It seems like every company today needs a mobile “app”. After all there are over 350,000 apps in the Apple App Store alone that have been downloaded over 10 billion times. That’s roughly 32 apps for every person in the United States if they each had an iPhone. Those are crazy numbers and don’t even account for the nearly 300,000 apps in the Android Marketplace that have been downloaded over 3 billion times.

So with all those eyeballs browsing new apps for their iPhone, iPad or Android devices, the question is, why not build an app? With every software development decision, there are some things to consider before you invest the money in building a mobile app.

Here are 5 questions to consider before building a mobile application:

Why am I building a mobile application?

• Are you a B2C company that wants to further engage your customers with your products and services?
• Are you a B2B company that simply wants to create internal efficiencies for your mobile workforce or integration partners?
• Are you an eager entrepreneur that wants to solve an inefficient process with a mobile application?
• Are your customers asking you for a mobile solution?
• Is your CFO forcing you to find ways to reduce the amount of time some employees are spending on non-billable data entry?
• Can you increase revenue by making it easier for your clients to purchase from their mobile devices?
• Are you trying to engage your users to spread your products and services through their social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc?

Whatever the reason, sit down with your leadership team (this could just be you) and find the answer to “why” you are building a mobile application. Create a simple strategy statement that allows each member of the project team to get behind the concept and understand what you are wanting to accomplish.

Do I know what I want the mobile application to do?

Once you’ve answered the question of “why”, start writing ideas down of what you want the mobile application to do. I’m not talking about designing the application, I’m talking about writing use cases. Use cases define how your users will use the application and generally answer the question of what you want an application to do. Keep it simple here, write a bulleted list of who will use it and what they will be doing. Again, don’t try to design the app, that comes later in the process, whether you have someone do it internally or go outside of your company for assistance.

Do I need a native mobile application or can we build a mobile web site?

The truth is having a native “app” is marketable. We see companies that want to launch an app just to say that they have done it or to prove they are an early leader in their industry. We are cool with that, but want to be transparent about the difference between a native mobile application and a mobile friendly web site.

A native mobile application is written in the native language of the mobile device, Objective-C for iPhone and Java for Android devices, it’s compiled and uploaded to the app store or marketplace for users to download directly to their mobile devices. A mobile friendly website is a web site that is build exclusively to look and function properly on a mobile device. If you build a mobile friendly site, you can still have a native app, but it’s simply a browser that points to the mobile friendly website.

The biggest question to answer (beyond the marketable question) is does your application take advantage of the built-in functions of the mobile device. Translation – are you going to want to take photos, use GPS (location services) or use the accelerometer within your application? If the answer to any of those three is YES, then you need a native mobile application. If the answer is NO to all of them, then you might be fine with a mobile friendly web site.

Do I need to build an iPhone, iPad and Android app or should I start with one or the other?

The iPhone, iPad and Android devices are by far the most common smart devices on the market today, but Blackberry and Windows 7 phones are seeing some growth in larger corporations. To answer this question you need to consider who your users are and what type of devices they have, what is your budget and what is your timeline. If you are building a consumer facing application, then iPhone, iPad and Android should be your initial focus, but we are seeing some companies go with just iPhone for starters because they have so much traction with their app store. If this is an internal application for your employees, then going exclusively with one platform will be driven by your mobile phone demographics.

Do I have the development expertise within my organization to do this project?

Can I build this application internally? The most common answer we are seeing is No, companies typically don’t have employees in IT that are capable of taking a mobile project from start to finish. Unless you are a mobile application development company or a digital agency, then the likelihood of you having someone in-house is going to be low. Choose carefully who you decide to partner with, many companies claiming to do mobile development might ship your project off-shore or to another outsource company who you aren’t familiar with. Make sure you understand the terms of the contract with whoever you partner with and insist on transparency throughout the life of the project.

Do I know how to release a mobile application for the masses?

With iPhone and iPad apps you will have to obtain a iOS developers license to put your app in the app store for download. This is a one-time cost of $99 dollars and will be used by whoever is developing and launching the application for you. With Android Marketplace, you simply create an account and there is no charge.

Beyond physically launching the application there is announcing the application, which is also a challenge. Announcing the application can be done through an email marketing campaign of users that are already using your service, through your existing social media channels that you engage with like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, your blog, etc or by notifying media channels in your industry that you have launched a mobile application. If you have an internal marketing team, they might be able to help with this if they have been engaged in other social marketing, however, if they are a traditional marketing department, then you might want to consider going outside for help on announcing your new application to the world.

Good luck!