Category: Mobile Apps

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Mobile Apps Mobile Web

Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web: No Contest

As mobile app developers, we are frequently asked by clients why they need to invest in a native mobile app since they can build a mobile web page for a much lower cost. We always respond with the same rationale: the power of having an icon on the smartphone’s screen, a device that never leaves their side, the ability to leverage the native functionality of the smartphone (location, phone, push messaging), and being confident in a user experience tailored to the device make this an easy decision.

Now, we develop mobile apps, so we realize some are suspect about our agenda when we make the case for them. So, the decisive factor comes to us from a recent study from eMarketer, who provides the ultimate reason why businesses must invest in a mobile app if they truly want to have a successful mobile strategy:

Americans spend 88% of the time on their phones with mobile apps

Not only do apps crush the mobile web with time spent, that number is actually growing. This trend has been happening for the past 5 years, and each year apps win an increasingly lopsided victory. The mobile web is still important – but primarily for what we refer to as “The Two S’s:” searching and sampling. When the user is ready to commit, to buy, to enter into that relationship, they want your app!

A mobile app ensures your best customers have instant access to your brand, your content and the easiest way possible to engage with you. It also gives you a way to have a one-to-one relationship with those users, a way to know them, and serve them as the crucial customers they are.

Consumer expectations for brand interactions have never been higher, and the native mobile app makes it easy for your company to meet (and exceed) those expectations and deliver on the promise of your product. As the most-used device in almost all of our lives, the mobile platform enables you to develop a deep and lasting relationship with your customers in a way that a simple website simply cannot. When realized in an app, your product or service becomes a “tool” just like the camera or text in the user’s device. It’s a sure way to lock yourself in (and your competitors out).

Budget considerations are important, but so is ensuring your mobile investment is effective, especially during challenging economic times, when retaining each customer is imperative, the mobile app can create that bond. Our advice: if you’re going to invest in a mobile strategy, make sure your brand is front and center and has the best possible chance of succeeding.

It’s a safe bet.

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App Everywhere Awards Mobile Apps

jācapps Named a Top App Developer by Clutch

jācapps is excited to announce that we have been ranked by Clutch as one of the top app developers. We are also proud to say that we have been doing well in one of Clutch’s more competitive categories, their ranking of the best boutique app development companies.
We have over 1200 apps and 10 years in the industry, creating not just apps for mobile phones, but ones that go beyond common devices. While many developers focus on iOS and Android applications, we deliver your message through all of the most-used devices in the world. Our App Everywhere suite allows clients to utilize apps in unique ways, as mobile is put to work beyond the smartphone. In the Connected Car, Tablets, Smart Speakers, Smart TVs, Streaming Devices, Wearables, and whatever comes next. We also work to help companies use mobile outside of the consumer sphere, with business to business and internally-facing apps.
“Only the most versatile and knowledgeable developers can keep up with the abundance of new technologies created every year,” said Clutch Business Analyst Misty Lopez. “These developers stand out based on their ability to adapt to these new technologies and techniques and apply them to a variety of development projects for their clients. We are excited to feature them on our platform.”
Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews firm that ranks businesses on a number of criteria, including carefully conducted interviews with past clients. This means that our success is largely a result of the kind words of our clients, who we would like to thank for taking the time to talk to Clutch about us.
Clutch also has two sister sites, Visual Objects, which showcases agencies that do outstanding creative or design work, such as web designers or mobile app developers, and The Manifest, which lets users view quick bios of B2B companies, ranked by service focus and location. We are listed on The Manifest as one of the leading mobile app developers in Detroit.
We are honored to receive this recognition. We are devoted to our clients, and we can’t wait to continue providing our clients with the highest quality service possible.

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App Everywhere Mobile Apps Push Notifications Radio

Mobile Apps Reach Everywhere

farmer using mobile checking report of agriculture in farm

The most difficult challenge for radio stations is to be able to reach their listeners’ whenever and wherever they are. It can be even more difficult when stations are in smaller communities where signals can be tricky. But, no need to worry, we have the solution that can help your radio station achieve its optimal coverage.
A mobile app is the ultimate tool to put your station in the palm of your listeners’ hands on their smartphone. Cell signals can reach where your broadcast doesn’t reach. Having a mobile app for your radio station will allow you to engage with your listeners wherever they are.
With the world becoming mobile obsessed, mobile apps allow you to connect with your community.
Here’s how:

  • Local news alerts
  • Local sport score alerts
  • Weather alerts
  • Contests
  • Program alerts
  • Coupons and discounts

Push notifications functionality to reach your audience directly anytime.
Our V4 and custom mobile app solutions will create the best possible solution for your radio station, no matter what your location is. From big city to country roads – we can create a successful mobile app that your listeners can tune in whenever and wherever they are!
Contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin to learn more about how to take your radio station mobile! sari@jacapps.com or 248-353-9030

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App Everywhere B2B Apps Mobile Apps

How to Build Customer Retention in Your App

Build Customer Retention in your APP

For modern businesses, an app is one of their most important sales and retention tools. Customers are just as likely — if not more — to judge you on your digital presence as they are to judge you for your retail space.
Because of this, your business is smart to focus on four keys to retaining customers through your mobile platform. What are these four keys?

