development idea. And here are a couple of tools that will help you to analyze those keywords:

Now, you have the app idea and understand whether it is good or not. The next step is development and you still have some work to do.

Which platform to build for first? That's one of the most frequently asked questions.

The answer is everything depends on your target audience. Android works best for developing markets like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. While, iOS is a good choice in case your app targets young audience from such regions as Western Europe, Australia, and North America.

It's worth mentioning that iOS users make purchases more frequently compared to Android users.

In fact, many startups develop an iOS app first. It's simply a cheaper and faster option. Android development is harder and more expensive due to it's fragmentation (a lot of OS versions and devices).

However, it's worth mentioning that Android app development is more flexible in terms of features and customization.

There are two ways:

• Form an in-house team;
• Hire a software outsourcing company.

The first way is pretty hard and more expensive. You need to take care of many things like office space, equipment, salaries etc. Many young companies simply can't afford this or haven't much experience.

The second way is cheaper and more reliable. A lot of startups hire software outsourcing companies from other countries to build the product's MVP (like Skype did) or the whole product. Such companies guarantee workability of the final product and provide the full support within a certain period of time after it's release. So, you don't have to waste your time on searches of competent developers and other related things.

Nowadays, Western Europe is considered to be one of the best options for software outsourcing due to it's value for money.

If you have any questions -- contact our managers. They can also help you validate your app idea and estimate the cost of it's realization.

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