So I got to catch up with a friend of mine this past weekend. It was nice catching up after such a long time. He’s now a full-time Android Developer, but he’s looking to build a project on the side. He bounced some app ideas off me, and to be honest, most of them sounded really awful, especially the one about an app that allows you to track the number of staples left in your stapler (really, bro?).
After a long conversation, it hit me; rather than centering the decision on which ideas we thought were great, why not allow the market to decide? What markets were most ripe for domination with minimal effort?
In other words: What apps are users most desperately crying out for?
So I got my hands on a dataset consisting of 9660 apps from the Google Play Store from 33 different product categories. The dataset was last updated in September 2018, so the data is still satisfactorily relevant.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/GWMVm9ltbTDxr38olrFP8cemvsQQtE-n-m9k0OLm6dvHGeUk_M7NkQQnt7R2jmClHZF39mORRU-LFMl54wVwjWQeMmypIsSfqj_wNXe3Uc7L74qyyt82WjYURlSsF8l8AGOMybCA7qQCAk6JZQ
The results were really interesting so I thought I’d share the results with other developers looking for potential business ideas.
Here are the factors I took into consideration while trying to find these app opportunities:
A lot of platforms we use daily inherently do not solve well-defined customer needs e.g. Fortnite, a game that draws more than 100 million players each year but doesn't solve any clear-cut problem as such. So it'll be clever to steer clear of choosing to build an app like this because it's harder to predict its organic growth, especially with a super-limited budget.
Is there actually a demand for the problem we are trying to solve? Are there people actively trying to find a solution to this problem?
We'll take a look at the category to see whether there are other competing apps, and see how well they're doing. If the competition is really doing well at solving the problem we might not stand a chance.
In this section, I dove into the dataset to find apps that were serving a fairly large user base but we're also doing poorly. The idea is to enter the market with a much better offering and take over market share. Here are the specific criteria I used to find apps that fitted this profile:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/_eOBruISLuKPGdNgJBGjcTgUfliPgpDDEqlyalUVI7WvB8kb4QAPY-jw528JS9hVerjSrv996FU3ARlrG23JBdHbnnAKBBZiaPK39vFlPhPY71qv-kZJde2uOPjvF5Sl4jA1o4GbnjVjJv0uBw