Contactpoint is delighted to support INNOVIC with mobile app development for their clients who have an idea for new app.
Heather Maloney, CEO of Contactpoint, was recently interviewed by Richard Milne, CEO of INNOVIC, in relation to app development.
Richard Milne: What led your business into app development, and how long have you been working in this area?
Heather Maloney: Contactpoint started working in digital technology back in 2006. At that time, the only presence you could have on the internet was a website displayed on a desktop computer. Mobile browsing was becoming more common a few years later and Contactpoint embraced the initial response to this, which was a separate mobile friendly website. This was followed by widespread use of mobile apps around 2010 / 2011. As Contactpoint has always been about providing growth oriented digital technology for our clients, it was a natural progression for us to also build mobile apps. We worked on our first client mobile app in 2012. Initially all apps were built natively for the specific operating system. This predominantly included Blackberry, Windows, Apple or Android.
Richard: What is the most interesting app you have designed and built?
Heather: We provide services to a wide range of business types and industries, and so every app is unique in its own right, so that’s a tricky question to answer. The Plumb Guard App which helps keep plumbers safe by warning them via their mobile phone if there is dangerous electrical current running through the pipes in the ground that they are working on, was very interesting as I had no idea of the phenomenon of electrically charged pipes! This app also requires significant sophistication around receiving Blue Tooth signals from the Plumb Guard equipment to be displayed on the phone, and passing the data to cloud aggregation tools via an API.
Richard: How long do apps usually take to build?
Heather: The project duration depends on the complexity of the application being developed, because adding more people to a project team does not always mean that the app can be built faster. A successful app development project will follow a logical set of steps, including ideation / specification, technical & visual design, building, testing and launch. We endeavour to deliver a MVP (minimum viable product) version of any app we build within 3 – 4 months. Being fast to market helps you to keep initial costs to a minimum while you are getting real market feedback with regard to the demand for your app idea.
Richard: I am aware an app has to be developed each in Android and iOS platforms to cover all mobile devices? Is this critical, or, depending on the target user demographic, would one platform be enough?
Heather: There are some occasions where our clients have been providing the destination device to their user base (this happened with some of the apps we built for the Toll Group) and in such case, it was only necessary to build the app for the particular operating system. Aside from that case, sometimes our clients, in order to save money (and where building a cross platform app is not appropriate), they will conduct market research to identify the most used platform by their target user group. In Australia that’s more likely than not to find an approximately 50/50 use of Android and Apple, so such research might not be very helpful in choosing which platform to target.
Richard: What is the most successful app you have designed and built?
Heather: Success is an interesting concept! Success might be making your customers more sticky by providing them with additional, free resources to help them engage or do business more easily with you. Or success might be sales of the app itself, or sales of a subscription service.
To date our most successful app was the Toll Inventory Collection Report (ICR) app which when launched changed the marketplace and the way that inventories were collected across the logistics industry.
We are also looking forward to the app we are building right now, being successful in advancing the road construction industry.
Richard: How has app development changed over the years / what’s the current trend?
Heather: App development began as only native (that is built for a specific operating system of the device type of the user) and relatively quickly moved to allowing development of apps in HTML & Javascript, which then a special program would then recompile for selected native operating systems, making it easier for developers to build once and deploy to multiple environments (albeit likely forcing a simpler app without the same performance as a native app). This is also known as cross-platform app development.
More recent developments are a plethora of new options for developers such as Ionic, Flutter, Unity etc., which take differing approaches to helping solve the same problem of building for multiple destination devices and operating systems.
If you are developing a version of your app for an smart watch, you are going to want to have a separate app due to the vastly different user interface and desired size of the app.
Richard: If someone was contemplating building an app in 2025 what key advice would you give them?
Heather: I have 4 pieces of advice:
1/ Don’t try to shortcut the process. Working through all the aspects of design, development, testing, and launch are very important for ultimate success.
2/ Don’t add too much functionality into the first version of the app. It’s good to roll our improvements in the near future. Early feedback will help you reduce cost, and focus your investment on the most important features.
3/ MVP version most likely will be built cross platform, rather than natively, depending on the functionality being delivered. If your app is wildly successful, you may elect to rebuild it natively later.
4/ Line up your first users to help test and promote your app as early into the the design and development process as possible.
