Location-based apps are the ones that utilize a user’s geographic location to make full use of the apps’ features. In 2020, these are pretty much all the apps that you have installed on your mobile phone or tablet computer. Try going to settings on any of your devices and checking which apps ask for your permission to access your location for proper work, and you would get a more or less clear picture of what location-based apps are. But why companies actually need your location? Let’s find out!
Profits, profits, profits…
To find out why knowing your geographical location is so valuable to businesses, we need to turn our focus towards numbers. It seems that advertising a product locally made and sold it the same area is leading to an 89% increase in sales, 86% expansion in a customer base, and 84% more engaged customers. The proper use of a location-based app would be of good service to a company of any size, in any region of the world. So, it’s reasonable to ask how to create a location-based app?
Know your business’s goals
Undoubtedly, companies who have geolocation-based services integrated into their apps are enjoying higher profits. But their path wasn’t that easy at all. Building such an app would require the utmost attention to detail, careful evaluation of the market, and ensuring that customers’ privacy is not violated.
Depending on what your company is doing, your approach to building an app would differ significantly. The range of apps that use geodata is extremely wide, from mobile games to navigation apps, social media networks, and retail services. Make sure to research the market in your area for potential competitors and find out their strengths and weaknesses. This same analysis would be useful when applied to your company as well since it may allow you to identify what locals really need and are willing to pay for.
Remember that there are different types of mobile operating systems, but we would primarily focus on Android and IOS since they are currently market leaders. These platforms officially support different programming languages, meaning that you would require more programmers to develop an end product.
The technology stack natively supported includes Kotlin or Java for Android and Swift or Objective-C for IOS. Apps developed using these languages guarantee stable work and great performance, yet they are more expensive as well. However, there is also an option to choose to React Native, which is supported by both platforms and cheaper than the native ones, at the expense of losing performance.
People do not like sharing their location with companies. In fact, more than 50% of respondents told Statista that they see location tracking as a direct threat to their privacy. To avoid conflicts with clients and possible data leaks, business owners must carefully protect customers’ personal data, particularly the geodata.
This is accomplished through proper security testing, run on a regular basis or whenever an update is about to be released. Transparency is also a key element in customer-business relationships, so make sure to provide a clean Terms & Agreements statement.
