A Few Thoughts on App Challenges

Posted on | June 5, 2010

Ljubljana
Image by tomazstolfa via Flickr

In the last year there have been a ton of mobile application challenges. Mainly because other players in the industry want to compete with Apple’s iPhone ecosystem - the iPhone SDK and the Appstore being at the center. Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile and many others (including some local operators in the Adriatic region) have been trying to spur mobile development by pouring massive amounts of money into prizes for dev competitions. I firmly believe this approach is wrong and that it can yell no tangible results in the long run.

The problem(s)

App challenges are usually organized in order to convince developers to try a new platform. It is important to stress out “new platform”. This means that the skill levels of developers on these new platforms are usually low to medium and in very rare cases advanced. In addition to that app challenges usually target developers who have few if any mobile projects in their portfolio and are only experiencing the mobile world for the first time - lured in by technology that is similar enough to what they have been used to develop for in the past (Java in Android, C++ in QT, Objective C for iPhone).

Furthermore these developers (who are usually not mobile professionals) need some guidance and assistance, specially in order to avoid classic design pitfalls and in order to deliver a great user experience - let’s face it, developers need designers and vice versa.

Finally, many apps lack the business/marketing component that would make them viable in the long run.

The goal

Setting the right goal is crucial. Getting 101 amateur apps (remember the low/medium skill levels from above) is not really what you want unless you just want to crunch numbers. Aiming for a small number (5 is a nice number) of high quality apps is a better strategy (at least from my personal perspective).

The (proposed) solution

With the problem and goal in mind the solution offers itself. To solve the problem you need to bring those developers to at least a medium skill level to start with, help them build teams and monitor their work process in order to be able to help.

You can then help them get in touch with mobile experts, organize one on one sessions and nudge them in the right direction when needed.

Long term benefits

I fully understand that this kind of approach requires much more effort than just naming a large prize and wait for applications to start flying in, but I firmly believe that the results will be worth it.

With this kind of approach several long term benefits for developers can be achieved:

  • developers learn how avoid mobile design pitfalls  (always handy, no matter what the technology)
  • developers learn how to deliver a great (not average) mobile application
  • developers get to know designers, mobile experts and business mentors
  • get applications that can sustain themselves in the long run, so that their creators see the benefit to keep working on them
  • the contest organizer has the possibility to build up an organic community through long term interaction
  • the technology providers can build up a knowledge base about their SDKs - learn what sucks and needs fixing

In this spirit I will be joining the Nokia App Forum Slovenia’s summer Academy, where we (along with Matevž, Andraž and Žiga)  will try to take teams of young ambitious developers on a journey of mobile application development and teach them all the tricks of the craft in the process.

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Filed Under Business Models, Development, Mobile, Thoughts, Web Strategy |

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