How much does it cost to develop an app? Is this or such questions disturbing you? If yes, you have landed on the correct page. I have tried to answer this question, which has been repeatedly asked, to the best of my knowledge. The question of how much would you spend to create an app is similar to asking questions like how much would you spend to buy a car or how much would you spend to buy a house. The answer is completely dependent on your choice or what you are looking for. Are you looking for a modest house, a paint house, a luxurious house or even better? Are you looking for a family car, a sedan, or an SUV or a bigger car? Depending on your requirements you will be able to make a choice out of all the alternatives.
Similarly, there are several key factors that determine or influence the cost of your application development project. Let us take a look at some of the influencing factors:
- Types of app
What kind of application are you planning to create for your business? Would it be an informative app or an interactive app, a business app or a gaming, a short-term promotional app or a long-term strategic app? Is it to be made for the general public or is it a limited version for the internal users? Depending on so many requirements your development cost will also vary.
- Functionality and Purpose
It is very important to know what actual functionality your app will offer. For instance, an informative app is developed with the main aim of educating the users. Similarly, an interactive app must be constantly updated with real-time information to keep the end users engaged. Depending on the goal or objective of your app, you come up with functionalities. Now when a company decides on functionalities and features it makes a judicious and conscious effort of balancing features with its balance sheet. What may look simple is actually a pretty trivial task.
- Platform and devices
Mobile app development industry is aware of the fact that mobile platforms have come a long way. From the Monopoly of Symbian operating system that was established in early 2000 to the tension in the market offered by rivals like iOS, Windows, and Android. Each competitor has a certain market share. Android has been taking the market by a storm. If you are planning to create an application that is dedicated to Android platform you will incur different cost than creating an application for iOS or Windows platform. Similarly, if you are planning to create an application for Blackberry phones on Symbian platform you will have to invest a completely different cost for application development.
- Device configuration
If a platform has maximum market share this means that app development would come with a lot of consideration and provisions. For instance, Android is an open source platform, therefore, the requirements for creating an app would be completely different. To create an app, different platform consideration factors such as architecture, screen resolution, RAM, configuration, internal memory and much more such factors must be kept in mind. These factors determine the prerequisites for your app development. Also, there are several hardware factors such as customised OS themes, that may be considered an important aspect when dealing with app development in relation to critical data. Factory configuration makes the app incompatible and may cause poor performance. Therefore, it is important to consider the factors of the platform configuration so that the application offers the best performance.
- User Interface
Eye-catching, cool, attention grabbing are a few terms that can define the user interface that matches the recommendations of clients as well as the expectation of the end users. The user interface needs to offer excellent graphic and visual elements that keep the users hooked to this interactive app.
- Maintenance, Support, and Enhancement
If you thought that deployment was the last step of mobile app development process, you were wrong. What comes after deployment is even more critical and important. Maintenance, support, and enhancements, these things are considered important while creating an application that makes it presence felt in the market. Suggestions, bugs, reports, everything must be fixed by the maintenance team or the development team to make the mobile app version stable. Each of these processes add to the overall cost.
- Return on investment
There are other factors that may affect the cost of developing an application. Factors such as making business decisions based on the application or dual platform presence, social media involvement or indigenous, database allocation, app monetization and other factors determine the rates of development. All these factors can affect ROI.
In conclusion, there is a huge list of factors that determine the cost of developing an application. Several mobile application development companies like Dreamztech work day and night to come up with apps that fit the needs of the end users and match the requisites of the client. Every app that is developed evolves from a good idea and therefore promises to make its presence felt in the market create. An enticing, engaging, and result-oriented application is a result of hours of work and effort that the dedicated team of developers put in. Thus, the cost of developing applications also encompass factors like man-hours that was invested by the development team.