Most Retail Mobile Apps Fail Before They Launch
What It Really Takes to Build a Successful Mobile App, and Why Retail Brands Underestimate the Operating Model
Building Outlook Mobile at Microsoft nearly failed. More than once. In hindsight, it looks inevitable - Microsoft, email, hundreds of millions of users. It seems obvious, but it wasn’t. It was one of the hardest product challenges I’ve ever worked on, and it completely reshaped how I think about mobile, engagement, and growth.
It also explains why most consumer brands are underestimating what it really takes to build a successful app. And why they shouldn’t try to do it alone.
The Myth: “We Just Need an App”
When marketers talk about building an app, the conversation usually starts with surface-level questions: What features should it have? How long will it take? How much will it cost?
Those aren’t the hard questions. The hard questions are the ones you don’t even know to ask until you’re deep into it. The hard questions are operational. Who owns the funnel? How will we instrument behavior? What actually drives habit? How fast can we iterate without breaking the experience? What actually drives revenue?
At Outlook Mobile, we had to solve four complex problems, simultaneously. All while integrating into the Microsoft ecosystem and culture and building to become “Enterprise Grade”.
1. Alignment Is the First Gate to Velocity
The first challenge wasn’t code. It was people and their alignment. We were lucky in that the core team of engineers was already present - world class engineers who went on to build incredible products at companies like Instacart.
But we had to move beyond engineers. We had to assemble a cross-functional team that could move fast while fixing things.
We needed instrumentation, analytics, and a framework to understand them. We needed growth leadership, both for demand generation and in-app engagement. And we needed clear shared metrics to ensure decisions were made quickly.
Product velocity is dependent upon decision velocity.
Without shared metrics of success, opinion creeps in. Politics follows opinion. And before you know it, meetings run into hours and velocity dies. Your product dies. Your business dies. You’re done.
We set three audacious north star metrics:
100 million MAU
Five star app rating
Shipping to both app stores every week
And one grounding principle. To build an app “Loved by users. Trusted by IT.”
That clarity and precision gained immediate alignment and mattered more to the product’s success than any other single feature we shipped.
2. Assumptions are Expensive
We shipped features we thought were valuable. But users didn’t behave the way we expected, and features we thought were critical were ignored.
For example, a sophisticated Files experience. We assumed mobile users struggled with document workflows. And so we had a Files tab at the bottom of the screen alongside “Mail” and “Calendar”.
No one used it.
We joked that it was the place code went to die.
We also thought writing emails was important. A reasonable assumption to make, given the application and what it was for, right? Wrong.
When we instrumented the app, we saw the average session length of a user was 24 seconds. That single metric changed everything.
Outlook Mobile wasn’t a composition engine. It was a consumption engine. Users weren’t writing emails. They were triaging it.
Without instrumentation, we would have been optimizing the wrong thing for years. That’s the cost of building blind.
3. Engagement is Designed, Not Discovered
The (relatively) easy part about building an app is getting someone to download it. The hard part is getting the user to build a habit around it.
To get to our first 10 million MAU, we obsessed over onboarding. Making it as quick and easy as possible. We looked at all of the key workflows and removed friction relentlessly. We experimented with push notifications, ensuring we were only sending ones that added value, not noise. And we shipped constantly without destabilizing the product.
And we did that while competing against Apple and Google, whose apps are pre-installed on the device. So we had to build a habit around Outlook Mobile, while breaking a habit built around a product and ecosystem they’d been using since they bought the phone.
Engagement doesn’t happen by accident. It’s engineered through relentless attention to detail.
4. The App Store is Not Distribution
Even inside of Microsoft, we had almost no central marketing support. We didn’t even have a clear funnel from Microsoft.com to the app.
And so, like everyone else, growth had to come from building the best app in the category. This earned us press attention that gave us credibility. We got the app rating above 4 stars and that earned us features on the app stores.
All of this created curiosity. Curiosity we had to convert into loyalty through instrumentation, interviews, and rapid iteration.
The app store isn’t a distribution channel. It’s a conversion funnel you have to drive. And it’s ruthless.
