What Makes End-Users and the Marketplace Love Your Windows Phone App?

An unusual thing happened at the Telerik Windows Phone team product planning meeting for Q1 2012 a few months ago. Instead of starting with our usual mantra “What does our customer need in order to build a great app?” we talked about love. What does love have to do with a mobile app you would ask? Well, a lot. Keep reading. The two questions we asked were:

1)    What is it that will make the end-users love our customer’s Windows Phone app?
2)    What is it that will make our customer’s app be loved by the Windows Phone marketplace? 

And here’s a preview of what comes next in the blog post:

We know that the end-user is smart, demanding and sophisticated. He wants super intuitive functionality, but also a simple one, he wants an app that’s slick and cool, he also wants an app that match his needs very closely, he wants to be surprised and he’s impatient – performance issues are simply unacceptable. Your app has a few minutes to make an impression, or it ends up being a one-time fling.

RadControls for Windows Phone already had the performance factor covered. We’re proud to have the fastest ListBox control, which is pretty much the backbone of every mobile app. We have lightning fast Chart and a JumpList controls that won’t fail you even when bound to 10,000 records.

That is why we focused on functionalities that help you achieve “that thing” that make your users simply love your app. Some call it “the wow factor”, Microsoft has called it “element of delight”, we are building it so that you can use it out-of-the-box.

RadSlideView adds this cool flip transition, both with vertical and horizontal orientation.

And guess what? You can achieve this with a single property.

On demand loading is another sweet new feature of the SlideView control. The app will load only the currently selected item, boosting the loading time of the app. You can also use a template to provide a light-weight snapshot of the two adjacent to the viewport items. But what does this mean to the user? It’s simple – he will have what he wants fast and he won’t get bored while waiting. Check the example:

How about horizontal scrolling in the ListBox control. You will not find this behavior in the Windows Phone toolbox.

Moving on to the next question, how to help our customers’ apps achieve better rankings on the marketplace. The starting point for this discussion was the analysis of the data and feedback collected from Tasks - a real-world app created by our team as a learning exercise. We noticed for examples that after implementing “Rate this app” reminder, the number of the app's ratings increased drastically, which consecutively affected positively the overall ranking of the app.

The marketplace is the primary distribution channel for your app and it has its logic and app’s success metrics. There are certain functionalities which are the absolute must-have composite parts of a mobile application that has potential to be successful on the marketplace.

The good news is that we started building these must-have capabilities to that you can concentrate on the logic and the “wow factor” of your app. We called them building blocks and we are introducing four of them with this release:

RadDiagnostics – enabling end-users to send instant crash reports to the developer. Read how to implement it and see a preview of how the report will look like in this blog post.

RateAppReminder – helping your app gets more ratings, which is one of the factors affecting greatly the app’s overall ranking. See how simple it is to implement the control.

TrialReminder – encouraging purchase of the paid version of the app or of premium content. Read how to implement the TrialReminder control here.

LiveTileHelper – allowing you to easily create context specific dynamic tiles. Read how

Quite a few other components and functionalities will be available with the new release of RadControls for Windows Phone in mid-February. Stay tuned.

Join us for the Release Webinar Week to learn for the cool, new stuff across all Telerik product lines. This 3-day event is packed with hour-long webinar sessions from February 20 till February 22, so mark your calendars. One lucky winner from each webinar will leave with a Telerik Ultimate Collection license worth $1999. To enter the drawing and participate in the Q&A session, you must attend the live webinar. 

Register here!