Development Luxury App Design

4 Common App Development Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them

3 min read

Mobile apps have revolutionised the way that consumers interact with premium brands. Whether shopping for clothes, ordering food, or booking a taxi, people increasingly rely on mobile apps to manage their purchases and lifestyle. As a result, developing a luxury mobile app is a high-stakes task for businesses – one that can often make or break a brand.

Unfortunately, developing and maintaining a high-quality luxury app is not a straightforward task, and there are instances during development that can jeopardise the success of an application. In this article, we’ll look at the most common pitfalls that companies encounter while developing a luxury app and the steps you can take to prevent them.

Pitfall One: Unrealistic Budget

Luxury app development is not as much of a budget black hole as a few years ago, but you’ll still need to assign a realistic budget to design, develop, and maintain your application. Don’t expect to create a high-quality luxury app on the cheap like you could a website. You’ll need to assign a budget for design and security, UI, marketing, and ongoing maintenance.

An unrealistically low budget invariably leads to corners being cut in these critical areas in favour of design, so you end up with a good-looking but half-baked mobile app that fails to deliver a genuinely premium experience to the user. To avoid this, brands should set a realistic but achievable budget and prioritise the essential functions valued by their customers over secondary or less necessary features.

Pitfall Two: Inadequate Understanding Of The Target Audience

The success of a luxury consumer app largely depends on how well it caters to a narrowly defined target audience. Even ‘generic’ consumer apps are designed with a market in mind, and the closer your app aligns with the needs and preferences of this market, the more downloads you’ll get and the stronger your engagement will be.

Extensive target audience research is required to maximise your customer experience and ROI, and failing to do this adequately could result in an app that doesn’t align with your customer’s needs. Important factors to consider include your customer’s purchasing behaviours, search preferences, preferred content medium, and the devices they use to deliver a well-targeted and genuinely personalised app experience.

Pitfall Three: Neglecting Personalised Features

The hallmark of a luxury app is its personalised features, with customers increasingly expecting full accessibility and personalisation within the UI. A customisable UI that can be tailored according to the consumers’ preferences, including font size, colour scheme, and layout, will help give your luxury mobile app a more elegant and personalised feel, increasing retention and making customers feel more connected to your brand. Personalised push notifications are also a powerful tool to keep customers engaged – these can be created based on a customer’s location, interests, engagement level, or past purchasing behaviours to promote personalised recommendations and offers.

Pitfall Four: Lack Of Ongoing Support And Updates Post-launch

Maintenance and updates are essential to ensure that your luxury app remains relevant and functional over time, so your development team or support partner should have resources dedicated to long-term support and updates (this should be factored into the lifetime cost of your app). Apps that aren’t regularly maintained will quickly look outdated and become glitchy, and that can be reflected in customer feedback on app stores.

The role of an ongoing support strategy is to fix bugs, ensure that the app remains compatible with mobile operating systems as they change over time, and update the app’s features and content. To help you in this task, it’s important to make it easy for your users to provide feedback on what can be improved. Full updates don’t need to be as frequent as regular maintenance, depending on the app’s functionality and market. However, you should still aim to keep the app updated several times a year to sustain its relevance to consumer trends.