I won’t waste your time, make you wait till the end, or hide the answer somewhere in the long text, The most important thing to know before launching your own app is marketing and how your app will growth.
Sales trump all and before you can go anywhere make sure that you know how your app will grow, and here’s why.
Building an actual app is not that hard and if you can code then you know that building an MVP(Minimum Viable Product) is relatively easy, there are also coders from India who can do it for you, companies like Flex Urban, etc…
At scale yes the technology needs to be robust and optimal thus a bigger team is needed but you can really start an app on Friday and having an MVP by Monday, what comes after is the hard part.
Getting users who will use your app is not easy, you need to nail your marketing, know your consumer acquisition cost and retention rate.
So one of the most important things to know before you launch your own app is to know if whether you’ll have to spend for every user you get and for how much.
The best advice I can give is that try to go for apps that rely on the Network Effect which means that the value for one user who uses your app relies on others joining as well. Like how with Dropbox when you share a file, the other person has to have an account, which increases your users organically and exponentially.
Other apps that rely on this are social networking apps such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. Once your users invite others to use your app just to make their experience better then you have a gold mine but if not, then be ready for an uphill battle of fighting to get and keep every user.
Goodluck and I hope this helped.