Advantages of Mobile Audit and How to Conduct Audit for Competitor's Apps

By Juned Ghanchi
The mobile audit is already in practice among the vast majority of developers and we all know its tremendous effectiveness in elevating the app design and performance. There are various bad and good practices of mobile audits that we used to know but with the help of some robust mobile auditing apps for Enterprises, the varying philosophies and practices have been standardized now. Actually, these apps helped to make apps more efficient and effective by changing the so-called paper based audits to mobile audits.

Today mobile app audits are extremely crucial to stay competitive with your business app. The advantages of mobile app audits are many. Whether a business needs to check compliance standard in the workplace or a retail store need to track performance or an app of a construction business deals with an on-site safety standard or need to conduct your competitor app's audit, the mobile audit would help to evaluate the business process in every possible way.

What a good mobile audit app should ensure

To be precise, all mobile audit tools do not deliver the same efficiency and effectiveness for all businesses in the same manner. But, knowing the key attributes of such audit is crucial to select the right tool or app.

First of all, the audit should be designed with user-centric attributes. Like any other mobile apps, auditing apps also require minimum user actions to get to the option and the respective result they are looking for. As ease of use is a crucial determinant for great UX, for a mobile auditing app it is extremely important to eliminate the need for typing input as much as possible. The audit tool should make the job easier for the user with limited input and ease of access. To ensure ease of use in an auditing app look for the following attributes.

  • Well, organized audit questions and formats.
  • Capable of capturing structured data consistently.
  • An audit infrastructure with consisted focus on audit outcome, audit reports, evaluation and actionable areas.
  • Capability to drive binary replies (in Yes or No value) by rephrasing questions.
  • Capability in rephrasing questions o drives a choice among the provided options.
Secondly, a great mobile audit tool should be equipped to approach the insiders and key personnel with conditional questions. There would always be certain questions that are only required conditionally.
  • The auditing app should be able to ask conditioned questions as and where it needs to go deeper into user reactions.
  • Often the follow-up questions are conditional that users only come across when answering positively.
  • In no way, there should be a lot of follow-up questions as this can actually de-value the overall experience.
Paper-based audits versus mobile audit apps

To be precise, paper-based audits are about to become obsolete and a thing of the past. It happened simply because paper based audits are not only time consuming, cumbersome and imprecise. In a company with employees distributed over several locations, such audit can lose track of the process because of shuffle in human resource.

In complete contrast to the traditional paper-based auditing tools mobile audits provide instantaneous results and deliver really actionable output. The survey reports can be uploaded in no time and it can be accessed and put to use in the decision-making process almost instantly. Moreover, mobile audit results can be evaluated by people located across several locations. Most important of all, thanks to cloud integration in most mobile audit tools, the reports can be accessed anytime and at anywhere.

Auditing competitor app

For any business analyzing and surveying the market before launching a new product is a standard competitive practice. Naturally, the app business cannot be any different. Especially with increasing crisis for most apps to stay competitive and profitable, it has become extremely important to make a survey of the existing competitive apps. It is more like doing a little ground work before actually taking part in a competition. It is also important to get an idea of the opportunities and competitive obstacles ahead.

While going through the initial research on competitor apps, you need to be more diligent and focused than ever, because this is where you can have a detailed understanding of the typical app receptivity and opportunities that your app is going to experience. By comparing the similar apps, you not only know the lacking aspects you have but can grab the idea of how you can market your app well.

Actually, without auditing competitor apps you can overlook various aspects concerning the performance of an app. A competitor app will clearly show what remains to be the standard attributes of that niche and how you can make the experience better.

Here are some areas that you should focus on while auditing competitor apps.

  • App audience
  • Branding
  • Marketing and promotional campaign
  • App performance
  • User experience
How to conduct an audit of your competitor's app?

Auditing competitor apps should be taken as a step by step approach. Let us offer below certain things that you should begin with.

  • It should begin with the determining of the main competitor apps in your niche.
  • Then you should focus on the key selling point of each of the apps and their respective target audience.
  • Thereafter, you should focus on how your app performs against the competition.
Even a highly feature-rich app has a key feature or a feature set that makes the USP of that particular app. Secondly, the target audience will give an idea of the apps branding. Obviously, your target audience will have a huge impact on the app design, user acquisition, and monetization.

Choosing a wider selection of mobile apps comprising nearest competitors and related apps can actually open up the broader scope of understanding. Moreover, app audit conducted over leading apps in your niche will also enrich you with design ideas, marketing campaign, acquisition channels and monetization models. An app audit will allow learning about the best practices from most successful apps.

Recommended