The Art of the App Store: The Business of Apple Development

MIXING AND MATCHING

You've now done a bit of competitive research, have a good idea of what the others are doing in your niche, and, if you followed the prior advice, likely built up a feature set for your app comprised of various missing features from other apps, as well as your planned innovations.

The next goal is to redefine your feature set to make your app appear truly unique.

Borrowing Style and Functionality from Mainstream Applications/Games (the Picasso Way)

There is nothing wrong with borrowing new features in successful apps. Picasso in fact, is well known to have borrowed styles from classical and contemporary artists, distilled down into his own geometrical style, and created a new work of art.

In this exact way, in fact, you should take highly lauded new features or styles from successful apps, and then apply your own sort of transformation on them to make them unique.

Let's consider “Doodle Jump,” an example examined previously. Though it wasn't the first app to make use of that hand-drawn Napoleon Dynamite-esque “sketch” style of art, it certainly was the most successful to do so to that point. So, let's say you wanted to do a casual game and were inspired by the “Doodle Jump” art, not only because it more easily captures your imagination in the same way a book does more so than a movie, but also because it's simply easier to create. Fair enough, let's go with that style.

But let's also say you are intent on creating a productivity app and are wondering how in ...