Mobile Phone Unlocker

We were approached by a client who owns a mobile phone shop. The client was keen to explore how he could harness the possibilities of mobile apps for his business.

We sat down with him and discussed his business model and talked through several ideas.  An idea that we decided to pursue further was to develop a mobile app which allows customers to “unlock” their phones from their current network provider.

The client was already doing this in his shop for customers. By developing this functionality to work on a smartphone he:

• Expanded his customer base by millions of customers
• Now has more business from the app than his shop
• The majority of his customer are based in the USA – without the app he simply would not have been able to reach them

After deciding how best the app should work, we came up with a simple, easy-to-use app, called “Mobile Phone Unlocker” for Android phones.

The Results

We released the app in mid-December 2012 on the Google Play Store. The client decided not to do any marketing or promotion initially.

• 1 month in: The app had over 1400 download
• 4 years later: The app has been downloaded over 100,000 times, and has become an extremely profitable source of revenue for his business

Why the app was successful

• We worked with him to understand his business and his revenue streams.
• We realised that the revenue stream from unlocking could be increased vastly by releasing an app – as this would open up more customers to this service. He was relying on people walking through his door before.