Base 2 Applications’ ViBe Android app just passed over 500k downloads. Our guest blogger Paul Benjamin, Co-Founder of Base 2 Applications, shares his experience of designing and marketing a successful Android app. If you’re headed to CTIA next week in New Orleans, be sure to stop by to see Base 2 Applications in booth 4473 and take a picture with a ViBe-ing Android!

The Idea

Smart phones have transformed the way we interact with the world in such a short time. They bring music to our ears, coupons to our fingertips and reviews to not eat at that awful burger place. Most powerful and basic of all, smart phones bring the ability to communicate through voice and/or SMS.

Custom ring-tones can be set for contacts, but what about the common scenario of when your phone is set to ‘vibrate’? How can you differentiate who is calling you in that scenario without pulling the awkward peek during a meeting or annoying people with the light of your device during a movie or, more seriously, when a user is deaf?

Itching with an entrepreneurial spirit, we got the inspiration to find a solution to the standard vibration limitation. We developed an app called ViBe, which takes the ring-tone paradigm and applies it to vibrations. If your spouse calls, you can set them as the ‘Heartbeat’ ViBe-tone and you will be able to differentiate their call without having to look at your phone. You will feel it!

Promote!

Half of a Million downloads in less than 6 months and counting!  Now how can an app get organic exposure in an app market that has hundreds of thousands of applications – each one vying for mindshare of users and space on each android device?

The simple, yet very complex answer is to be talked about:

“ViBe is a brilliantly simple idea, elegantly executed” (Matt Warman, The Telegraph)

The talking leads to downloads and more talking and, eventually, the right ear will hear about it and, as with ViBe, we were pushed to the holy grail for developers – “ViBe – Featured on Google Play”!!

So how can your app get ‘talked about’? By networking at local industry events and hackathons, you can find journalists and corporate partners interested in helping you create buzz.

Listen to your Customers

While promotion is critical for success, it’s important to listen to feedback and add features that your customers care about. We have added quite a few features since original release including: creating your own ViBe patterns for calls and SMS, localization in Spanish and German, a social feature to text the name of a ViBe set for a contact, 3rd party app compatibility – handcent and GoSMSPro and more.

The future of ViBe will be to continue to be the market leader in custom vibration notifications and dare I say be a driving factor for users to purchase Android phones over the iPhone. #TeamAndroid get excited to feel what’s next!

Strategic partnerships with companies such as Immersion have helped make and continue to make our goals possible. We were able to leverage the Haptic SDK to control the haptic players on devices. The SDK allowed for a seamless integration and the support team was very responsive to any issues that came up – a big plus for any developer using a third party tool.