Mobile App Development: What Users Look for in a 5-star App and How to Make One

With more than three billion smartphones registered in the world today, mobile devices become increasingly ubiquitous each year. As a result, the mobile app development market has become the most competitive it has ever been. According to the research conducted by Statista, the number of apps on the leading digital distribution platforms alone has exceeded the bar of five million as of the fourth quarter of 2020. 

The market is expanding by leaps and bounds, flooded with apps of different kinds and varying quality. It is certainly crowded out there. But where should a young entrepreneur start when considering developing their own mobile app? What quality requirements should one follow and features include in their app to ensure visibility and positive reception?

The following article should not be perceived as the ultimate guide guaranteed to bring your app 5-star ratings, but it will definitely help you set your mobile app development project on the course to success in the endless sea of competing mobile solutions.

Where to start when building your first mobile application

The first question you should ask yourself is why do you want to build a mobile app? Are you chasing after a trend in the hopes to make use of someone else’s success formula or did you come across an idea no one else implemented before? Will your solution stand out from the crowd? How? There are so many questions it’s crucial to have answers to before you start the development of your mobile application. 

Mobile app development is a very complex process that requires a wide range of business and technical skills, experience and thorough research that will shape the fate of your mobile application before you even get to the coding phase. With millions of competing apps on Google Play, Apple App Store, and other digital distribution platforms, you have to understand the importance of discovery, market research, and other pre-development processes. You have to learn how to set the objectives and overcome challenges along the way, how to conceptualize and strategize an app that will take its market niche and fulfill your marketing goals.

With that said, here’s a short, general step-by-step to get your app development project on its feet. Following it to the hilt may not work for everyone, so take from it what suits your business goals and marketing strategy best when starting on your first mobile application.

Identify a problem

Already have a solid idea for your mobile app? Move on to the next step. If not, the first thing you need to do is identify a problem you want to solve with your app. Mobile applications, every successful product or service out there, were all created to solve a problem. You want to get from one place to another the fastest? You get a navigation app that builds you the most optimal route. You don’t want your music library to be limited to the albums you purchased? You get a music streaming app and explore whatever music you want.

Some apps succeed because they solve a problem better than their competitors, and some pioneer a unique niche no one else could have imagined before them. Either way, problem analysis plays a pivotal role in the mobile app development process. If you fail in understanding and defining the problem to be solved, you risk setting the wrong requirements for the project and ultimately delivering the wrong solution no one will ever use. This first and most important step trivialized by entrepreneurs is where the high rate of app development failures comes from.

It’s also important to note that our needs and problems are not permanent. What might have been a considerable problem yesterday, may not be such a big deal tomorrow. Therefore, you should consider the long-run viability of your solution when thinking about problems to take on. Going deeper into the problem and finding the root causes may help you ensure the longevity of your solution.

Validate the need

The problem you defined and the solution you ideated will be the core for your entire mobile app development project. Now that you have that covered, it’s time to identify a specific niche your mobile app falls into and validate if there is a demand. You need to dive deep into research: identify your target audience, analyze your own business and that of your competitors.

Depending on the scope of the problem, your solution will affect certain groups and numbers of people with different needs and concerns you have to consider. These affected people are known as stakeholders. And identifying them is your first step in the validation process. This list should include every group interested in the finished product from business owners, investors, and the development team to the very end users your mobile solution is being built for. The diversity of your target audience depends on the kind of product or service you want to create, whether it’s B2C, B2B, B2B2C, etc.

Talk to your stakeholders. It’s possible to engage with your target audience directly and indirectly through many various channels. There is no concrete system to it. You can: 

• build a landing page that highlights your idea and gather feedback from email signups;
• describe your idea and run polls on your business website and social networks;
• start topical discussions on forums and platforms such as Reddit;
• use keyword research tools such as Google Trends and Keyword Planner to validate the need by analyzing search volumes and forecasts for a given problem.

At the same time you define and engage with your stakeholders, you need to research the competition. What are your competitors doing? Do they have their own mobile apps or ongoing app development projects? If so, what solutions do they offer? Solid preliminary research will help you understand how many existing solutions to a given problem there are on the market and identify their strengths and weaknesses, assess their performance and marketing strategies. Thus, you will be able to see whether there is a niche your mobile app could occupy and if your idea has a competitive advantage to attract users. If not, you will be able to refine your idea to get a competitive advantage or even reshape your concept and shift your mobile app development project into a direction of higher demand and lower competition. Otherwise, you risk entering an oversaturated market or unknowingly implementing the exact same concept of already existing mobile solutions.

