App Development: Process Overview, From Start to Finish | Udemy instructor, Angela Yu

hello everyone my name is angela and i'm an ios and watchos developer and i'm also one of the co-founders of the app brewery and today i'm going to take you through the entire journey of building an app from beginning to end now through my time working as an ios developer i've worked in teams large and small and also been at the helm as a cto for one of my own app based companies and i'm very fortunate to have been recognized for some of the work that i've done throughout the years today i'm going to teach you how to make an app from beginning to end going from idea validation through to how you would design the app through to how you would monetize your app as well as development and marketing your app in order to get downloads on the app store so it's going to be a whirlwind tour of the entire process and i hope you're ready because we're going to get started so it doesn't matter if you have an idea already or if you're still in the process of brewing one this is one of the most important parts of your app development journey how do you figure out if your app idea is a good one how do you know if it's worth spending your time and your money and your energy to build this app how do you know if it's gonna be a good one so one of the first pieces of advice that i give to students is to talk to absolutely everybody if you're on a plane talk to your air hostess about your app idea if you're in a supermarket talk to your check out cashier about your idea everybody has a valid opinion and by doing this you might just come across somebody who has a unique insight or who might be one of your apps customers in the future and people who will give you advice along the way now whenever i tell people this the first question that i always get is should i ask for an nda or what's known as a non-disclosure agreement now this for those you guys who don't know is basically a piece of legal paper that sort of prevents anybody from stealing your idea but of course you would need the legal console to be able to back up that piece of paper and it's rarely done and one of my friends who works on sand hill road so where a lot of the venture capitalists are based in silicon valley you know he said that if a founder comes to him and the first thing they do is to slide an nda across the table then he knows almost instantly that this guy is a newbie because anybody who's built anything worthwhile will know that the idea is only such a small part of the success of the product and there's so much more to it including a lot of blood sweat and tears and a lot of hard work so my answer to this question is emphatically no try and get advice from as many people as you can without putting them off by having to sign an nda in most cases if it's a really good idea you can bet that probably five or six people across the world already have the same idea and some of them are working on it and some of them are trying to get people to sign ndas now the next thing that you need to do is a little bit of market research so go on to google go onto the app store search for variations of your idea and see if anybody's already created it now the important thing to remember is that if somebody has already created your idea that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't make it because you might have unique domain knowledge you might know more about the topic than the other people who are making it but there are also other things like you might create an app with a better user experience you might create one that's far better designed than the existing products there are unique angles that you can approach in every single idea and remember that facebook wasn't the first social network and google wasn't the first search engine so don't let it put you off but let it inform you you need to be aware of who your competitors are what stage they're at and what is their development process and you can do a little bit of online sloothing to find out all of this now if you don't yet have an app idea that you want to work on then i want you to keep in mind this phrase now i first came across this phrase when i was at stanford and i came across this talk by guy kawasaki now for those of you guys who don't know who he is he's probably one of the first employees at apple and his official title was something like chief evangelist whatever that means right but he said something that really stuck with me and he said that as a startup founder or as any sort of product maker when you're going about your day-to-day life you should always keep this phrase in mind and it's if this then what now what does that mean let me illustrate this with an example now back in 2016 there was this article in the new york times and it had a title of something like how to make anybody fall in love with you or something like that and it was an article that described the research of a sociologist who found that if you get two strangers to ask each other intimate questions that you might not ask a stranger or tell a stranger you know there were questions like if your mom and dad were both drowning in the sea who would you say first and really intimate questions that you probably wouldn't ask a tinder date right but he found that if you got strangers to do this it would accelerate their feelings of intimacy towards each other and i found that article completely fascinating and i remember seeing it all over my social media it came up on twitter and facebook again and again people were sharing it they were liking it and there was a lot of interest around it so i thought to myself if this then what and i thought if people were interested in it then they probably want to give it a go right maybe on their next tinder date but looking at a dense article on a phone is a terrible user experience you would have to zoom in zoom out pan around to try and find the right questions it's really not that fun so i thought what if i spent two hours building an app that made the process a lot easier so i created an app that would split the screen into two and you could lay