Why Crypto apps must spend coin on product quality
Cryptocurrency is exploding as it becomes more and more mainstream. What used to be a confusing, technical, and ephemeral concept is now a common form of currency and an exciting investment opportunity for the masses. Today, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin can be used to purchase goods and services from Overstock and Newegg, book flights on Expedia and Virgin Galactic, and even make donations to Save the Children. Even more, it’s becoming one of the biggest investment markets, surpassing $2 trillion in April 2021.
In 2020, 15% of U.S. adults owned some form of cryptocurrency, with half of those making their first investment that same year. As more consumers look to buy, sell, trade, and spend their cryptocurrency cash, they’re turning to mobile smartphone apps to manage their accounts and digital wallets. In mid-2020, new installs of cryptocurrency apps rose more than 80% year over year, and popular apps like Coinbase and Crypto.com hit their highest ever volume of daily active users. In the days following the recent Coinbase IPO, app installs more than quadrupled! And, with cryptocurrencies being more popular with younger consumers—millennials make up nearly 50% of Bitcoin users and 57% of Bitcoin investors—crypto apps face a tough crowd, especially where app product quality is concerned.
Quality Matters for Crypto Apps
With so many new users hopping on the cryptocurrency, or crypto, bandwagon, it creates a challenge for app developers, especially as many of these users will be new to crypto, new to financial investing, or both. So, they’re entering a potentially confusing new crypto investment experience through a newly developed app. In other words, quality matters in the crypto industry more than most. User expectations are already high, and skewing young, those expectations can make or break any new app. That’s one of the reasons why Apple and Google stress the importance of product quality to developers.
So how do you measure product quality? The App Store and Google Play Store have their star ratings and comments, but many more users throw their feedback into the ether of social media. In these other channels, it’s difficult to identify relevant comments, decipher sentiment, and understand feedback across multiple languages. Even if you can capture that data, to make it useful for product quality and app developers, you need related data on OS, region, product version, and other attributes before you can really understand and prioritize any product quality issues.
Crypto App Popularity Makes Quality Critical
Cryptocurrency is inherently volatile, meaning the prices change drastically, very fast and very frequently. In 2017, one Bitcoin was worth about $1,000. In 2018, it ranged from $4,000 to $19,000. In the first few months of 2021, it has fluctuated between $30,000 and $60,000. Other forms of crypto, from Litecoin and Ripple to Ethereum and Stellar, have similar volatility.
Competing for crypto users is becoming more difficult, especially as your apps will be compared with big, established players in the crypto industry. This includes Robinhood and Coinbase for crypto investing and wallets; Shopify, Stripe, and Square for payments, ecommerce, and purchasing; debit and prepaid cards, like Wirex and Bitwala; and even individual brands and retailers, like Tesla.
The fast and frequent changes to the value of crypto makes for much excitement among crypto traders, crypto buyers and sellers, and crypto investors. It also means they’re checking those prices frequently throughout the day, pounding your crypto app and counting on it for speed and reliability of crypto data, but also to manage, protect, and secure their crypto financial transactions. And, with crypto experiencing such explosive growth, apps are getting more usage from more new users than you may have expected, which makes bug prioritization and management even more of a challenge for developers.
What Crypto Users Care About in App Quality
Crypto app users want to track and manage their financial accounts while getting up-to-the-moment information on crypto markets, coin prices, and related news. Since it’s money, they also demand rock-solid security balanced with simplicity and easy access. And, with crypto app users split between highly experienced day traders, total novices, and everyone in between, product quality can make or break your entry into this exciting industry.
In addition to these requirements, and the baseline consumer demand for security, safety, and privacy, users of crypto apps also want:
Instant access to their accounts, with easy to understand insights on markets, investments, balances, incoming deposits, outgoing payments, and other data,
Simple and instant payments to and from friends, to and from retailers, and with ubiquitous availability across accounts, apps, and countries,
Clear, intuitive, and speedy visualizations of financial, market, and account information,
Helpful financial guidance, news on crypto markets and trends, and advice from influencers and experts, and
Fast crypto trades with clear accounting of transaction fees, taxes, and more.
See Your unitQ Score
Our proprietary unitQ Score and unitQ scorecards solve these problems for product, development, and quality teams focused on crypto apps. These scorecards are updated monthly to improve and focus your app product quality efforts. They also let you benchmark your app quality against the highest quality crypto apps, as well as those in other popular categories, including finance.
If you’re not yet a unitQ customer, it’s easy to check your unitQ Score. We’ll track your App Store and Google Play Store feedback and reviews, and send you a weekly assessment of your product quality. You can compare that to the monthly scorecards to see how you stack up against the competition.
You can also unlock the full power of unitQ Monitor to get product quality insights from the App Store, Google Play Store, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Twitter, Reddit, and other feedback channels and translated from more than 100 languages. It’s also easy to integrate that data with Slack, PagerDuty, Jira, and other internal tools already used by your product, quality, support, and engineering teams.
Product quality is an essential component of success in the fast-changing, hyper-competitive, and explosive market for cryptocurrency apps. We can help you easily bring comprehensive user feedback into your product quality efforts so you can keep users happy while making sure your own investments in product quality bring you a very positive return.
