Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting at a networking event or cocktail hour.  The people are fascinating; the conversation is engaging and lively.  You’re the marketing director for IT solutions experts, and someone asks you what your company does.  You begin to explain to your audience, most of whom are not in the industry, that your firm develops mobile applications.  You inevitably receive this reaction:

“Oh, I have a GREAT idea for an iPhone app!  You should create an app that [insert aforementioned great idea, delivered with fever-pitch, breathless enthusiasm].”

A mythical Ann Arbor beach cocktail establishment,
for which the author wishes in vain.

Now truly, I (as I am referring to myself above, but I’m sure you caught on to that fairly quickly) loathe cutting people off in conversation, but it’s one of those times that I interrupt a speaker and explain that Logic develops mobile applications for others, not for Logic (which generally elicits a disappointed, “Oh…” and then I have to spend some time convincing the dear speaker that Logic’s role in the mobile app world is still fascinating, even if I can’t have our people develop aforementioned great idea tomorrow). Similarly, I recently drafted a response to an interview question that explained this very point. 

It’s an important distinction, one that bears further discussion because it means when we develop an app, our customers pay us for our services—and that’s it.  We don’t try to take a piece of the profits; we don’t own any percentage of the product.  It’s been suggested that we might be missing out on some major revenue. 

Au contraire.

If you are keeping up with Gartner, AdMob, and Nielsen’s reports (or our blog, or the news, or things that happen in the daylight) on Smartphone usage you’ll know that they predict that mobile technology will become even more widely used, especially for personal and corporate functions as opposed to gaming and other entertainment.  In fact, it’s so simple, what gamers know that the rest of the business world is just beginning to grasp—people love their smartphones and they use them a lot.  Making your game available on a mobile device differentiates you significantly from other web-based games.

So, back to what Logic does and does not do, and why we’re not missing out on anything.  We’re not interested in creating a game and selling it on the App Store and making $0.693 a pop.*  We’re interested in providing what we’ve always provided to our clients: solutions.  We’re only at the beginning of the so-called mobile revolution, and there are plenty of solutions left to be built…because let me tell you, if differentiating yourself from your competition is your desire, offering a mobile application to your customers is definitely the answer.  Gamers know it, social media knows it, and now you know it.

In the next few blog posts I’ll explain the process of taking your app idea from inception to App Store, and some of the solutions we’ve been able to provide our numerous mobile development customers.  For now I’ll refer you back to a quote from Marc Hollerbach of Anesthesia Revenue Management, about their app:

“Simply, our clients love it.”