Layout the solution and get feedback

Now that you’ve validated the general need for your idea, it’s time to make your solution into something your stakeholders can review and provide feedback on. Even though concise documentation with your product vision, wireframes, and storyboards might do just fine to start work on a small, simple mobile product, it never hurts to go the extra mile and make a kind of an app mockup, a mobile app prototype, before you start the development of an innovative or complex mobile solution.

With a clickable mobile app prototype, instead of looking at pictures and reading solution descriptions from paper, your stakeholders will be able to experience a (possibly) slightly simplified yet actual user journey. They will see firsthand all the features envisioned and how the problem solving process of your mobile app works from start to finish. Even with only basic functionality introduced, a clickable prototype helps everyone involved to see and understand the scope of your mobile app development project. It provides you with valuable stakeholder insights and feedback that should help you manage user expectations more effectively.

Based on their experience from using the prototype, each of your stakeholder groups will provide your project with their unique perspectives on your future mobile app, including their personal considerations and needs. This enables you to reasonably and effectively address the issues found and eliminate drawbacks before the actual development starts. This will also help you identify extra steps and barriers to solving the problem, giving you an opportunity to improve user experience. Remember, good UX/UI design means good discoverability, especially, when you have all the platform design standards well considered in your mobile application.

Start building

Following the data analysis and stakeholder feedback with all the twists and tweaks introduced into your designs and software requirements specification, you can finally move on to the actual mobile app development process. Depending on your business needs, time-to-market expectations, and the complexity of your solution, you will have to decide whether you’re immediately going for a full-fledged mobile application or turning your clickable app prototype into an MVP first. 

Starting with an MVP is always a better and safer choice as it provides you with an additional layer of validation and improvement. You build a version of the app with only the core functionality introduced, leaving all the extra flare and non-essential features for later. This enables you to capture important metrics (such as number of downloads, session lengths/intervals, etc.) and gather more feedback on the quality of your mobile solution before you dedicate more resources to your app development project. Then you can turn this aggregated data into an actionable list of adjustments (in case your MVP needs any) or, if your MVP was well received as is, you can confidently continue building it up, introducing the remaining features that were left out in the initial version.

Quality requirements and features of a 5-star app

Now that you know where to start on your mobile app development journey, it’s time to learn what essential qualities and features users want and expect to see in a mobile app before giving it that precious 5-star rating. This section will give you an understanding of a few basic quality requirements that can help you stand out in the endless sea of competing apps.

Let’s have a look at some of the key factors that go into determining how successful your mobile solution will be.

Purposeful and targeted

Know your target audience

Design and market your mobile application with the target audience in mind. Even if it’s a comparatively small niche, the users that make up that market are more likely to download, enjoy your app, and stick around if it was designed around their particular preferences.

Solve a problem

There is a reason we often call mobile apps mobile solutions. This is because it’s not there to simply please the eye, but to solve a problem for its users, fulfilling their needs and making their lives easier, more enjoyable, or both. A fancy toy with no purpose is guaranteed to get boring, deleted, and long forgotten after a short period of time in comparison to a problem-solving app. Make certain that your users understand what problem your app is solving and rely on your solution in dealing with it.

Offer a rich experience

To be truly successful, you should provide your users with the kind of experience they wouldn’t find anywhere else. Or at least something that was carefully considered and not just duplicated from trends, competitors, or a mobile browsing experience your website already offers. Recycled experiences don’t captivate. They don’t give your users any incentive to keep using the app. Especially, when your solution doesn’t offer anything that wasn’t already available online or through other apps. 

Focus on one core feature

Make sure your mobile solution has a strong USP and offers distinctive utility to your users, providing genuine and meaningful value. This one really depends on the kind of mobile solution you’re building, but it’s always easier and more effective to market an app that is known for its core, strongest feature—something no one else in the market can offer, or at least something you do significantly better than the rest of the apps out there.

