App Savvy: Turning Ideas into iPad and iPhone Apps Customers Really Want by Ken Yarmosh is a new book from O’Reilly that focuses on the hottest market today: mobile apps.
Over its 352 pages it is highly informative about how can you make your iPad or iPhone app stand out in Apple’s highly competitive App Store.
This isn’t a technical coder’s book stuffed full of lines of C++ and Xcode, although developers should read it, too.
It’s more focused on the business, product, and marketing elements critical to planning, completing, and selling apps.
There are guidelines for planning the concept, engaging customers “early and often”, developing the app, and “launching it with a bang”.
What’s different about Ken Yarmosh’s App Savvy is that it details proven processes for developing successful apps, via numerous interviews with the App Store's most prominent publishers. Informative interviews include Digital Post, Mobclix, Smule, Sophiestication, KISSmetrics, Balsamiq, GetAppsDone.com, AppStoreHQ, Tapbots, Agile, Hog Bay, Mariner, TapMetrics, PoweryBase, tap tap tap, Grades, TouchArcade, Flurry, Lumos and appFigures.
You learn a lot by asking the right questions to people who’ve been there and done it. Yarmosh has done just that.
While it focuses on the key iOS market for iPhone and iPad App Savvy has plenty to teach on any platform.
App Savvy also goes into detail on the following subjects:
- Learn about the App Store and how Apple's mobile devices function
- Follow guidelines for vetting and researching app ideas
- Validate your ideas with customers - and create an app they’ll be passionate about
- Assemble your development team, understand costs, and establish a workable process
- Build your marketing plan while you develop your application
- Test your working app extensively before submitting it to the App Store
- Assess your app's performance and keep potential buyers engaged and enthusiastic
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