your phone onto the table and both people can read the questions the right way around and the app would tell them whose turn it is and who should go next and to complete the experiment the sociologist made these two strangers stare into each other's eyes for four minutes straight so i implemented that as well into the app even though it seemed kind of creepy i was trying to stay true to the original research so then i uploaded it to the app store didn't really think anything of it went to sleep and then a few days later the app went viral it was shared on product hunt and there were thousands upon thousands of downloads all because of this one phrase if this then won so i urge you as you go about your day when you come across something that's slightly strange or makes you think then keep this phrase in mind and you might just stumble across some really good app ideas or even business ideas now the next thing that works really well for app ideas is when you scratch your own itch so when you come across a problem during your day-to-day life it could be during your commute it could be at your workplace it could be when you're studying something that just completely frustrates you and you think why why does this problem exist well those problems if you come up with a good solution tend to be really good app ideas because you know as much as we'd like to think that we're unique if you have a problem you can bet that somebody else across the world probably experiences the same pain with the same problem and if you can create an app that addresses that problem and create a solution that you love then you can be sure that other people would love it as well so the next time you come across a problem don't just resolve to complaining about it think if you can come up with an idea that might solve that problem for yourself and others now the next type of app ideas are what you might call der app ideas so this is when you go to your supermarket cashier or you go to your air hostess and you tell them about your app idea and they say well duh of course it should exist it should have existed yesterday here's my money please take it from me so i can buy this app that you are going to build well this is the dur type of app and in order to achieve this kind of reaction there's two important things in the mix one is of course having an idea that generates that kind of reaction something so obvious something that they really see the appeal of but two also being able to express your idea in a way that anybody can instantly just get it so let's look at some of these dur statements from successful companies that we know and love for example evernote remember everything who wouldn't want a second brain where you can stash all the bits of knowledge that you can't remember well dur right or nest saving energy is a beautiful thing who can argue with that saving energy is a beautiful thing or github build software better together so when you come up with an idea think about how you can express the core concept of it in a single dir like statement that generates interest and when you talk to people it seems entirely obvious why your app should exist now the next type of app idea i want to talk about are apps that fulfill a market vacuum so a market vacuum is when there is a customer demand or customer need that is as of yet unmet by any existing product or service so for example back when the iphone 4s came out and the s stood for siri by the way so the iphone 4 with siri apple did a really good job of marketing siri now we know today after you know siri's been alive and well for many years that she's not that bright and she's probably only really good for reminders and timers as far as i can tell but people didn't know that back then they were sold on this idea of the virtual assistant the pa who you didn't have to pay and a whole bunch of really awesome sounding taglines that came from apple and various journalists so people were really excited but the problem was that not everybody could upgrade to an iphone 4s right you might be on the android ecosystem or you might have just bought a brand new phone and you didn't want to upgrade so that was a market vacuum and there was a company that spotted that market vacuum and they created say hi translate and what this app does is that you could press on one of the buttons to speak to the phone as if it were a real human and it would talk back at you in your language of choice and it's like as if there's a little translator that lives inside your phone and it simulates that whole siri experience that you're lusting after and by filling that market vacuum the people who made this app went on to do really really well because they filled the vacuum now let's look at another example if you haven't heard of flappy bird then i have to be incredibly jealous of you because i think that means that you spent the last two years on a caribbean island with low wi-fi signals because this was an internet sensation everybody wanted to flap their bird now for those of you guys who don't know it's basically this game where you get a slightly chubby bird who has to flap its wings to navigate through a whole bunch of pipes in order to get as far as possible and everybody got obsessed with this app because of how difficult it was and you could see twitter light up with people angry about how infuriating this app was and yet how addictive they were to it but the drama came when one day the developer released a statement and said flappy bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed but it happened to become an addictive product i think it's become a problem to solve that problem it's best to take down flappy bird it's gone forever i mean life doesn't get much more dramatic than this in the developer world this was it so he pulled the app overnight off the app store and it was gone forever literally and people couldn't flap their birds anymore and you have no idea how much anxiety it created in everybody that they could no longer flap their little chubby bird so by now you might recognize that this has opened up a market vacuum literally overnight and the