Usability goes first in mobile app development

Word about both positive and negative user experiences spreads faster than you can imagine. Either through reviews and ratings, social networks, or a simple chit-chat with friends and family, people love sharing about their experiences and can easily discourage others to use your app in case the experience was disappointing. More often than not, businesses fail to recover from a flood of negative reviews caused by such a chain reaction. At the same time, flooding positive reviews can save you thousands of dollars on marketing your app.

A five-star app sports a user interface that was built with the focus on usability and simplicity in design. So after you made sure your mobile solution aligns perfectly with the needs and wants of your users, your next goal is to focus on making the app easy to interact with, intuitive to navigate, and overall enjoyable to use. Your users will be encouraged to continue to use it and have no reason to go searching for a different mobile solution.

Simplicity in design

Your design should have a polished feel to it. So don’t overpack your mobile app with features that have nothing to do with its actual purpose. If a feature doesn’t help solve the problem or doesn’t make the process more enjoyable, it will only create more clutter and make it more difficult for users to use the app. Design user-friendly interfaces with simple screens, simple menu structure, obvious leads, and no ambiguity throughout user journeys. Intuitive and easy navigation is one of the top-priority quality requirements users hope for.

More touch, less struggle

Minimize the number of actions and amount of typing your users should perform to solve their problem. Today users expect to easily tap and scroll their way through the app with minimum effort. Always try to include different options your users can choose from instead of making them manually type something in.

In-app search

Another layer of making your app more usable and accessible is search functionality. Various filters and sorting options make searching for products and services on your app significantly easier. It may be an obvious overkill for some simple 3-step app, but convenient search functionality is a must for content-heavy mobile solutions. Even though it sounds pretty simple, many mobile app development projects in fact forget about this important feature.

Customization

We all want to stand out in one way or another, so mobile apps that offer plenty of options for customization are certainly appreciated by users. Let your users make the app look and function the way they want it. This can be as simple as giving them a choice of adaptable themes (colors, hues, font styles, etc.). This small but truly enjoyable experience can give your users a stronger sense of ownership.

App marketing and analytics

Download numbers, ratings, and user reviews will provide you with some understanding of whether your mobile solution is successful or not. But these stats will definitely not be enough to provide you with a full picture on the KPIs and long-term viability of your mobile app development. 

Without integrated app analytics and reporting tools, you won’t be able to analyse user activity and measure user satisfaction with different aspects and features of your app. You will lack the useful reports with detailed statistics and metrics on app performance that could help you improve user engagement, encourage more downloads, and increase sales rapidly. You will also lack the data-driven insights necessary to implement positive feature changes and build efficient app marketing strategies for your business to grow and prosper.

Another important thing you should remember is personalization, which is one of the key requirements on the list of user expectations and should be prioritized in your marketing strategies when possible. Depending on the kind of application you’re building, personalization can be achieved through lots of different factors such as demographics, gender, behaviors that users take in the app, their interests and preferences, purchase history, location, etc.

With proper systems in place, your very app becomes an efficient marketing tool you can utilize to provide users with personalized experiences and offers—things that make your customer base more likely to connect positively with your app and grow a bond with your brand. Here are some things that can make your mobile solution more personal to your customers’ habits, needs, and preferences.

Push notifications

Push notifications are a fast and powerful tool businesses use to communicate with their audience. Today we practically can’t imagine an app that doesn’t have this crucial feature. Timely and personalized, mobile push notifications can serve a whole lot of purposes. This ranges from providing users with important news, promotions, and updates to gentle reminders, targeted offers, and suggestions.

Push notifications are your most cost-efficient marketing tool that can be used to:

• stimulate user engagement;
• retain users;
• increase conversion rates;
• track actionable metrics;
• build brand consistency.

Whether in text, in the form of a simple graphic, or as a combination of both, relevant and personalized push messages will work much better than things like emails that are likely to end up in a spam folder anyway. 

Location tracking

Depending on the kind of business you do, this feature may be key to how your mobile app solves the problem for your users. However, let’s take a look at how it can be used from the marketing and analytics perspective.

Knowing the geolocation and habits of your users brings personalization to a whole different level. The data such as accurate location, time, and place your users visited can help your business target the right people with the right, personalized services. This means real-time proximity advertising and personalized offers. Location tracking will also serve as a good source of user insight, helping your business find innovative ways to stay on top of your customers’ evolving expectations.

