Peggy Anne Salz - The Everything Guide to Mobile Apps: A Practical Guide to Affordable Mobile App Development for Your Business

Dear Reader,

Its both exciting and terrifying to think about the mobile technology opportunities that lay ahead. Its no coincidence that companies everywhere are scrambling to produce smartphone and tablet apps aimed at getting their content, services, and brands in the hands of customers.

Its time for us all to take out and dust off Henry Chesbroughs milestone book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, and read it with mobile in mind. Chesbrough famously argued in 2003 that companies must be open to good ideas wherever they find them, and should leverage multiple paths to marketeven if the path to success is through another companys business.

Were sure Chesbrough would agree that this approach also powers the new App Economy, where companies and developers alike are creating value-adding mobile apps. Alone or together with partners, you have to plan for success.

But app developers are not just expected to master all the business and technology challenges of a multichannel, multidevice, multimedia world. In many cases, they must take on new responsibilities on behalf of their clients and partners, provide the ideas, build the apps, and drive the social media and marketing that will benefit everyone in their business ecosystem.

Its a mammoth task, which is why we have brought together the insights of twenty-five-plus mobile technology professionals, practitioners, and pundits to identify market trends, best practices, and key lessons learned in developing and distributing mobile apps. Our purpose is to provide you clear direction and critical information, equipping you to profit from your app venture. Think of this guide as a starting point to a detailed roadmap, one that will allow you to plot the transformational path your app business needs to succeed in this exciting new App Economy.

Strap yourself in. Its going to be a terrific ride!

These handy, accessible books give you all you need to tackle a difficult project, gain a new hobby, comprehend a fascinating topic, prepare for an exam, or even brush up on something you learned back in school but have since forgotten.

You can choose to read an Everything book from cover to cover or just pick out the information you want from our four useful boxes: e-questions, e-facts, e-alerts, and e-ssentials. We give you everything you need to know on the subject, but throw in a lot of fun stuff along the way, too.

We now have more than 400 Everything books in print, spanning such wide-ranging categories as weddings, pregnancy, cooking, music instruction, foreign language, crafts, pets, New Age, and so much more. When youre done reading them all, you can finally say you know Everything!

PUBLISHER Karen Cooper

MANAGING EDITOR, EVERYTHING SERIES Lisa Laing

COPY CHIEF Casey Ebert

ASSISTANT PRODUCTION EDITOR Mary Beth Dolan

ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Lisa Laing

ASSOCIATE DEVELOPMENT EDITOR Eileen Mullan

EVERYTHING SERIES COVER DESIGNER Erin Alexander

Visit the entire Everything series at www.everything.com

GUIDE TO
MOBILE APPS

A practical guide to affordable mobile app development
for your business

Peggy Anne Salz and Jennifer Moranz

This book is dedicated to my husband, Peter Salz, without whose encouragement, support, and sense of humor, none of this would have been possible, and to my mother, Ruth Trautman, who started the flame. Peggy

This book is dedicated to my LOML, Jonathan Shambroomyour love, laughter, and monkey sounds made this possibleand to my mother, Judy DeVoto, for your never-ending support of my passion for writing. Jennifer

A special shout-out to all our guest contributors and mobile pundits, with a hat tip to Tomi Ahonen for excellent mobile stats; Ken Herron for his invaluable insights around social media; Eileen Mullan for being a good listener and a great editor; and Jez and Debi Harper at Ts Nua Designs for keeping it real, sharing their passion, and giving their all to make sure this book sets the bar. It has been such a pleasure and an experience working with you all and the result is a resource we can all be proud of!

LOOK AROUND AND ITS clear that conditions are coming together for a perfect storm that will rip across the mobile app space, paving the way for mobile apps that will enable everythingfrom games and entertainment to education and health care to retail and daily productivityand leave an indelible mark on the daily lives of many.

It all links back to the power of mobile, a true mass-medium that has been growing for years. Think of the printed word from the 1500s, sound recording from the 1900s, cinema from the 1910s, radio from the 1920s, TV from the 1950s, and Internet from the 1990s. The power of mobile lies in its simplicity, ubiquity, and incredible reach. Approximately three-quarters of the worlds population now has access to a mobile phone. Thats higher than the number of people who have clean drinking water (!). In a little over a decade, the number of mobile phone users has increased six times, from 1 billion in the year 2000 to a whopping 6 billion in 2012.

From the first mobile music ringtone, developed by Finnish technologist and entrepreneur Vesa-Matti Vesku Paananen in 1998, the early evolutionary path of mobile technology has been sharply focused on encouraging the passive consumption of prepackaged content. Not surprisingly, mobile downloadable contentfrom ringtones to wallpapersbecame a multibillion-dollar industry.

At this point, mobile is about much more than buying novelty content. The advance of mobile apps now