developers who saw it as that the first ones who tried to fill that vacuum stood to gain the most and today you could literally flap anything you want you can flap a troll you could flap a chicken you could even flap a turd if you so wished and the developers who were the first to recognize this market vacuum stood to gain the most so look around you for market vacuums are opening up every day and see how you can target them and close off that vacuum using your app so now that you're certain that you've got a good app idea something that's going to be a real big hitter it closes off a market vacuum or it scratches your own itch whatever it may be the next step you need to take with that idea is to design it and very often you hear people ask well why do i care about design isn't it enough that it's a really good idea or that i coded up really well think about this currently there's around 2 million apps on the ios app store and about 2.5 million on the android app store that is a lot of apps and when you release your app to those app stores it's literally like a drop in the ocean so in order to differentiate yourself you have to be able to appeal to people's emotions as well as their logic you have to make people love your app and we know that loving an app doesn't come from how well it works or how it doesn't crash or how you know it saves all your data every single time but it comes from the design plus if you think about it it only takes three taps for all of your blood sweat and tears to be completely wiped off their phone that's all it takes and the scary statistics are that apparently out of a hundred apps that gets downloaded off the app store 50 of them gets deleted after the first time they're opened so you don't want that to happen to your baby right so that's why we have to think about design now that's a good question what exactly is good design so it's a little bit like a mythical beast right like a unicorn you'll probably know it when you see it but actually both apple and google provide guidance on this so apple produces a delightful piece of bedtime reading it's a little bit thicker than what you're used to and it's got a fantastic title called ios human interface guidelines if any book ever flew off the shelves it's not this one but it does describe how you should lay out your app how you should design the animations or the interactions in order for it to feel like it fits in with the ios environment and google has something similar called the material design principles that shows you how to make the best android looking and feeling apps out there so these are great things to take a look at and if you have a look in the description box below i've got a whole bunch of links for you that link towards all of these resources that i mentioned during this talk now once you've got a good grounding of what apple and google think is good design the next thing to do is take a look at some of these mobile pattern websites so one is patterns without the vowels obviously because startups don't have vowels and another one is mobile dash patterns and what they do is they collect and categorize screenshots from some of the best designed apps out there so that means when you're designing a particular part of your interface for example you're looking to create a news feed for your app then why not take a look at how twitter does it how facebook does it and i'm not saying you know steal these ideas from these incredibly well paid designers but i'm saying more like be inspired by their designs so once you know roughly what your designs are going to look like the next step is to choose a color palette and one of my favorite tools is something called colorhunt.io and here you have a bunch of professional designers who have curated and collected some of their favorite palettes so you can search by hot or popular and you can copy down the hex codes of some beautiful palettes for your project as well now if you're even lazier than that then there's a website called flat ui colors which is a 15 color color palette that was specially formulated for the ios environment so for example you might notice that this shade of wisteria is the exact shade of purple that the yo app uses for their app icon or if you've ever used any of the seven minute workout apps you'll notice that they've basically just taken all of these colors and used it to color their app now if you're an android developer then there's a website called materialpalette.com and here you can select two colors that you like and it will automatically generate an eight color color palette complete with an accent tone so once you've seen some mobile patterns and you've got your color palette the next step is to create what's called a user flow diagram and a user flow diagram maps out the journey that a user might take through your app for a specific task so how would they go about checking out an item or how might they create a recipe in your app and the beauty of this is that it's drawn pencil on paper it takes maybe a few seconds to change and rub out and modify until you're happy with the flow and once you are then the next step is to create what's called a wireframe so wireframes are low fidelity representations of your app's design so they're usually drawn pencil on paper and it shouldn't take you more than half an hour to do a quick wireframe for an idea that you have and once you've created your wireframes you can even link them together using something called pop now pop allows you to take pictures of your wireframes link them together through interaction buttons and then you end up with a working app that you've just drawn up 15 minutes ago so it's a really really cool tool and we'll teach you how to use that within the course as well now the next step up from wireframes are what designers call mock-ups so mock-ups unlike wireframes are high fidelity representations of your design so it's almost like you've gone into the future and you've taken a screenshot of this app that doesn't yet exist and you've captured it to show venture capitalists or your developer team in order to get the end product the app that you