  1. App Functionality

First of all, make sure that your app works consistently. A problematic app or one that is too slow will not only fail to contribute toward customer retention, but it will also turn off potential customers before they even get started.
Start with a simpler app experience as you begin. This allows you to focus on getting the core process right without a lot of distraction. As you create an app that works well for everyone on a regular basis, add features and functions to boost the experience.
Be sure to base additional features on thorough testing as well as customer feedback to avoid creating any functional issues.

  1. First-Time Experiences

Think about the app from the perspective of a first-time user. Many customers today won’t give your app more than one chance to impress them, so don’t waste it.
The process of signing up and making an account should be intuitive and easy to navigate. Create a short walk-through for new customers, emphasizing only the most important functions but making it clear how to use them. And avoid wasting users’ precious time and attention with obnoxious ads or unnecessary side trips.

  1. Habit-Forming Activities

Using the app needs to become habit for your customers. You build this habit in a variety of ways. Push notifications are an excellent and effective tool, as long as you don’t overwhelm users with too many notifications. Tailor reminders for the individual user based on their interests or choices. Make notifications fun and gentle rather than aggressive or repetitive.
Help customers in your brick-and-mortar locations see the benefits of the app as well. Make it useful for the most common of your transactions, such as refilling goods they’ve already bought or scheduling appointments in less than a minute. And offer helpful tips, special discounts, or new products to appeal to (or intrigue) customers between visits.
In short, make the app into the go-to place for repeat and low-level activity with your business.

  1. Innovation

Be always on the lookout for new ways to make the app work better for you and for your customers. If you’re a medical provider, you may add a patient portal where clients can view their medical information or interact with providers when they have questions. A hair salon, on the other hand, might add a virtual queue or offer ways to save styles or nail ideas into a portfolio for use in their next visit.
Keep your app on the forefront of your business promotion as well as social media plans. It should be an integral part of your overall marketing and customer service strategy, leading the way with promotions, services, and new ways to help your customer. No matter whether a customer visits a social media site, your app, or your store, they should recognize the experience and feel like they’ve been here before.
Focusing on these four key elements in your app will help you retain more customers and make a more enjoyable experience for everyone. At jācapps, our team of experts will help you build an easy and efficient app that works well to keep customers engaged. Call us today to make an appointment to learn more.

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App Everywhere B2B Apps Mobile Apps Push Notifications

Push Messaging: Before you hit send

Woman being unhappy. Resolute serious short-haired woman showing stopping gesture to laptop camera during online conversation

Push messages can be one of the most beneficial elements to your mobile app, but you need to make sure you are creating and checking them correctly! Remember, you are interrupting someone with your message, so you need to make sure that you aren’t making any mistakes.
Here are a few common mistakes we have found in push messages that you should double check and avoid.

Sending too many messages

The main thing to remember, don’t get carried away and start sending too many messages – you don’t want to spam your users, this will push them away.

Messages with typos

Remember to proof read your messages! Make sure it is correct, the details are accurate and there aren’t any typos. It won’t enhance your user’s feelings about the brand or the message.

Vague call to action

Make sure your call to action is clear and compelling. A vague call to action is not going to get the click that you are hoping for.

Message isn’t relevant to the people you are sending it to

Make sure your message is relevant to your audience, this is very important in order to get the successful click rate. One thing we offer is creation of topics. We can create topics that your users can decide what type of messages they would like to opt-in to, therefore, you will be able to reach the right people for the right reasons. This is an important technique because when people get messages that are not relevant to them, your push messages will not be successful.
It is important to keep all four of these mistakes in mind when you are creating your push messages, in order to have that successful click rate! Check out our Push Messaging 101 Webinar for more information and contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin to learn more about our push messaging solution!

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App Everywhere Apple CarPlay B2B Apps Connected Car Mobile Apps

Mobile App Development Process

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Investing in a mobile app is a significant commitment and you want to be confident in the mobile app development company who develops your company’s app. Another concern for companies is not knowing how the complete mobile app development process really works.
Our team of developers, marketers, and strategists will guide your company through a four-step process that takes your project from conception to completion.

