Develop an android application for online services business
You have an online business, and your customers are using it through the web browser. Sometimes, you receive emails from paid customers asking for android application integration. They want to use your product but by using an Android device rather than using any web browsers.
You are in a challenge as to what you should do. Should you invest in mobile application development? Or should you invest in extending existing web application products?
Here is the deal. You could look around your competitors and see if they have extended their businesses to mobile applications. You should immediately start application development if others have already done it.
Alternatively, you could trust your customers – if the number of customer requests is increasing - and definitely should start the development.
Extending online service support to Android applications is beneficial in many ways, and you know the importance of providing online services.
In the last week, I received a request for developing an android application from a new prospect, and here is the one paragraph from the project summary;
"My competitors have created the android applications for supporting their business model. And I am thinking the same, and I request you to create a quotation – include development time and cost - for my business android application. Furthermore, I wish you could create it in the shortest possible time so that I do not lose my customers."
The above paragraph intrigued me more than anything in the project summary.
We could learn three lessons from the paragraph;
- The client is creating an android application before his business competitors have developed it. That is the fear of losing existing customers rather than extending his business.
- The client wants an application developed in the shorted possible time. Sometimes, it takes a little more time to understand business needs and find valuable features. We do not want to include all features in it.
- The client is ready to invest money for his business growth.
You – as a business owner – should not wait for your competitors to extend your business. You should constantly look around for the possibility of business opportunities. And you could take action to invest money in your business rather than waiting for the competitors to invest money in their businesses.
You are responsible for your business growth. Business competitors are similar to the compass that validates our progress.
As for the android application development, I could help you in creating a complete ecosystem that includes software automation, web application development, and android application development. My team and I have expertise in the above three domains.
After investing sufficient time into developing a mobile application for online businesses, I found three regular features that you could integrate right away. And then, we can extend the application further depending on feedback from customers and responses.
Depending on the business, the three features may vary in complexity and size. But the core of these will be the same.
Customer management
Any business android application starts with allowing customers to log in to the system and then manage their profile and settings. And therefore, your application could have an inbuilt customer profile management feature so that he can access his personal information, update them and request online services based on the subscriptions.
The component may integrate the analytic feature so that you could review the service usage and patterns to create a more personalized outcome. You could collect data for services used at different times, frequency of service usages, and the time invested in the application.
Service management and help forums
Your business may provide a single service or multiple services. The application should have access to these services, and you could manage them efficiently.
The component allows you to share your services and their details with the customers. And depending on the usage of customers, you could customize the business services for the different customers.
As per experience, the service and its help forums are the most visited pages by the customers. If your application has concrete support then, you do not need to fear losing the customers.
I have used some android applications, and they had terrible service pages and help forums. I could not find the required information from there. And therefore, I dumped these applications.
Payment integration
The payment terms have changed in the business domain. The businesses created bills after usage of services – also call post-paid services. But now, each business owner takes payment before use of services – also call prepaid services.
And since you created a business to earn a profit, therefore you should integrate a payment module in the application. You could take care of the payment module so that your customer could use the services without any interruption and pay the bill on time.
Your application may have some other features because of business services and opportunities. You could take care in choosing the features and functionality.
Based on the above three components, I sent my quotation to the client and waited two or three days for any response. After some communication, we agreed on some prominent features that we should integrate into the first version of the android application.