Defining Your Culture

I mentioned before how failed or discontinued apps often have short-term goals attached to them, which might explain why they aren’t still being sold. As a developer, you have to think about the long-term plan. Instead of hoping that your app will be a success, come up with a plan that will make it a success. You want to create an application that will create its own culture, and thus become a part of our mass culture. I’ll have more to say about a marketing plan in Chapter 4, but let me briefly touch on a how to come up with the culture for your application.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t program your app to do everything that you dreamed it could on the day that it launches. Chances are, you have already discovered how difficult programming is, and the technology may not even exist yet to have your application do exactly what you want it to do. That’s fine—as long as you can make a program that can at least do some of it, that might be enough to justify a download by an Android user. Remember what I said in Chapter 2, that sometimes it is about making an application that will allow a user to do something easier, which usually means fewer steps involved in implementation.

For example, let’s say that you have an application that serves as a universal remote. First of all, let me tell you that a lot of other applications that are doing this, and it usually involves another piece of hardware to get it to work. So you really need to make sure it can at least replicate the basic features of your competition before you release it to the Android Market.

Now, what kind of culture can you present with this? That all depends on what you can offer users, especially if there are features that your competitors don’t offer. It would be helpful to look into the future of home theater electronics to see where your product can go. For example, if you can create a universal remote that can deal with set-top boxes like the Roku or even video game systems, then you might have something that your competitors don’t have. Combine that with some cloud computing and a DVR, and you’ve really got a package that you can offer customers!

So what kind of culture are you creating? Your target audience is definitely the home theater crowd—but don’t just give them a product, give them something to believe in. Show them that by using your Android application they are transporting themselves into “a world of their own.” I’ll leave you to decide whether or not that is a decent slogan, but you see what I am getting at: you are showing a belief for your target audience to rally around.