  1. Discover

This is where you’re apps take root. We draw inspiration from our conversations with you to brainstorm ideas and discuss the requirements needed to develop them. This part can be a lot of fun for companies – we get to sit down with you and truly craft what you want your app to do, look like, and how you want it to engage your audience. This discover point is where we like to emphasize that we truly create your company’s app different from any other app we’ve done.

  1. Design

Once a concept has been approved, we combine skills and strategy to make sure your apps look great and are easy to use. Our progress will be presented to you in the form of a specification document. This is where we get to sit down together again and make sure your app looks the way you pictured. Once this step is approved, we move into the actual development of the app.

  1. Develop

After you’ve green lighted our specification document, our in-house development gets to work. This phase culminates with rigorous QA testing.

  1. Deploy

We submit your apps to their respective stores and watch the numbers skyrocket! But we don’t stop there… we keep a look out for rate potential problems and help you navigate new devices and OS versions as they become available.
This simple four-step process keeps your app development process stress free and organized in order to create the best possible mobile solution for your company. If you are interested in our mobile app process, contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin to being your mobile app development process today!

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App Everywhere B2B Apps Mobile Apps Push Notifications

Push Messaging: 4 Ingredients of a Good Push Message

As we have covered before, push messages are one of the key elements to your mobile app to engage your listeners and users. However, there’s a technique behind push messages that help you create the most successful messages to send your listeners and users.

Here are the 4 ingredients of a good push notification:
  1. Relevance

Make it meaningful and personal. Make sure the message is import to your audience and not just to you. The topic must be relevant, actionable and timely to your listeners. Sending a lot of messages will reduce the impact, so you really got to nail down what your listeners what to know.

  1. Brevity

You have a very small space and people have very small attention spans, so this point cannot be over emphasized. Push messages are really consumed at a glance. The user probably only has a few moments when looking at this message, so you need to be quick and get straight to the point. Just because you have a total of 140 characters, doesn’t mean you have to use them. We have seen more successful push notifications with characters between 20 and 90!
Think more like a tweet than a Facebook post!

  1. Timeliness

When you schedule your message, it really matters! There is actually an optimal time to send your messages. It will be different from brand to brand, and station to station but you can look at your statistics of your push messaging and see when you get the most responses. It is important to keep track of this and overtime you can fine tune your strategy to get the most engagement possible with your audience.
As what we found so far, the most engaging time tends to be around lunchtime, between 12pm – 2pm!

  1. Call to Action

This really has to be an important element of how you use your messages. The whole point of sending these messages is getting your audience to do something. So, make sure you are clear on what you want them to do and make it easy for them to do it. Once your user does click on your message make sure your link has a clear connection to the message. In other words, don’t make your users click around your app trying to figure out where they need to go for that specific notification. Your message should flow naturally and clearly! Push messages are a strategy to make your listeners life easier and more engaged, don’t make it difficult!
By using those 4 ingredients you will create successful push messages to engage your audience. Check out our Push Messaging 101 Webinar and contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin for more information regarding push messages! sari@jacapps.com or 248-353-9030

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App Everywhere B2B Apps Mobile Apps Push Notifications

6 Key Signs Your Company Needs a Mobile App

Group of friends watching smart mobile phones - Teenagers addiction to new technology trends - Concept of youth, tech, social and friendship - Focus on close-up phone

With the world becoming more mobile every day, it is important to stay ahead of your competition. With more and more of us spending most of our days glued to our smartphones, a mobile app may be the best way to reach your target market.
You may not know how to dive into a mobile app or may not know why a mobile app would be useful for their company, but there are unlimited problems that mobile apps can solve, and they can be created to be the perfect fit to your company’s needs. Also, companies can learn a thing or two on how they can step up their branding and customer relations.

Here are some signs your company needs a mobile app:
  • Your competitors have an app 

It is important that you stave above your competition and with technology today, most companies will be investing in and creating their very own mobile app to be able to reach their customers no matter where they are. Investing in designing your company’s application and you will know you have the app that perfectly reflects your brand and ideals.

  • Your site is not doing well on search

Ranking high on the Google index often equates to brand visibility. If your website has not been ranking well, you may be close to becoming obsolete. With your very own application, you can become more noticeable in the public eye, especially when you offer everything your customer could ever want.

  • You don’t have customer or public engagement 

With a user-friendly application, you can send out push notifications which provide customers developments in your business. By keeping your customers and the public in the loop, you are creating a variety of engagement among the community.

  • Build brand recognition

Companies are always looking for a way to expand their brands, you want to be able to create an effective program and solution that is up to date with today’s technology and generations. Aside that point, you want a program that can reflect the values of ideals of your organization. By putting out a mobile app, you can provide whatever features you decide that will certainly get your customers to know your brand.

