How to reduce mobile app development costs.

How to reduce the cost of development for a mobile app for Android and iOS... this is one of the most popular and widely discussed issues on the Internet today.

The mobile market is growing, and thus the need for high-quality products and services for mobile development is also growing. Applications have become a profitable business.

Despite the obvious appeal of this segment, the price of developing a mobile application is often prohibitive. Many people think that developing a mobile application is easy, something you can manage with a budget of up to $3,000. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Let's try to understand the reasons and answer the question of how the price of a mobile application is determined.

The process of creating a mobile application includes several stages:

At each stage, you will need 1-3 high-skilled and highly paid specialists; adding up the cost of specialists, with an average project period of 4-6 months, a high sum is required.

At the start of the project, if you do not fully understand why you need a mobile application or what effect it will have on your business, we recommend that you conduct pre-project analytics that will answer key questions: Who are your users? What tasks will it solve? What functions need to be implemented?

All of this is necessary to win over competitors, make a profit, and, most importantly, understand whether it makes sense to develop your own mobile application, as there may already be a ready-made solution for your problem. If you’ve definitely decided to develop your own application, then the question is: "Why is creating your own mobile app expensive?".

Ninety five percent of mobile apps are developed from scratch, which means that it’s not possible to use something like 1C Bitrix, WordPress, or Wix, as is the case for website creation. The number of hours spent on creating a mobile application is many times greater than the hours needed to create a website.

For example, you can create a typical online store with the ability to create a catalog of goods, an integrated payment system, analytics and feedback forms in a digital agency in 50 hours, for which a turnkey solution will be used. If you’re thinking about developing such a solution for a mobile platform, it will take about 450 hours.

If you need a native mobile application for iOS and Android, you should develop one app for each platform, so you should spend twice as many hours. Cross-platform technologies, such as Flutter or React Native, allow for the creation of one app for two platforms. Due to a number of restrictions, they’re not used in serious product development. With the risks that have arisen, your project may simply not reach the release or may face serious limitations in terms of functionality. In this article, you can find more information about cross-platform development.

This could save your budget up to 70%. In this case, you save a lot of money on development, testing, and management, but there are also a lot of risks.

First, the quality of the project will depend on how good you are at testing.

Second, the quality of the code must also be considered, since you can't guarantee that the code will be reviewed or that the development process will be well-organized. As a result, in the future, no single agency will be able to use such a project for support and will instead have to recreate or rebuild it all over again.

Third, a team of freelancers is very difficult to scale, so the risk of a project not being completed on time or even the disappearance of the contractor in the middle of the project increases. The result of this will be lost time and money.

The formula that calculates the cost of mobile app development is the number of hours spent times the rate per hour. You can find cheap specialists; but in this case, you shouldn’t expect to get a high-quality app. In most cases, the quality of your app is directly proportional to the rates of specialists, i.e., the qualification and experience of developers. Thus, if you’re planning to reduce the cost of app development by choosing cheaper specialists, be ready to lose quality. You can influence the total amount of development hours, but you must do this wisely and without negatively affecting the final result.

One of the options for reducing the cost of mobile app development is the exclusion of expensive and non-priority functions. The benefit of each function is evaluated from the ratio of its cost to the results and its effect after implementation.

By forming the necessary set, you can eliminate some features that are expensive, but don’t necessarily carry significant benefits for your users.
We have collected the top popular features that significantly increase the cost of development:

Leaving only the necessary functions intact, you should pay close attention to the design of the application. A professional agency thinks not only about the beauty and convenience of the interface, but also about the feasibility of its implementation from a commercial point of view.

If you want to increase the development budget several times and break your deadlines, then feel free to ignore any issues related to the design creation. Of course, the app should be intuitive and pleasant to use, but this doesn’t mean that "beauty" should tie up a significant part of the budget. An experienced contractor should strive to create a high-quality product within a predictable budget and timeframe. What should you pay attention to?

Read more at https://appus.software/blog/how-to-reduce-app-development-costs-Appus-tips