create looking exactly the way that you want it to and this is really the beauty of mockups if you tell a developer you know i want a news feed then you might not get the nicest news feed but if you were to create a mock-up then they would try to keep to the design that you've made now markups can be made in lots of different design software anywhere from photoshop with illustrator or sketch or marvel there's a whole bunch of tools out there that you can use but if you are the designer developer if you're going to code up the app and build it yourself you don't always need to create mockups because when you're creating your app in xcode you have the opportunity of creating the designs within the software itself so you wouldn't have to duplicate your work inside a design software as well as inside your programming software so that's what i tend to do if i'm building an app just for myself now if you want to design a mock-up without having to learn how to use photoshop or sketch you can actually use a website called ux pin to simply drag and drop different elements onto your iphone screen so for example you can drag on a calendar or you can drag on buttons to make it look the way that you want it to now while you're creating your designs if you are the designer then you might need some other assets as well and it's really important that you can't just take images off google search because some images are copyrighted so you could potentially be getting a letter from their lawyer sometime down the line and it would be terrible if you have this huge hit of an app only to have to pay compensation to somebody so be really careful when you find designs that you want to put into your app now a safer bet is to look for design assets that are creative commons or websites that allow you to use their icons for free and the key phrase here is free for commercial use now here are some of my favorite resources one is a website called icon store where professional designers have designed these beautiful packages of icons so they have the same look and feel as each other and the best part is that they're free for commercial use now if you needed hd images to use as the background of your apps then you can find huge collections of beautiful hipstery hd images from resplashed and unsplash and remember that if you want to look at any of the resources just head into the description box and i've included all of the links there for you now i can't stress enough how important it is to design your app a lot of people make the mistake of jumping head first into programming it only to realize a month down the line that ah i should really change you know screen two should become screen three or this button should go to that screen instead and the problem is that when you want to make those kind of changes and you've already got the code written down then ripping bits of code out or trying to implement different functionality can be extremely time consuming and difficult and that's why the process that i'm describing to you and the one that i'll teach you inside the course is all about taking it step by step going from user flow diagram to wireframe to maybe mockup and then prototyping and only then do you go into xcode or android studio to build your apps because something that might take you a few seconds to rub out on your user flow diagram will end up taking you a month of development time when you need to change it inside xcode but what do you do after you've designed your app so you know your app idea is a great one you've designed it to look and feel and behave exactly the way you want it to what's the next step well you might think it's getting into the programming and developing it but it's actually thinking about the monetization strategy and this is something that you should bear in mind before you start developing your app and not as an afterthought so i'm going to talk through some of the most common monetization strategies for apps and the cases in which you might use each one so the first one that a lot of people would have heard of because this term is brandished about a lot is the freemium model so this is where you download the app for free and you get around maybe 60 to 80 of all the features of the app but then in order to get the premium features you would have to pay in order to unlock the paywall and this can be a one-time payment for example removing ads or it could be a recurring payment now this type of model works really well if you have an app that has frequent daily usage and it has a high perceived value to the user so these are services almost like for example your dropbox or your spotify and the reason is because only if the user has integrated it into their workflow or into their daily life does this model start making more money rather than if it was an outright paid for app so think about what type of app that you have or you're building then try to fit the monetization model to it the next model i want to talk about are in-app purchases so this can be real say if you're selling t-shirts or if you're taking people around in uber cars but it can also be virtual so things like gems or energy or time or lightning bolt whatever it may be now the important distinction is that if your in-app purchases are virtual then they need to go through the apple payment gateway and during that process both apple and google will take off 30 percent of whatever it is that the in-app purchase cost so of course that kind of margin is not sustainable if you're selling t-shirts right so that's why they allow you to use alternative payment gateways if you are indeed providing the user with real life goods and that is something you should think about ahead of time now there's a few more types of monetization models that i want to run through one is white labeling so for example if you were a gym and you wanted an app built and the features that you might want include maybe allowing users to book the classes maybe the user should be able to update their membership details or update their payment methods and but the thing is these features aren't unique to your gym every gym if they