  • Gain customer insight 

Mobile apps have the power to let business owners know the patterns, performance, and preferences. Through the features put forward in the program, developers can monitor and track the behaviors of the users. This knowledge allows your company to fine tune your services according to your consumer’s tastes.

  • Stand out from the crowd

Not only will having a mobile app create a competitive edge in the industry, but it will also have the public in aw about the way you approach your venture.
Working with a reliable and highly advanced local app developers and designers is well worth your investment. If you aren’t offering a mobile app to the public, seeing the wealth of advantages these companies bring might be worth considering.
We would love to talk to you about mobile strategy and help you take your company mobile. Contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin at sari@jacapps.com or 248-353-9030.

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App Everywhere B2B Apps Mobile Apps Push Notifications

Push Messaging: How they work and how to use them

Push messaging, also known as push notifications are one of the strongest tools to engage listeners.
Before we get into the “hows” of push messages, let’s cover what a push message is exactly. Push messages are messages from an app publisher that are “pushed” directly to the user’s notification tray on their mobile device. Therefore, the notification pushes them to open up your app and engage.
But, before you just start sending out a million messages to your listeners, it is important to know how they work and exactly how to use them.

How Push Messages Work:

When a listener clicks on your push notification message they’ll land directly in your app or web page. You can set up your notification to either take your listeners to your home page or send them to a specific page that relates to the push message.
Push messaging works for three reasons:

  1. Urgency
  2. Timeliness
  3. Call to action

All three of these elements create engagement with your app and your listeners. Check out our webinar Push Notifications 101 to learn more.

How to Use Push Messages:

It is important to know your listeners and to know what they would like to receive from you through push notifications. Some ways to use push messages include:

  • Breaking News Alerts
  • Event Reminders
  • Program Alerts
  • Weather Updates
  • Contests
  • Coupons and Discounts

These are just a few of the common push messages that have seen successful open rates. These types of messages will pull in your listeners to your app and keep them engaged and excited for future events and reminders. Check out our webinar Push Notifications 101 to learn more.
Push messages are the tools that will help take your mobile app to the next level and we’d love to help you do it with our push notification solution. Contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin sari@jacapps.com or 248-353-9030

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App Everywhere Mobile Apps Push Notifications

Another Step Towards A Fully Mobile World

Global networking of business

As you may know, today’s world is becoming more mobile each and every day. This could be scary for some people but, it is a huge benefit for most and for business efficiency.
What is the big new invention that is getting people talking?!
Apple recently announced their new credit card, the Apple Card! This credit card really kicks it up when we are talking about turning our world truly mobile. As Apple says, “There’s never been a card this smart.” Apple Card lives on your iPhone and makes your life easier. Some of the hardest and most annoying tasks you had to do in the past are now done in the palm of your hand with just a click of a button.

Here are some of features the Apple Card has:

 
Tracking and Reporting:
This Apple Card has one of the easiest tracking systems to keep you updated and alert to what you are spending, when you are spending and where you are spending.
The Apple Card Wallet app on your iPhone will allow you to see weekly summaries and monthly summaries. There is no need for you to have to have separate banking apps or websites, it is all totaled and laid out for you in your mobile apple wallet that you can decided if you would like weekly or monthly reports.
And if you didn’t think that was easy enough… it gets even easier! Apple Card makes it easy to spot trends in your spending, so you can decide if you need or want to change those trends.
 
Maps:
Have you ever gone back to your bank statement and wondered, wait, where was this $50 charge from? Well, you don’t have to worry anymore… Apple Card pin points the exact address of the charge that gives you the name of the store, restaurant, building, etc and locates it the map for you!
 
Daily Cash:
Apple Card has created one of the easiest systems for cash back, and as they say, “Daily Cash that’s even easier to spend than cash”
No matter where you are using you Apple Card it gives you Apple Cash on every single purchase you make and goes into your Apple Cash card in your Wallet app, and you can just spend that cash with just a tap.
 
Payments Made Simple:
Well, we all know the worst thing about having credit cards… the payments. But, Apple Card has made payments a little less stressful. On your mobile Apple Card Wallet app, it clearly shows how to save on interest. Apple Card helps you by keeping track of your payments and also gives you suggestions of when you should pay them off. It also will notify you when your payments are due. No more stress of rushing to meet your payment deadline!
These are just a few features of the Apple Card that can make your life more efficient and less stressful through mobile. With mobile becoming the most popular and efficient tool it is helpful to stay on top of all the latest trends to help keep your business performing efficiently!
We would love to talk to you about your mobile strategy to help you take your company to the next level in the mobile world. Contact our Director of Business Development, Sari Zalesin. sari@jacapp.scom or 248-353-9030