Want to be a mobile app developer? Here's how

MANILA, Philippines - Nokia shares some tricks of the trade to get you started on a successful application developing career.

What does it take to develop a successful mobile app? Ask top mobile app developer Jan Ole Suhr and he will say it takes a lot of guts, ingenuity, passion and a lot more. Suhr is the guy behind MobileWays.de, and most famously, the Twitter client Gravity, which has since expanded to include Facebook, Google Reader, and much more. 

Gravity is a fully featured Twitter client with a user-friendly interface that supports multiple Twitter accounts, image uploading to Moby Picture, TwitPic, Flickr and others, multiple Twitter Searches, Twitter Trends, Lists, Retweets, Groups, Alerts, Auto-Connect and many more. 

It was originally a personal project for Suhr, who wanted to have his own Twitter client on his then Nokia N95 and E61i. Thus, he embarked on the project that aimed to be a Twitter client that was at least good as the apps on the other mobile platforms.

Since it was introduced two and a half years ago, Gravity has grown tremendously to become one of the most downloaded social networking apps on Ovi Store worldwide.

Here, Suhr shares pointers that aspiring app developers can look into to jumpstart their career in coming up with coveted apps for today’s mobile phones:

• Engage with your users. Make them feel important. Always be polite regardless of how rude a customer may sound. If you’re winning an angry customer over, you’ve actually won a fan. 

• Publicly show your own engagement with the product. Use it yourself as much as possible. You will learn about the problems with it sooner.

• Create a way to interact with your users via the app: the first feature to implement is an auto-updating mechanism, or at least a way to push messages to the app. There are so many download sites offering your 1.0 version that might not even work anymore. If you cannot notify those users, you might just lose them right away.

• “Small companies have a hard time competing with the big ones.” Well, that’s not true in Suhr’s experience. Small companies have a lot of advantages: they can move quickly - dump projects and start new ones in the blink of an eye; they can sit out projects while working on other things; they can create a personal, and thus more engaging relationship with their users, just to name a few advantages. As a small start-up yourself, you need to be aware of these competitive advantages. 

• Try to use today’s technology, not tomorrow’s promised technology. But this comes naturally because you have to make a living today and not tomorrow - most of the time - especially if you’re not VC funded.     

For inspiration, download the 10-day trial version of Gravity on Ovi Store (www.store.ovi.com).