wanted an app would need these sort of features so you find one gym that wants to have this app and then you re-skin the app in order to have their custom branding and color palette and then you sell it to another gym and another gym another gym and so on so that means that you develop once and you sell many many times now that works well if you have contacts or domain knowledge in a particular niche and you want to build apps almost as templates that you can resell again and again now the next monetization strategy i want to talk about that's becoming increasingly more and more important is ads now perhaps more on the android system than the ios system people are becoming more and more reluctant to pay for apps instead they're willing to suffer through interstitial ads and banner ads and having the screen taken up by a lot of advertising but this is the truth and we as app developers have to deal with it somehow now personally i'm not a huge fan of ads because as we spoke about before you know i've spent weeks even months just tweaking the designs redesigning making new prototypes sketching it out again just to get it pixel perfect and make it look beautiful and then a fifth of the app screen is taken up by clash of clans and that somehow just really hurts me inside and having the ios ecosystem being my predominant market you can almost get away without having to use ads as long as you can create good enough apps but for clients or for android then this is a really important monetization strategy that you need to get to grips with now another monetization strategy that's relatively new is the partnership model and this is usually when you involve one large advertiser and incorporate them into your app so as an example one of the first apps that implemented this was run keeper where if you ran a challenge say 5 000 meters like say a 5k or a 10k run then you would be rewarded with things that had real life value for example 10 off nike shoes or 20 off adidas shorts whatever it may be but it would reward your behavior in the app with real life goods now if you think about it all three parties who are involved in this process they all benefit so your developer benefits because they get paid by the advertiser the advertiser benefits because they get to show their products and they get to be in front of their target audience and your users benefit too because not only is encouraging them to run more it's also giving them some real life benefits so if there is any way that you have links with maybe retail or real life companies that you can get to sponsor your app and you in turn advertise them to their target audience then this tends to work really really well now the last monetization strategy that i'm going to talk about that nobody likes talking about because it's a bit of a problem child in the world of app monetization and this is selling your users data for money now you might not believe this but if you look inside your health and fitness apps especially inside the privacy policy hidden beneath layers and layers of legal jargon is the right to sell your in-app data associated with your account be it your name your date of birth whatever it may be and you can see that ethically has some issues because you probably don't want this data getting into the hands of health insurance companies or life insurance companies without your explicit agreement so this is not a strategy that i encourage not only because it's kind of unethical but also because the big app stores apple and google are cracking down on this and if you do end up getting banned by apple or google then they remove all of your apps from the app store and prevent you from uploading any more to these markets so it's something that is good to be aware of as an app user yourself but it's something that i don't encourage using as a monetization strategy as an aside if you were really keen and you didn't mind giving your data away there's actually a way where you can sell your own data so your browsing history or your app usage data or your health and fitness data for something like 40 pounds a year so something like maybe 60 dollars a year if you're interested there are these opportunities out there now finally we've assured ourselves that we have a great app idea we've designed our app to look and feel beautiful we know exactly how we're going to make money from our app once it's on the app store and now it comes to the main event how do you develop your app how do you turn it from these ideas and designs on paper into something that you can hold and use in your own hands well that is where the programming part and the app development part comes in now there's many ways of developing an app and i'm gonna go from most expensive way to least expensive way of doing this so the most expensive way is going to a physical shop so i live in london there's a lot of great app development boutiques and you get to sit down with a designer a developer the people who'll be working on your project you get to talk to them about your ideas and you know flesh out what it is that you want made and you can be close to the development process of your app every step of the way now the reason why most people can't afford to do this is because you're going to need to budget anywhere between 80 000 and 150 000 per app so android or ios in order to get this kind of service now part of that is because you're paying for the expertise and advice and guidance of designers developers but another part of that is that rent in london is extremely expensive i would know so if ins so instead of paying somebody who's based in the uk you can also find a freelancer who's based elsewhere maybe somewhere where it's cheaper to rent an office mostly in eastern europe or parts of asia and the really important thing here is to make sure that you select your freelance developer or development team really carefully and make sure that you vet them properly now here's a bit of a horror story from one of our students on one of our at brewery programming boot camps so she had this idea to develop an app and she approached a team that were based in china over