Creating new apps has never been easier! Or so I've been told.
What I have noticed is that customers expect a certain baseline of functionality. Features that they have grown accustomed to. Features and functionality that exists in other, more mature applications. Applications and services with teams and teams of engineers and managers behind them. You know, easy stuff.
Tough cookies if you think this doesn't apply to your nascent little app, whose domain was registered three weeks ago, and your first AWS bill hasn't even come in yet. Because it's not their problem! It's yours.
That's okay, it's not like you had other problems to deal with.
Here's a completely unordered, inaccurate, non-exhaustive, tongue-in-cheek list of absolutely necessary must-haves:
Free tier. People loathe paying for things. Money? Ew.
Figuring out how to get people to pay you is a weirdly difficult problem, and the existence of that problem is the reason Amplitude has a 10 figure market capitalization.
It's also why your 2nd biggest expense is going to be your marketing budget way sooner than you think.
If you like to gamble, you can always try to ride the hockey stick growth choo-choo train, make everything free, and hope that somebody with a lot of money notices you before you run out of instant noodles and redbull.
Native mobile application. It doesn't matter how awesome and incredible your product is on the web, the literal first thing someone will email to your
support@address will be: "Is there an Android/iOS app available?"And no, a responsive web app that performs perfectly on mobile Safari/Chrome isn't going to cut it. I really wish it did. That's just not how the world works, though.
Dark mode. I have no idea how this squeezed its way into the zeitgeist of the current technological landscape, but people are really vocal about the absolute necessity of a dark mode.
And a good dark mode is hard! Add in any sort of theming or user-selectable accent colour, and you've now got a colour theory problem, a design problem, and a math problem to solve.
Undo. It's no longer enough to have confirmation dialogs for potentially destructive operations; customers never read those anyways, so it's not like they provided a useful guardrail.
People are conditioned to just click-click-click their way to ruin, and no matter how much rope you give them they will inevitably find creative ways to hang themselves.
Applications need to maintain a history stack that lets users undo the most recent destructive action, if not the last N actions.
Push notifications. Everyone fights so hard for those precious (re)engagement metrics and the dwindling attention span of the human race that it's now become a de facto requirement to have push notifications for both mobile and web.
It's ubiquitous to the point that Bothering-People-As-A-Service (BPaaS rolls right of the tongue, doesn't it?) is a multi-billon dollar side-quest.
Google/Microsoft/Apple/Slack/etc. integration. It almost doesn't matter what your service or application does, but if people can't link up their calendar/email/slack/dropbox/etc., then you're going to be dancing around that support request every day until you finally cave in.
As a reward, you then you have the the fun job of maintaining and supporting those integrations forever! Don't worry though, it's not like big tech companies like Google will gut and sunset their own APIs and products without warning.
Direct email/chat support. Customers love to talk to you about how their day is going and ask why you haven't yet created a native desktop client for your service that runs on Windows XP. They absolutely do not want to do this to an AI or a chatbot, and most certainly don't want to read a boring old FAQ. Words? Reading? Disgusting.
And even though you answered this same question, from the same person, on the same free-tier plan two months ago, they will adamantly remind you that this is a deal-breaker for them and they will immediately move to one of your competitors if this isn't implemented by the start of the next lunar cycle.
Is anyone else tired?