Appmakers Try to Game a Crowded Market

The app market used to be a happy-go-lucky place. Startups, or a couple of guys in a dorm room, could fling their apps into the mobile stores of Apple and Google, and if they didn’t hit big, move on to the next idea. With more than a million apps on the market, and four out of five in the Apple Store receiving so little attention that they aren’t ranked on the download charts, the odds of success have gotten much longer. Even tiny companies go to great lengths to make sure their products are near perfect at launch, and they’re using all kind of gimmicks to break through the noise once their apps hit the market. “It’s become like the movie business,” says Michael Mace, a former Apple and Palm executive. “If the first weekend is good, you have a chance. If not, you’re toast.”

Mace now works at UserTesting, a Mountain View (Calif.) company that charges $49 to test apps on real people. Developers can watch a video of testers trying to navigate their app and pinpoint which aspects of the app are hard to use. “I was a little confused on the map screen,” says one guinea pig trying a retailer’s shopping app. “I would improve this by maybe making the icons a bit more clear.” The feedback mostly consists of comments like that—or swearing, which can also be instructive.