Building Mobile Apps

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A nice wrapup on mobile development from GigaOm Mobilize.  I particularly like points 5 and 6, "Throw out your own expectations of what it needs to do", and "Compete only with yourself, don't freak-out over the market"


5. Throw out your own expectations
This dawned on the Formspring team when they were figuring out how to translate their Q&A site into a mobile app, which they released earlier this month. At first they felt pressured to recreate their site, but they realized that wasn’t realistic for the phone’s small screen. “Some expectations are yours that you need to throw out,” said Tom Wang head of product at Formspring. Your website may look “radically different” than your app, and that’s OK if it gives the best user experience. “You really need to rethink what you’re presenting and how you’re presenting it.”

6. Compete with yourself
“A great company thinks about competing with itself,” Flipboard Editorial Director Josh Quittner said. “That’s really in the end who they compete with. They don’t think about what everybody else is doing because if you start thinking about what everybody else is doing, you end up following them.”

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