one of these online websites like elan score odesk where you can find freelance development teams and you may or may not know but there's two ways of paying freelance developers you can either pay per hour of work they do or you can pay per milestone so you pay them a set amount once they've reached 20 completion 40 completion 60 etc now she was at 80 completion the app was so close to being done and they'd shown her the intermediate apps and she'd been testing them on her own phone and it was all going so well but then when it did reach 80 she got a call from them over skype and they said to her that something terrible has happened their company had been raided by the police in china they had all of their computers taken along with all of the work that included her app and they said that one solution might be that if she was willing to pay an extra 10 000 pounds then they could bribe the chinese police and try to get their stuff back now at this point she rightly started getting very suspicious of this team and actually ended up walking away without having her app completed because she was scared that she couldn't trust this team so what if they put down some code that would end up stealing her customers credit card details or something dodgy like that and this is one of the reasons why when you work with a freelance development team abroad where you can't meet up with them regularly you have to make sure that you interview them more than once so face to face or over skype and you also have to make sure that you speak to some of their past clients and see some of their past projects that they've built this way you can try and figure out what the work what the experience is like working with them and most of these teams if they are legitimate should be able to give you a contact of somebody who's based in the same country as you are who have worked with them before and you can talk to them about what it was like working with that team now this still carries a pretty high price tag you're looking at anywhere between thirty thousand and fifty thousand to develop an app through a freelance team so now we've come to the cheapest solution and the most customizable and that is building the app yourself now at the app brewing we've run in-person programming bootcamps for over three years and we've seen hundreds of students come through who have been able to build their own apps and become app entrepreneurs now even if you don't want to be a developer yourself it would still be a huge benefit to be able to look at code and understand what's roughly going on and also to be able to estimate how long would it take to build a particular feature or how much it should cost to build it and these are all valuable skills that will stay with you and that benefit will appreciate over time as well and it's a lot easier than you think it is at the ad bury we've taught over a thousand students in person and over 50 000 students online and we know that a lot of people have come from different backgrounds with no programming knowledge at all and they've been able to build crazy wonderful apps after completing the course going on to develop a company or continue to work as a developer so it's very much within your capabilities but once you've developed the app what is the next step well you need to get downloads right you need to be able to market your app so that people will hear about it and will be able to download it and there's some skills involved in that now back in the days when the app store first came about it was really the golden era because you can make any old app and somebody would download it because there wasn't much choice and i'm convinced that if i time traveled back and i took a picture of my own face and made it an app that is called take a look at angela's face app and it did nothing other than to display a selfie of me then people would still download it and probably even buy it that was just the world back then but today it's a very different place there's a lot of other apps that you have to compete with so when you search for something like ninja games on the app store there are hundreds if not thousands of apps are targeting that keyword so you need to learn various skills and tricks in order to be able to rank highly and also to get people to know about your app and get downloads for your app but before you do any marketing you don't want to market a bad app and by bad i mean a buggy app so if something wasn't working so you have to make sure that you test your app extensively before you put it onto the app store and put a lot of effort into marketing it because if you market a really buggy app you're just gonna end up with lots and lots of bad reviews which is not what you want now here's a trick that i like to do for some types for certain types of app launches say that my target market is the us and the uk what i can do is i can release the app to smaller countries that match the demographics of my target audience so for the us and uk the smaller mirroring demographic tends to be canada and new zealand for me and what you do is that three months ahead of the main release you release your app only to canada and new zealand and then you watch the reviews and the feedback that you're getting from these real users because some of them will have feature requests some of them will discover bugs and they'll give you a lot of really useful feedback which you can act on to improve your app and once these users are loving your app then you can be pretty sure that your main markets will love it as well so that's just a quick tip for beta testing for free essentially now what happens on launch day now it's really important to think about your launch day so that's the day when your app goes live on the app store ideally what you want is to have a large list of people ideally their emails people who have signed up before saying that they want to download your app once it's available and you can achieve this by building a landing page for your app so what we tend to say is that before you design your app before you develop your app before you lay down a single line of