Facebook does it with their services and Foursquare does it with their app. There are situations, when you should think about separating your app into two (or even more).

From The Users Perspective

As a user, I’m really grateful, when I don’t have to navigate through a feature packed app to find one feature I relay want to use. In our case, when I want to send a card, I don’t need all the features the Tripmii App has to offer, I just want to send a card. It’s much easier to just open the app, which is especially made for that.

Nowadays, when every app is sending push notifications all the time and wants access to services like location based service, the user wants to be able to give as fine-grained permissions to apps as possible. With one app, the user can only provide the permission or he can decline it. But with multiple apps the user can easily set several different permissions in the settings of his iPhone for each single app.
You are interested in new stamps, friends are sending you, but you don’t want to get informed, if there is a new trip available? With having two apps, it’s possible to make the settings accordingly.

From The Vendors Perspective

There are a couple of advantages, when separating an app. First of all it’s much easier to promote one outstanding feature, than a couple of probably good features of which the user is only interested in some. Another aspect is, that according of a new study of Microsoft, the attention span of users is now lesser than that of a goldfish. Listing all features of an app can easily overcharge people and they then stop reading. In our case it’s hard to feature TripCards, because all the other features of the Tripmii app pushes the card features into the background.

In the first version of the app, the user could sent cards to his friends. Later we added the possibility to create and to write a whole TripBlog right from the road. Since then, the number of TripCards users sent, declined dramatically. It’s obvious, that the user thinks the app is for writing TripBlogs. “And the app also sends beautiful cards” is difficult to communicate, because it’s a totally different feature.

Tripmii, TripStamp & TripCard

Sure, there are a few drawbacks like having multiple apps on the spring board, but all in all it’s better for both sides to spread features over multiple apps.

We just made the start with a brand new app called „TripStamp“ which let’s you collect beautiful stamps from your journey. The next app will be called „TripCards“ for sending cards to friends, while travelling. Stay tuned!