What do people struggle to understand about application development ?

Let me tell you a little story.

A while back, in 2012, I was approached by a business guy from England that needed an application, let’s call him Bob. At that moment the idea he had was like this: he was having a clothing shop, so he wanted to do an e-commerce like app, with all the standard functionalities like cart, checkout, order status and so on. But here’s the catch, he wanted a killer functionality: he wanted to use the phone to scan the person and than on the display he could show only the clothes that would fit that person + an image of the guy in that particular jacket (for example). And not only that, he had a limited budget of $5k-$7k.

From the moment I heard it I knew it was near to impossible, especially with that budget, so I’ve tried to settle a compromise: we’ll do a simple proof of concept, iOS only for starters and the user would actually introduce his size, and than on the back-end we could filter the items, and show only appropriate size. Bob was not buying it. We also discussed the possibility of installing a Kinect in the store and so than his clients could do first body scan in store and than the app would only show generated images: the scanned body and related item. But than Bob understood that every time when new items will arrive he’d have to scan those and that would take a 2–3 days of his time per arrival.

In the end this idea remained just an idea, but let’s think why this was a no-go from the start:

1. Unrealistic budget — Why do you need to create an app in the first place ? To sell more, to entertain, to expand your influence to another niche, you name it. But this will not be possible if your budget is low, all you’ll end up with will be a compromise. And the compromises tend to be… well, compromises. No one is really ecstatic about a compromise, and with the abundance of the current apps, your idea most likely will not be able to compete with other apps. Without a budget your UI will be average, the code most likely not really clean, and AppStore page will not contain the best copywriting. So either start small and focused and do one single thing but do it really well, or find a way to allocate a better budget and go on with that.
2. Lack of well-thought user flow — Don’t just try to copy the other app. Your business will be in some sense unique: it could be that your measure of success is different, or the layout doesn’t really fit your current business flow, or that your back-end is lacking some crucial information for a particular feature or scenario. Analyze what do you want to achieve. Draw some mockups on paper, scan those and send to your developers and designers. Discuss what are the potential issues they see with the mockups and solve those. Also make a reality-check, lead interviews with several of your loyal customers to make sure that the flow you’ll be presenting in your app is acceptable. In conceptual phase, you can afford making errors, because it will cost you very little to nothing. In later phases it could cost you your business.
3. Mismatch between the idea and technology — When I think about the idea now, I’m thinking about using the augmented reality. I’m thinking about machine learning. In 2012 it was simply not possible. Than again, how many of you reading this would use such an app ? Please comment ✍, I’d like to hear your thoughts on that. I’m still thinking that just setting your size at the first app launch would do the trick, because the simpler your flow is better is it received by your users, and bigger is your conversion rate.
4. Need for back-end changes or creation — too often clients that request an app, either focus only on the app and forget about the necessity of a back-end, or don’t really understand that behind a button with text “Buy Now” there’s a need of Paypal, Stripe and Venmo integration. There’s a need than to somehow track payment errors and define for each of those errors some actions to be done.
5. Privacy issues — Even if I did give much of a thought to privacy issues in 2012, today when everyone is so zealous about GDPR — privacy is a real concern. Pictures of your customers, scan of their silhouette, any other data of theirs should all comply to GDPR rules. Your user should be able to export his data, delete his account AND all his data from your servers and any existing backups and so on. Take this in consideration for your next app development.

Please feel free to comment: what are other important aspects that could stop to implement an application idea?

Thanks for reading !