The start of anything new is always an exciting but tense time. You have an idea which you are sure could potentially be the next “killer app”. Google itself started off as a search engine and is now the second-most valuable company in the United States! With your new idea in hand, you spend weeks, sometimes even months, surveying the market, meeting with investors and, most importantly, working on the app itself.
In this early stage, your team will most probably comprise of overworked engineers with very little time on their hands, scarce resources and a limited understanding of the market. All of this contributes to you making rushed decisions which will inevitably make your app less than stellar.
However, once the app has reached a marketable stage, you make it available for download and wait until people start to download and use it. Soon, feedback starts to trickle in via customer reviews and you realize how things could be different and in some cases, better than what you’re initial idea for the app was.
So What Should You Do Then?
In order to respond to the feedback, you will have to rewrite the app. Different customers will give different reasons as to how the app could be better. Maybe they might insist that the product be written in a different code, C# in place of JavaScript for the sake of compatibility with their devices, or as is more often the case, to eliminate bugs which will crop up because of the rushed decisions you had to make before.
You start responding to the feedback and your customer base starts to grow, you gain a better understanding of the market and your engineers get more experience, thus making rewrites easier. Depending on how market-savvy you are and how innovate and helpful your app is you may achieve product & market fit.
Rewrites After Achieving Product & Market Fit
Rewrites may have to be done even after achieving product & market fit due to a number of factors:
- A new version of an operating system may be on the horizon.
- Customers may ask for new features to be implemented.
- Debugging the existing code may have become too complicated.
However, rewrites are a risky venture and should only be undertaken when it is absolutely necessary as new bugs may get introduced or old bugs may reappear.
Today, you need to use HTML5 and other technologies as a developer. The need is to create apps that run in most mobile versions of the OS. For instance, if you are creating an app for the Android, it is always useful to create apps that run right from Android 2.3 at least. This ensures a wider audience helping you plunge into possibly more profits.
