How a Mobile App Can Benefit Your Smart Home Business

The potential of mobile technologies is growing rapidly: smartphones and tablets sales have already exceeded the PC sales, and modern companies regardless of their business segment are tending to develop a mobile app to double their profits. There is no doubt that today mobile app is an essential part of any successful business.

Why mobile apps are so crucial tool for the modern effective business strategy and what tasks can they solve? Umbrella IT will clear this out through the example of the smart home engineering and home automation mobile apps.

Smart Home is a technology that has been gaining a lot of popularity lately.

And this comes as no surprise: technologies that promise a whole new level of comfort and safety improving everyday life and simplify the daily routine is just the thing that has always been in great demand.

Comfort and safety are the basic human needs which, of course, are taken into consideration when the smart home system is being developed. Modern people expect their unspoken desires to be satisfied immediately: a user comes home - the sensor goes off and n the hall the light turns on, climate control system smoothly raises the temperature till it’s perfect, the kettle begins to boil in the kitchen.

All of that became possible due to the rapid growth of the technology last decades. First attempts to implement the home automation began in the early 1900s, now many high-tech giants from Google to IBN are involved in the smart home technology development.

As a rule, a standard smart home consists of the detectors, sensors, actuators, and safety units, which are controlled via a central controller (hub) or a wall-mounted control panel.

A potential user would hardly want to waste his time making sense of the various buttons, consols and control panels installed all around the house and trying to adjust the system to meet his own needs.

How to make a smart home simple and straightforward?  The solution is clear - you need to build a smart home app for your product.

We live in the golden age of the mobile technologies when almost each one of us has a smartphone in his pocket, that has more computing resources than all the NASA computers that made the Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on Moon possible in 1969.

Mobile phones have already got into the many spheres of our lives and their integration with different devices has become a norm. Reality is that many daily routines are now followed remotely via a smartphone without any physical interaction. And the smart home engineering is just the business field where mobile devices integration is essential.

A smart home app development works well in two directions: a smart house app is of a great importance for users as well as for the business. Take a look more closely at the crucial benefits of these directions.

CUSTOMER BENEFITS

As it is known the supply determines the demand. Hence the development of a mobile app with the powerful functionality means for the business to stay one step ahead of oneself.

The web and mobile development company Umbrella IT has identified 6 key points that make a mobile app for the smart home business so attractive for users.

• Remote access to all the integrated devices

This is the most basic feature that this kind of app always has. A user can switch the lamp on or open the garage gates via the special app at the touch of a fingertip. The mobile app lets a user control the system remotely from any spot of the Earth.

• Flexible customization of a user interface

Potential customers estimate smart technology from the perspective of its usability, safety, comfortability and, the most important, its simplicity. Many people are giving up on the smart home system installation just because they are wary of perspective to make sense out of the complicated system of panels and consoles for a long and exhausting time. A smart house application minimizes that risk: with it a customer can customize the interface in a quick and easy manner, choosing the essential sensors and devices and adjusting the basic use cases and scenarios.

• Notification service

To users, the notifications play a crucial role showing the system diagnostic information and the current status of all the integrated devices. The system notifies a user when it turns the forgotten iron off or closes the windows when it starts raining. And, a user never misses an important update as well.

• Personal profile and shared use

A mobile app allows opening simultaneous access to the specific users to control the system.

• Advanced security

The home automation systems are a complex network of the motion detectors and, sensors, security cameras electronic door locks and other physical security features located in different part of the house. The whole network or its single element can be activated or switched off by a user via the mobile app at any moment. More than that, a user can choose by himself all the specific mobile devices which are going to receive alarm signals and security notifications.

• Personal analytics

This point might seem irrelevant and most optional in comparison with the others. Yet it can be a useful and a pleasant bonus for a certain user. A mobile app for a smart home allows to monitor and analyze the user activity in the house:  how often and what exactly users watch on tv, what kind of food is cooking on a stove, what products are in the fridge, and what users daily routines are most energy-consuming. Based on the obtained results, users can analyze their daily habits and even make some adjustments to their lifestyles.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

The mobile app is a business-accelerator and smart home engineering is a business area where a mobile app is not a tribute to trends but a necessity because its payback is easily calculated and its potential efficiency is in large excess over the smart home app development cost invested in the app development.

• Increasing sales

Clutch’s survey shows that 55% of business owners have developed a mobile app for their businesses just to increase their sales. And this result speaks for itself.

For example, the majority of mobile apps - and smart home apps are not the exception - use push notification. Push notification fulfills an important user function informing him that the system unplugged the iron that was left on, closed the open window, prevented the gas leaking or any other home activity. Moreover, push notification is an effective image-building and marketing business tool that tells clients about new products, updates, services, special offers, and events that guarantee the increasing sales.

• Improving customer experience

Improving customer experience means a set of impressions that a client gets when interacting with the company via your mobile app. And, as it’s known, a satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. Apart from the app’s own usability and aesthetics, all the points stated in the paragraphs above (“Customer benefits”) play an essential role in the creation of positive impression.

Another factor that is crucial to customer experience is the nature of a mobile app. A mobile app creates a permanent business-presence that is qualitatively different from the website internet-presence. While a website focuses on the occasional users, a mobile app provides a continuous access to all the information required to the clients directly.

• Higher competitiveness

Smart home engineering is an extremely competitive market. Various factors have an impact on the product competitiveness, and your own mobile app is an effective business tool that сan really distinguish you from the crowd. 

In this respect, Umbrella IT emphasized the importance of personalization: timely updates and add-ons designed to provide a stable app operation and usability; loyalty programs for the regular customers, geolocation notification, various payment option suited for every need.

SUMMING UP

Smart home app development companies prove with their products how the innovations have rethought the usual business operations. Modern mobile devices have dramatically changed the people view on what features a mobile phone has and what tasks it can solve. The development of a mobile app for your business is not just a one-box solution for any field of work but the investment in the future of the effective business that keeps up with the times. 

Does your company have no mobile app yet? Or maybe you want to improve the efficiency of the already existing one? Share your ideas, ask your questions.

Work with the team of the experts who develop mobile apps of any complexity and orientation for the various platforms. Get professional assistance in the development of the mobile app that would be a perfect match for your product.

WANT A MOBILE APP FOR YOUR SMART HOME BUSINESS - CONTACT UMBRELLA IT!

Photo: Shutterstock.com, Unsplash.com