How to find unique app ideas on your own? 

 

If we are to consider one area in our life wholly dominated by unique ideas and their execution, it is none other than the field of mobile app development. Every time a blockbuster app just hits the market, creating loud buzz and fan-following, many would-be developers and aspirants try to figure out how to make something such big to make a resounding success. 

Well, all these boil down to a unique app idea and its perfect or near-perfect execution. There is no shortage of examples of staggering success stories in the app world in recent years. Pokemon Go, the unique game app of its time, made $1 billion in revenue back in 2016 and became a landmark. The success of apps such as Candy Crush and Snap, which bagged billions through acquisition, are among the app market’s recent success stories. 

Not the ideas alone could help these apps to sail to the height of success. Project execution and marketing also play significant roles in them. But ideas are what an app project makes its start. This is why it is natural for any aspiring developer to look for unique app ideas? Is there any systematic method to find unique app ideas that can cement the success of future app projects? Well, here we are going to shed light on some of these tested and tried ways. 

 

Focusing on solutions for regular problems 

In most cases, successful apps are like solutions to problems that users frequently face. Now more precisely, an app solution can address a problem, more chances it has for acceptance. How do you encounter problems in various walks of life and find their respective app solutions? Here we provide some valuable tips. 

• Coming across problems in everyday walks of life is not difficult if you have an attentive and analytical bent of mind. But not all problems are worthy of app ideas simply because many of them are either already addressed by the competitor apps or are not that big to deserve attention with an app-based solution. 
• The second way to reveal a problem further and discover its app-worthiness is by discussing it with peers and other people experiencing the same problem and knowing about the possible solutions they are using. This can work as a brainstorming process to unlock an idea and bring the problem and solution to the light. 
• Besides the above two ways, you should always browse and research online and find problems people often encounter in their respective niches. For example, if you choose the travel niche for your new app, you should read many blogs and content on travel hacks that travelers frequently use, and thus, you can come across ideas that mean something.    
• Always maintain a small notebook where you can frequently scribble down your ideas and discuss various aspects of the same. We habitually forget many ingenious ideas that come to our minds naturally. This is where maintaining a notebook can be tremendously helpful. 

 

Browse through apps in the App Store

Another highly powerful and effective method is to browse and take a more profound experience of several apps belonging to your target category or niche. You can just go to the Google Play or App Store and, one by one, take a closer look at hundreds of apps in every niche. This will help you know all the app solutions available for several customer problem areas that deserve to be addressed. 

These days, releasing unique apps is getting more challenging as hundreds of similarly-featured apps represent most of the possible user problems in every category or niche. This is where your brainstorming skill to extend the app features will become crucial. 

• You need to check app ideas across categories and charts to examine how different app ideas address user problems with features, functionalities, and user experience attributes. 
• Just browse with a variety of keywords for your and several other categories to figure out the availability of apps for every different search term.
• Never fail to take a closer look at the featured apps section of every category across both Apple and Google stores. Since these apps are regarded as the best solutions over others, you can have a solid idea about which direction to think about it. 
• Last but not least, you can always extend your research to other categories to understand how unique app features can address customer problems and whether they still fit into your scheme of things. For example, a travel app’s features can be equally effective for productivity. So, cross-category research is equally important. 

 

A meticulous study of your customers 

If you are going to extend your digital presence through a business app, you must be addressing your customers first before anything else. This is when you need to take a closer look at the customer issues and how to solve them in the most effective ways. Apps help businesses win back customers simply by allowing them to address customer problems in the most efficient manner.

In a number of ways, you can conduct custom research and go deeper into their problems, issues, and the bottlenecks they face in day-to-day interaction with the respective businesses. Here we explain a few of them. 

• First of all, do strong demographic research, which will help you understand customer problems in real-life contexts. The socio-economic background, corresponding lifestyle habits, and cultural influences can greatly impact the app solutions they prefer or are comfortable with.  
• The second most important thing is to watch customer behaviour in real-life business interactions and digital mediums. Just give closer attention to what they are most interested in and where they spend most of their time. You can easily understand their online behavior patterns through detailed web analytics engines showing you different metrics and looking at the heatmaps, which will not be much different from that of mobile apps. 
• The main point is to detect the customer pain points and areas where they are most convenient. When you come to know about their usual pain points and the turnoffs, you can further find the right triggers and convenience attributes that make them appreciate something. Many successful apps are born just by addressing customer pain points. 
• Finally, there is no better alternative than hiring rigorous market research experts who can instantly come up with a meticulous data-driven analysis of customer pain points and preferences. The market research insights will finally make finding areas that deserve new app ideas easier. 

 

Conclusion 

Coming up with a unique and never-before-app idea and following this with proper development and deployment is what a successful app journey is all about. But even when the idea is not unique, you can still offer something uncommon and valuable as a value proposition. That’s precisely what we tried to explain above. 

 

Author Bio

Ciaran Stone is CEO of  Square Root Solutions – An well-known mobile app development company that helps businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups transmute their app development idea into actual mobile applications. In his spare time, Ciaran likes to write an article on different aspects of app development. 

LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/ciaran-stone