Now Imagine Doing That as a Retail Brand
If this was hard inside Microsoft, with engineering depth, infrastructure, and brand reach, imagine doing it as a $150M apparel brand. Retailers don’t wake up wanting to become mobile software companies.
Top of mind for them are core business metrics. Higher repeat purchases, stronger loyalty engagement, lower blended CAC, clearer channel attribution, and higher LTV.
But those outcomes require a strong brand identity, purchase funnel instrumentation and ownership, continuous experimentation and iteration. And most of all, operational alignment across all of these motions.
That is a mobile operating model. If this nearly broke inside Microsoft, what do you think it does to a retail org built around merchandising and paid acquisition?
This is Why Bryj Exists
If building Outlook Mobile required alignment, instrumentation, iteration, and relentless focus on habit, retail brands shouldn’t have to recreate that machine from scratch.
Bryj exists to give you the operating model without forcing you to become a software company.
We do it in two ways.
Bryj Beam: Start Fast. Own the Funnel.
Bryj Beam gets you live fast. But more importantly, it gets you instrumented from day one, so you don’t launch blind. You know who installed but never purchased; who purchased once but never came back; where users drop off in the funnel; and which campaigns actually drive LTV.
Identity is built in. Event tracking is wired, and engagement tools are native.
Your marketing team can test, learn, and iterate weekly without waiting on engineering cycles. You can trigger the right message to the right segment at the right time. You can see what worked, and double down.
Beam turns your app into a measurable growth channel. Not a brand accessory. Not a loyalty wallet.
A revenue engine.
Bryj Managed: Sophistication at Scale
Some brands need more than speed. They need deep CRM and POS integrations; custom UI that reflects the brand precisely, complex backend logic, global scale, and enterprise-grade security
Bryj Managed delivers that level of sophistication, without losing the growth engine underneath.
You get a custom-built experience where it matters, and infrastructure that scales. You get ongoing optimization, not a one-time build. And critically, you still get the instrumentation, funnel visibility, and engagement infrastructure that drives repeat purchase and LTV.
Managed builds the foundation.
Beam drives the compounding growth.
That’s the difference.
You don’t have to become a mobile software company.
You just have to decide whether you want to own the relationship, and operate it deliberately.
What This Means for Marketing Leaders
If you’re a CMO, Head of Growth, or Digital leader at a consumer brand, here’s the uncomfortable truth. You are already being measured on metrics that require a mobile operating model.
But most brands are trying to improve those metrics with rented channels. Paid social. Search. Marketplaces. Email blasts and LinkedIn fighting for inbox survival.
You don’t control those channels. You don’t own identity inside them. And you don’t see the full picture within those channels. They’re a black box.
When we instrumented Outlook Mobile properly, everything changed. Decisions got faster. Assumptions disappeared. Growth became deliberate instead of hopeful.
That’s the real shift.
It’s not “do we need an app?” It’s:
Do we want to own our customer relationship, or rent it?
AI Accelerates the Mobile Urgency
And here’s where it gets more urgent. AI is increasing abstraction.
Consumers will increasingly ask assistants what to buy. They will let algorithms choose options. Product will be discovered through intermediaries, and your website will be skipped completely.
AI agents, marketplaces, aggregators - they all sit between you and your customer.
Every layer of abstraction reduces your visibility. Every intermediary weakens your relationship. Every algorithm owns more of the decision. And this is not slowing down, it’s accelerating.
Essentially, websites become endpoints and aggregators become gatekeepers. CAC gets out of your control and becomes more volatile. Attribution becomes more opaque unless you own a direct channel.
Inside an app, you own identity. With identity, you own behavior. Once you track behavior, you can gain insight. And with insight, you gain leverage.
That leverage compounds. Again, this isn’t about “having an app.”
It’s about defending and strengthening your relationship with your customer in a world where AI is making that relationship easier to lose.
The question isn’t whether mobile matters. It’s whether you want to rent your customer relationship, or own it, as AI tightens the funnel.
Because the brands that own identity and engagement will outlearn, out-iterate, and outlast the ones that don’t.
That’s what building Outlook Mobile taught me.
And it’s the decision every consumer brand needs to make. Sooner than they think. Because the next five years won’t reward brands with the best ads. They’ll reward brands with the strongest direct relationships.