Social media integration

Provide your users with the ability to spread the word for you. Social media integration will not only simplify the signup and login processes for your users, but also enable your users to share the content from your mobile application through social networks. Achievements, invitations, events, offers—there is so much information users can effectively distribute about your app to a large number of people without your slightest financial or time involvement. Remember, users love sharing experiences. And sharing is a great way to engage new users and build a memorable brand.

Wishlist

This one is mostly related to the eCommerce domain, so if your app doesn’t offer a catalogue of products for users to choose from, you can confidently skip ahead. 

In short, a wishlist is a feature that allows users to mark/save items they are interested in but do not intend to purchase on the spot. It’s a kind of a middle ground between users purchasing and forgetting about the items they desire. Without this small but meaningful piece of functionality, a customer might forget about the items they wanted to purchase the next time they revisit your app. It makes a user come back to your app and eliminates the need for them to browse for the desired products again and again every time they want to take a look-see.

This helpful feature simplifies product navigation and rationalizes shopping behavior, giving users the idea that their shopping is well planned. After all, buying something that has been hanging in the wishlist for a couple of months sure does feel justified and rational.

Ease of communication

When implemented well, in-app customer support and feedback are a great feature to have. Good or bad, anything could happen in your app. And before your users go 1-starring your app and writing a wrathful review about it on Google Play or Apple App Store, it’s good to have a buffer that can potentially not only fix the situation itself, but turn the whole thing into a pleasant customer experience deserving a 5-star rating.

Make it easy for your users to contact support and leave feedback in case they need help with something they encountered in your app or simply want to comment on a feature they think could be improved in a way. This can be as simple as an email form for users to send their comments and ask questions. Or you could take it a step further and implement a click-to-call button or go for chat functionality that will provide immediate help to your users. This can be a combination of both live chat and chat bot functionality where a chatbot answers frequently asked questions and transfers users to a support specialist in case the issue is more complex than the bot can handle.

Knowing that there is someone ready to provide you with immediate assistance will show your users that you care about their experience, needs, and opinions. It will give them more confidence in their actions and a strong sense of involvement that leads to increased customer satisfaction with the service.

Don’t be afraid to even encourage users to leave feedback about the app’s functional and non-functional features. Customer feedback is the best source of insights to how the quality of your features and services could be improved. It’s the best way to understand what your mobile solution lacks and where it thrives. It gives you the direction your users expect you to take in the future. By means of this sort of collaboration between users and the development team, you can even build a strong community around your mobile app.

High app performance

This quality requirement is pretty obvious so we will be short—users demand high app performance and there’s no way around it. The bar for user satisfaction with mobile apps is high and getting higher every single day. Users expect your mobile app to load in one-two seconds or less. They expect fast loading screens with optimized images, videos, animations, and transitions. They expect quick API responses and no network-heavy backend requests with dragging in-app processes and transactions.

If your app takes too long to load a screen or perform a certain task, it fails to deliver the expected or at least satisfactory experience. It hurts your app ratings, hurts your brand and the potential revenue altogether. Your users will simply drop it and go looking for a better-optimized alternative. That’s why you have to remember about the importance of thorough mobile testing before you release your app into the market.

Security & compliance

The more common breaches of confidentiality and data leaks in today’s digital world made mobile app security and compliance an essential requirement in every industry, and not just the financial and healthcare sector. In addition to keeping their own business operations safe, practically every mobile application out there deals with certain amounts of user data they have to protect in order to engage users and build a trustful, long-term relationship with them. This includes both digital and legal security with well-addressed compliance requirements such as GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in the state of California, United States.

From contact details to bank accounts, different mobile applications gain access to various levels of personal information that hackers may attempt to steal. They trick users into downloading malware onto their devices that frequently attempts to access their data through applications with weak security. They intercept sensitive data traveling over the network. They try to steal user identities or get hold of their assets.

To gain trust with your users and avoid compromising your mobile application with exposed security issues, make sure to:

• never ask your users for permissions not crucial to your app’s correct functionality;
• implement multi-factor authentication;
• use encryption to protect your source code;
• take measures to secure data in transit;
• use only verified and proven APIs;
• equip your servers with multiple layers of security;
• minimize the storage of private user data on your servers and in the app;
• perform frequent and thorough security checks.

