In this high-tech competitive world, having a mobile application has become a necessity for all size business owners. People are shifting more towards online mediums for searching, deciding, and buying different products and services. It alerts product owners to understand the importance of online presence and make an initiative to launch their service on online channels too along with offline platforms.
Suppose you are a business owner and want to enhance your online presence in front of your target audience. In that case, you can contact a mobile application development company and ask them to create an application that will help your customers to reach you through their smartphones.
But how much will it cost, and what are the factors on which this cost will depend?
To get an answer to this question, you have to read this article till the end. Here you will learn about all the factors that influence the cost of mobile application development. But before that, let us discuss what mobile app development is and the types of mobile app development processes available in the market.
What is Mobile Application Development?
Mobile app development is the process of designing software applications that are capable of running on mobile devices. A typical mobile application uses a network connection to work with computing resources available at remote servers. Therefore, the mobile development process includes:
- producing installable software bundles (code, assets, binaries, etc.)
- implementing backend services, and
- application testing on target devices
Since you get an introduction about mobile applications, it is crucial to know about the two prominent mobile platforms leading the market. They are iOS from Apple and Android from Google. There are around 3 million applications in the world available for smartphone users. Some of these can run on both the mobile platforms mentioned above, while others can work specifically on one and not the other.
But what are these applications that are available for both platforms and the others that show specificity?
To answer this question, we need to discuss the types of applications available out there.
Types of Mobile Applications
In the early stages of mobile app development, the only type that existed is to create apps natively, that is, writing specific codes and developing apps for specific platforms. However, today, most applications are device-agnostic, which means they can run on multiple platforms or OS. Here are the types of mobile applications:
- Native Applications: A native app is a software application built using a specific programming language and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for a particular device platform, either iOS or Android. Native apps offer the users the best performance and customisation options, but creating these apps is highly expensive.
- Progressive Web Applications (PWAs): A PWA is a website that acts like a mobile application. However, users can not download web apps into their phones. Developers design these apps using web technologies, like Facebook React.
- Hybrid Applications: A hybrid app is like a web app developed through web technologies but acts like a native application. They are relatively cheaper than native apps but comparatively less feature-rich than native applications.
Based on your budget and business requirements, you can choose any one of the above options and contact a mobile app development company to develop a systematic and well-performing business application for you.
Factors affecting the cost of your mobile application development
Since you have learnt about the types of applications you can choose from for your business app, it becomes crucial to know about the factors that will affect its development cost. Well, the development cost is somewhat directly proportional to the cost of hiring a developer who will design your application. Therefore, the factors influencing the expenses of both hiring a developer and the development process are:
Mobile Application Development Platform
As discussed above, there are three types of applications, of which native and hybrid apps are specifically for mobile devices. If you choose a single native application for your business, you can have a codebase for only a specific platform. Although native apps are the best (performance-wise), the development cost and time required to create these applications are relatively high.
On the other hand, if you want to target multiple platforms for your business, then creating a hybrid application will be the right choice. It will be both time-saving and cost-efficient. The performance of hybrid applications are also good, but not more than what native apps provide.
Location of the Developer
Yes, location has an impact on app development cost too. How? Well, here you will know.
When you hire a mobile app developer, the developer’s geolocation plays an essential role in determining the cost of app development. According to a survey report by Buildfire, the most common and affordable places to hire app developers worldwide are India, Singapore, Russia, United Kingdom, and Australia. Therefore, chances are, opting for mobile app development services from these countries can be relatively cheaper than others.
App Development Complexity
The complexity in mobile app development depends mainly on its design, features, functions, integrations, and application development ideas. When you mention all your business requirements and the specifications you want in your app, the designers develop an idea of how the developers should create the app and what technologies will they require in its making. The more the app development complexity, the more time it will take in creation. As a result, greater will be the cost of developing that application.
Type of developer(s) hired
The success of your business application partially depends on how you implement it in front of your target audience and partially on how well your developer has developed it. If your application has a decent UI and UX, there are chances that people will like it, and you will get more leads and sales. If you hire a renowned mobile app development company to design your app, you can get the benefits of the experience. However, it can be expensive to get the services of such a well-established company in this field. If your budget is low, you can hire freelance developers who might have good personal developing expertise but no official experience. However, a lack of professional background can have a profound impact on the application’s performance.
Wrapping Up
Undoubtedly, the application development cost is something that immediately pops up when a business thinks about enhancing its online presence. But unfortunately, there is no such cost calculator that can determine the expense of developing an application. However, this article can help a business owner understand the factors influencing the mobile application development services cost. If you are a product owner, this piece of information can allow you to comprehend and decide what type of application will be suitable for you and how you want to get it developed for your business enhancement.