code the first thing you need to do is to create a landing page for your app it doesn't have to be very it doesn't have to be fancy it can just be a one-pager that briefly describes what your app is about but most importantly it has an email collection box and this will allow the people who are interested in downloading your app to put their email down and that means that on launch day you'll be able to hit up 10 000 or 20 000 of these potential users who will download your app on your launch day and both app stores apple and google look at your metrics over the first 24 hours 7 days and 30 days to see how you perform on a range of things like how many app downloads how many times your app was opened how many people how many people left a review how good the reviews were etc and that first 24 hours is really really important to get your app noticed and possibly start ranking on the app stores now if you're a web developer then you'll know how easy it would be to create this landing page but if you're not a web developer then there's a whole bunch of tools such as wordpress or squarespace and even something called app stop which allows you to put in the url of your app on itunes and it will automatically generate a landing page for you grabbing the data from your itunes listing so it's another resource that's worth looking at now app marketing is not just about bringing in new users or your existing user base download your app it's also trying to target people who are already searching on the app store for something that they're looking for and the scary statistic is that the top five apps for a particular search term so for example if i search for ninja games on the app store and the top five apps that show up account for 72 of all the downloads and that's pretty scary and the top app alone takes 35 percent so that's why you also need to learn about app store optimization now some of you might have heard of search engine optimization or seo and that's when you try to get your website to rank highly on google because we all know that nobody looks at page three or page four of google right so app store optimization is about how do you get your app as close to the top of the search screen as possible and the real secret to this is knowing which keywords to target what are the words what are the things that a lot of people are searching for but not many apps are targeting and a process that you can follow to do this is by using a reverse dictionary now a reverse dictionary is not a is not a thesaurus because the thoraces gives you synonyms so if i search for happy i might get the word joy but reverse dictionaries give you all the words that are used in the same context or or in conjunction with the word that you're searching for so for example if you searched for coffee you might get java you might get beans you might get espresso and what you'll realize is that a reverse dictionary gives you a whole bunch of words that make really good keywords and then you stick all of these keywords through a service like sensor tower or app annie which can give you some analytics and insights into each of these words and you look at how much traffic each of these words get so the higher the traffic the better and you also look at how much competition each of these words have and the lower the competition the better that means there's less apps that are trying to target those words and for sensor tower at least the sweet spot is when the traffic index is above three and the difficulty index is below three those tend to be good keywords to target now when you upload your app to the app store on the ios app store you'll actually get a box where you get to put in the keywords you want to target but with the android app store so the google play store you actually have to you actually have to sprinkle your keywords inside your description and inside your title much like seo in websites now there's only so much that i can cover in an hour and i could probably talk about all of these topics for days and days on end so if you're interested in learning more then be sure to take a look at the link below where for a limited time you'll be able to get 95 off of my gigantic 43 hour course which is normally priced at 200 pounds but you'll be able to get it today at 15 now before i leave you there's just three final tips that i want to give you if you're going to start the journey of creating your very own app the first thing is keep your app simple as simple as you can manage don't try and build every single feature that you could possibly want into your app in the first instance just as if you were learning mechanics you wouldn't first start by building a car because you might get stuck you might end up with just one wheel so you would start by making maybe a skateboard right keep your app simple make it a minimum viable product with only the core feature that you want to have and then once you've got that and once you've uploaded to the app store you can listen to user feedback you can see what other features are people willing to pay for and from there then build your product up give it more features and flesh it out more and make it more capable the next tip is if you do any marketing at all you're already above 95 percent of all the independent developers and it gives you a real leg up in the app stores so it's well worth doing and finally just do it it's a lot easier than you imagine it to be right now and i will be there teaching you every step of the way

Channel: Udemy

Views: 73,360

Rating: 4.9271221 out of 5

Keywords: App development, how to make an app, how to make an iphone app, ios 11 development, swift app development, create an iphone app, app devevelopment tutorial, udemy, how to make an ios app, ios 11, angela yu, angela yu udemy, udemy angela yu, how to develop an app, angela yu free online course, angela yu ios 11, angela yu ios, angela yu web development, angela yu free tutorial, ios 11 app development, ios 11 tutorial, how to create an app, xcode 9, xcode, ios development

Id: Sfpcl4FX3TU

Length: 51min 1sec (3061 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2019