Simple and trusted checkout

In case your mobile solution involves any kind of financial transactions, make sure to make the checkout process exceptionally simple and seamless with fast and easy steps. This is important because even the slightest concern or misunderstanding in the process can lead to groundless doubts, or in the worst case, complete removal of your “sketchy” application off of the user’s device. Give users what they want. Don’t bore users with information irrelevant to the transaction. Don’t ask them questions that have nothing to do with the checkout. Encourage swift decisions and smoothen the checkout flow to keep your users pleased with the process and the outcome it brings.

Another important trust factor in the checkout process is to use secure payment gateways your users are familiar with. Whether it’s Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Stripe or any other online payment system, you should make sure your mobile application provides a variety of secure payment options your users recognize. Thus, in addition to gaining the trust of your users and dispelling any doubts, integration of popular payment systems will also save your checkout process from the complexities of gathering private user data, the payment information the APIs have already processed for you.

Availability on both Android and iOS devices

Undoubtedly, the more devices and platforms your mobile application supports, the broader will be your reach and the bigger the potential user base. It’s important to launch your mobile solution on both most popular platforms, Android and iOS, as both feature worldwide popularity and cover a lot of ground—billions of mobile devices around the world. But the logical question is how should I do it? Should I go with native or cross-platform mobile app development?

The development path you choose depends on a number of important factors such as costs, performance, and user experience. Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of both approaches.

Cross-platform

Cross-platform frameworks are powerful tools that enable you to build and deploy your mobile application quickly and on both platforms at the same time. However, cost-efficiency, code reusability, and speed of delivery are really their only true strengths. Cross-platform apps don’t boast best performance or scalability and the unified user interface, that balances between the design approaches of the two platforms it was built for, doesn’t provide the best experience. So go for the cross-platform mobile app development approach if you’re looking to build a small application with no complex features or a solution where faster time to market is of the essence.

Advantages of cross-platform app development:

• cost-effective development;
• reusable code;
• fast deployment and easy maintenance;
• no performance difference across platforms.

Disadvantages of cross-platform app development:

• unified UI and limited user experience;
• average performance and poor scalability;
• challenging integration with target platforms.

Native

You can’t go wrong with native mobile app development as nothing can beat the feel and taste of using a high-quality native app. Native apps boast unrivaled excellence in user experience and performance compared to their cross-platform competitors. This, in turn, also gives native apps significant advantage in visibility and positioning on the platform they were specifically tailored for. However, all these marvels come at basically double the cost of development and maintenance of a cross-platform app. After all, you would have to build and support two separate native applications to cover both platforms.

Advantages of native app development:

• high performance and great scalability;
• excellent user experience;
• broad functionality and access to platform-specific features;
• better positioning on the platform.

Disadvantages of native app development:

• high development cost;
• no reusable codebase;
• difficult and costly maintenance.

Offline and online modes

Most well-optimized mobile applications work just fine with even average mobile network connection. Especially, considering that today’s average connection speed is nothing we could’ve dreamt of yesterday. And with the ubiquity of the Internet, it’s logical that most mobile solutions will completely depend on internet connectivity in solving their users’ problems. Some will also use this opportunity to implement an abundance of cool features that would require internet connection to function fully. However, even the most online-dependent apps should have at least some features that function offline.

There’s no ultimate approach to creating an ideal offline mode for your app and it really depends on the kind of business you’re in, but there are some good starting points you can rely on: local storages, local databases, and data synchronization. Depending on the kind of app you’re building, you need to go deep into your solution and carefully research user behaviors. Try to predict the situations where certain features of your app could be useful without internet connection.

An offline mode is a particularly useful feature for:

• streaming apps where users can cache their favorite, most frequently accessed content;
• travel, delivery, and fitness apps that use maps and GPS navigation;
• corporate apps with databases and different levels of tasks;
• cloud storage apps that enable you to store and access some data locally;
• office suites where users can edit documents offline and sync them online later;
• banking apps that allow you to check your balance, history, and access settings offline;
• healthcare apps with reminders and vital information stored offline.

Regular app updates

Regular updates play a huge part in building user loyalty and trust with your brand and mobile solution in particular. It’s a continuous improvement process that raises the quality of your mobile application to higher standards so you could meet the ever-growing user expectations, keep up with technology, and stay fresh and relevant. This includes aspects such as security, performance, usability, compatibility, and stability of your mobile solution.

