App and Brand Strategy

Sugarcube will work with you to identify how to best extend your existing business model into the mobile space. We combine your assets with with the latest mobile and web technologies to develop a best of breed app that resonates with your audience while simultaneously driving your business goals. This may be a single app to coordinate with a nation-wide ad campaign, a rich e-commerce solution with a long term product road map, a full suite of products, or something else entirely. Need a mobile strategy for your brand or agency? Contact us today.

Design

Our ex-Apple User Experience and Design team will make sure that your app isn’t just nice to look at, but interesting, engaging, and easy to use. We will work hand-in-hand with your art directors, copywriters, marketing, and brand specialists to design an app that is on message and properly represents your brand. This is an iterative process and we’re not happy with the design until you are. Our design process involves hands on field research whenever possible, low and high fidelity prototyping, and lots of collaborative wire-framing and white-boarding.

If you already have an app on the store that needs some love, we’d be happy to work with you to improve what you have. If you already have a rockstar development team in house we can provide them with a full design spec and pre-sliced assets for easy integration.

Development

In our past lives, the Sugarcube team has designed, architected, and developed dozens of products at Apple including Mac OS X, iPhone, AppleTV, iLife, Mac OS X Server, the iTunes Store and more. We’ve produced dozens of iPhone apps for leading brands in many industries and we will bring this experience and attention to detail to your brand. Through our experience we understand the challenges behind localization & internationalization, view persistence, web service integration, scalability, performance, battery life, custom controls, geocoding, settings bundles, app responsiveness, multithreading, and other aspects of iPhone development that others miss or must spend time learning. We also believe in getting things right the first time so your customers don’t have to suffer through minor incremental bug fix updates. We can work alongside your in house technical team and third party vendors or take everything in house so you don’t have to worry about the technical details.

Test & Deploy

Your customers deserve high quality apps that don’t crash or lose data. iPhone apps may be small but they are still composed of millions of 1s and 0s and they still require proper testing and quality assurance before they are let loose in the wild. Due to Apple’s review process, a bug fix can take weeks to make it into the hands of customers even if the fix only takes minutes. Our quality assurance team will test the app throughout development to find and resolve issues before your customers do. We encourage you to help us with this effort and we provide comprehensive test cases and builds for your team members throughout the development cycle. Thorough testing will save you a lot of time and money in the long run, will result in products that ship sooner, will reduce the number of unnecessary updates, will avoid customer backlash, and will provide your loyal fans with the great app that they deserve.

Submission and Marketing

Submitting an app is not a trivial process if you have never done it before, and there are many simple mistakes that result in rejections and unnecessary review delays. We will help you avoid common mistakes in the development and submission process, submit your app to Apple on your behalf, and make sure your app has the most effective screenshots, descriptions, categories, and keywords to maximize your app’s success. Sugarcube has been behind the product launches for many brands and we can help you choose the most effective marketing strategies to maximize downloads, brand exposure, and user engagement.

Support and Maintenance

Once your app is live on the App Store, we will continue to work with you to fix problems that arise and help you evolve and improve the app. Through comprehensive user analytics, user feedback, ongoing competitive analysis, and market research we will adjust the app road map, streamline the user experience, increase ROI, improve performance, and further refine and enhance the app’s feature set to keep your users happy and to keep your app and your brand properly positioned for maximum success in the mobile space. Contact us today to learn more about our support agreements.