Standing out from the app crowd

In the middle of the Angry Birds frenzy, Bubble Ball appeared and also became popular – but only for a short time. Like Angry Birds, it had a strong physics element to it.

However, original concepts that mirror the zeitgeist often make their own unique splash. Evidence for this is all around us.

Consider Banksy, the UK street artist who carved a name for himself by making pithy political statements about our world – whether it’s the hegemony of large retailers or the exploitation of childhood in marketing.

His work doesn’t stand on aesthetic merit, in fact, it’s fairly basic from that point of view, but he tapped into a popular current that mirrors how many people feel. 

Today Banksy is a widely feted artist, as well known in Los Angeles as he is on the gritty urban streets of Hackney where he started out.

Or consider music.  There’s a guy who calls himself Pretty Lights who takes samples of music and mashes them up to create sounds. There’s nothing unique in this, musicians have been doing it for an age. But the sound that Pretty Lights has created is different. Not all of it. Some is clunky and jarring, but quite a few songs stand out for their original flavour.  People who like his music can download songs from the web site for free. 

Pretty Lights is not in the mainstream but has a huge fan following – because it’s a different kind of sound.

A blog called 1,000 Awesome things hit the big time leading to a spin-off book and lots of coverage from the mainstream press including CNN, The New Yorker and The Sunday Times. In a sense, the blog posts are trite, in that they chat about mundane things. But that’s the point – ordinary things are portrayed in a positive light and each blog concludes with the word, AWESOME, capped up of course. 

It’s a uniquely American thing – it’s hard to imagine many European’s walking around mouthing ‘awesome’ without some sense of irony or fun.  But the blog taps into a uniquely US zeitgeist.

So how do you create a unique app? Well you can do it the hard way by losing your mind temporarily, walking around the park muttering to yourself and hoping that when you ‘return’ to the surface you’ve got some great creative inspiration.

Or you can methodically cast around and see if you can nail the ethereal zeitgeist and bring to life an app that mirrors it. But are your instincts right?

Or you can adopt an approach that recognises the market is saturated, take a classic app category and turn it on its head with a unique take, simply by rethinking it. For example, a newspaper style app could be created that allows you to write your own stories and headlines and insert your own images and then send to friends, or publish on your Facebook page. 

A weather app could have its ‘conventional’ functionality trimmed down with the weather portrayed visually and humorously with video, for example melting ice cream, somebody chasing an umbrella down the road, or somebody getting splashed with rainwater by the passing traffic.

And you can add lots of visual options. Or if you’re feeling daring and bold why not turn a gaming concept on its head and create a fun location-based app game called ‘Where is [insert the name of the latest toppled dictator] hiding?

All it requires is a bit of original thought.  

* This blog post is written by Softtalkmobile, and is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program, a single channel for distributing apps to multiple devices, multiple operating systems, and multiple app stores.