If you look at the Apple App Store or the Google Play marketplace, you will notice that every single day brings new apps of all kinds. Some are useful, while others are hardly so. Some are colorful, while others look boring and gray. Some are free, while others require a subscription or a one-time purchase fee.

The number of new apps in any given day is in the hundreds, if not thousands. While this certainly makes it feel that with a good idea, you can quickly strike gold in the application development world, there is another side of the coin that must be considered: every day, dozens (if not hundreds) of web applications disappear from the marketplace. Some may make a comeback at a later time, but many never return. What can cause an application to fold? As in every industry, there is the good, the bad, and the ugly in web application development, but the number one reason why an app that should actually deserve people’s attention for many years would disappear altogether is the developers’ failure to optimize their application.

What does it mean to optimize the application?

Much too often, when a developer or team of developers come up with a brilliant idea, bring forward a great application that immediately wins the hearts of a large core demographic, and observe their success, this is where they start on the downward spiral.

Their successful web application is there. Customers are flocking in. Positive reviews are everywhere. And yet there is little blissful or encouraging about the situation if the developers are not already hard at work behind the scenes, making the next version of the update and tracking any problems with the current one.

As they say, imitation is the highest level of praise - and this is definitely true when it comes to application development. Other developers, upon seeing that your idea is really taking off and customers are excited about it, will immediately try to either create another application that will do the same thing or an application that will do everything yours does plus something extra so as to draw the customers away from you. What can you do to counter that? Optimize your app, constantly, in a variety of ways.

How does optimization work?

Application development takes time, thus having a full version of a web application within a short timeframe is certainly unrealistic. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that new patches, additions and other sub-versions take less time to make but can make a crucial difference between your app’s continued popularity and its disappearing. Constantly listening in to what the customers are saying, running ideas by a focus group of users, as well as your own team, and keeping yourself informed about what your existing and potential competitors are up to - all of this will enable you to put your web application optimization into high gear. The Thoransoft team is here to help.