Here are just some of the many reasons why regular app updates are so crucial to the long-term success of your mobile app development project:

Fixing bugs

Pretty obvious, right? No one enjoys encountering lag, crashes, and errors when using an app. But no code is perfect, and it’s no crime to have a couple of bugs and errors slip through at the initial release or when introducing new features. What’s important is to introduce solid and timely fixes so that your users’ frustration with certain flaws doesn’t turn into negative reviews and 1-star ratings.

Optimizing performance

Users don’t particularly enjoy apps that are sluggish, drain battery, or use unjustified amounts of other resources such as local storage or cellular data. And while it may not be what drives people to downloading your app, good performance is definitely one of the main things that keep users from uninstalling it. Therefore, improving and stabilizing the performance of your application will never do you wrong.

Polishing the user experience

Whether by simplifying a process, revising visual design, or introducing a more engaging way of interaction with a feature, user experience should never be left behind. User experience is one the key factors directly tied to user engagement, increasing download rates, and good reviews. Listen to positive and negative feedback coming from users and introduce all the necessary changes to make using the app ever-so enjoyable.

Introducing new features

In order to stay relevant and minimize the risk of your users’ switching to the solution of a more trendy competitor, you have to keep up with the latest technology. In addition to improving existing features, find ways to implement new, relevant and innovative functionality. Research the capabilities of latest devices and monitor platform updates to evolve your app with new features and keep your users from getting bored.

Keeping security up-to-date

The same way hackers work around the clock to find new ways of stealing our data and assets, you should update your security bit by bit. With all the new features you introduce into your app and the platform (operating system) updates happening from time to time, you have to make sure there are no security flaws, vulnerabilities, or workarounds that hackers could use to hurt your users and business.

Why ratings and reviews matter for your app

In this article you learned where to start when building your first mobile application as well as what level of quality and features your target audience expects to see before they grant you that hard-earned 5-star rating. Now there’s one last thing we want you to know before you go. And that is why you even need these reviews and ratings in the first place.

There’s no denying the fact that user feedback is one of the main drivers of your business growth. High ratings and positive reviews on digital distribution platforms such as Google Play and Apple App Store carry significant value to all the potential new users about to download or purchase your mobile solution. Ratings and reviews serve as a kind of an unbiased, crowd-sourced indicator of the quality your app is rocking. It’s a trust factor that ensures your mobile app stays relevant and popular in the long run.

Have a look at some of the key benefits mobile app high ratings and positive reviews bring to your business:

Visibility and ranking

Discoverability, positioning, downloads, and in-app purchases— all these important things depend on the rating your mobile app holds and the number of positive reviews it has on the platform. They are key to the validation of your app by the distribution platform and are directly linked to the ranking system. The higher the score and the more positive reviews your app has, the more likely you are to get better positioning.

Conversion rates

Positive reviews and ratings are your major boost of conversion rates at the moment of launch of your mobile application. It’s a short-term boost, however, as the rating-provoked conversion spike tends to fall off shortly after a certain level of quality is achieved. But with proper marketing and reputation management strategies in place, you may very well be able to extend the effect for longer than weeks and months.

User retention

High user retention rate can be achieved through maintaining timely and respectful communication with your users. Responding to both positive and negative reviews shows your users that their feedback is genuinely taken into consideration and that you’re using it to improve the app according to their needs and preferences. Such two-way communication helps build long-term loyalty with your brand.

Revenue

Directly dependent on the aforementioned benefits, revenue generation is consequentially related to your app reviews and ratings. As a source of credibility, reviews and ratings influence your users’ purchasing behavior. Whether through in-app purchases or direct acquisition, users are more likely to invest in an app tried and proven by many rather than spending money on a solution with questionable rating and average reviews.

And there you have it—the basics of what users expect from a 5-star app and where you should start when planning a mobile app development project. This is not an all-around guide, but following these simple yet informative recommendations can definitely help you devise a mobile solution your users will appreciate.

We at QArea, are a truly agile team of dedicated professionals—engineers, designers, business analysts, and project managers with more than 19 years of experience in mobile application development and expertise in a wide range of industries. Whether you’re looking to complement your ongoing mobile app development project with additional troops or need a proven product development team to kick-start a whole new one, just let us know. We will have you covered.