Creating an app - Episode 2

In part 1, I discussed the idea creation and the initial brainstorming for your application. In part 2, I'm gonna talk about identifying the platforms that you want to support. Now it's important to note that this is not cast in stone, but you do need to have a starting point. So you may think the obvious answer here is, well, I should support all of them or maybe I should support as many as possible. And, yeah, that 1 way to go.

But depending on the app and the target audience, you could very easily be wrong here, which would result in many, many hours of development and everything else spent building something that is just not gonna work for users on a particular platform. I'll give you an example here. An app that utilizes, unique features, right, say of the Apple devices or aimed at Apple users may well attract users on other platforms. And I'm not saying it's not worth doing, but will it attract enough to make it worth creating the application on those other platforms and supporting them going forward? And will you get a big enough user base?

Or will you meet your target goals, whatever they may be? And so that is something to think about there. Just using that as an example. Another example here is maybe your tool is designed to help web developers with color palette creation and analysis, Something like that. Right?

Finding complementary colors based on something that they pick. Now, obviously, this would make sense to build this as a web app since a lot of web developers are gonna be using laptops and desktops and very likely have more than a few web browsers open. I I know I certainly do when I'm doing web development. And so by having it right there on a web page for them, right, it's gonna be constantly and easily accessible right there on their desktop as opposed to, you know, picking up some kind of device and opening an app and finding a color and copying information across, things like that. So it makes a lot of sense in that use case to have it right there on the same screen and in a web browser, which, like I said, they're very likely to have open.

So as you're thinking about, you're gonna start to identify the best platforms and targets that perhaps best suit the idea for your application. And this is why in the first episode, I suggested creating, profiles for your users, defining a typical user because this will help define where they're gonna be using the application. Maybe they're gonna be using it on multiple platforms, but by defining that typical user in the first episode there when we discussed it, this will help answer these questions a lot easier for you and give you a place to start. Now later on down the road, you may find that you perhaps made a bad choice and you need to put it on another platform or maybe it's going very well and you say to yourself, okay. I I should expand to another platform.

Great. That that would be fantastic. Right? That means you've got a working application. It's been popular or it's, you know, maybe not very popular, and you need to try something else in pivot.

Perfectly reasonable and, hey, it's likely to happen on your first application. Let let's just get real here. Right? So you can expand later on to different target platforms that will be done a lot easier by having a working application on your chosen platform at the beginning or platform. Now as we go forward in future episodes, we're gonna talk about ways to ease that pain by way of creating apps and some of the tools and things like that, but we're not gonna cover them here.

In 1, I just wanted you to be thinking about what are my initial target platforms. 1 recommendation I would have, if you have previous experience with a particular platform and doing development or something like that, that, of course, is a good place to start because you will be able to dive in and use the knowledge that you already have. Now if you are starting on a platform that you're not familiar with and, you know, you're gonna do this yourself, you're not gonna reach out out for other resources or a team or anything like that, then, yes, you know, there's gonna be a learning curve. But, again, this is all part of the process, and you will benefit later on down the road when you've developed a new skill on a new platform or some new tools. That that that's never a bad thing.

Right? There there's no such thing as, oh, you know, I wasted my time learning this as a web developer. No. Because it's bound to come up eventually. So this is 2, and I just wanna put these thoughts out here about your targets and your platforms.

I wanna say thank you to everybody who provided me feedback on the first episode. Thank you so much for for providing that feedback and suggestions. I really appreciate you taking the time and trouble. And also thank you for the for the positive messages that I got for folks looking forward to this series. That really helped a lot.

That really, you know, helps solidify for me that this is something I should do. And so we will be continuing this in the next episode. So that will be out next week. I hope you're looking forward to it. Take away what we've discussed in this episode.

Sit down with that paperwork or those notes that you put together from 1, and extend them now with this information here. And we're gonna take this, and we're gonna take a a big step forward in the next episode. If this has been helpful, you know what to do. Tell a friend. If you wanna give this a review, I would greatly appreciate that as well.

You can reach out to me as always at peter whidham dot com and share your thoughts. Have a great week, everybody.