Determining The Costs Associated With Building An App

Introduction

In this era of technological advancements, the mobile app economy is burgeoning. According to a report by eMarketer, nearly 90 percent of mobile app users spend their time on mobile applications while browsing the internet. Mobile apps, therefore, are integral and important parts of our daily lives as well for the organization to attract and engage the right set of audience.

According to Forrester Research, “Mobile is becoming not only the new digital hub but also the bridge to the physical world. That’s why mobile will affect more than just your digital operations — it will transform your entire business.”

Now as we know, mobile apps have penetrated our daily-to-daily lives, users spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes on their phones, and 20 percent of smartphone users spend more than four and a half hours a day on m0bile apps. Before estimating the cost, we need to understand the factors that affect the cost incurred.

How much does it cost to build an app?

According to Statista, there are more than 204billion mobile app downloads last year, and from this trend, we can easily incur that there are no signs of slowing down, and if you want to stay ahead of the competition, developing a mobile app is your pass to the first lane.

There is no precise answer to the question, “how much does it cost to develop an app?” The app development cost depends upon several factors such as:

1. Business Model

In this era of mobile apps, we come across and embrace several mobile applications on daily basis. Having a business model is a key step towards mobile app development, and also helps to determine the cost of building an app. Before starting with the process to determine the average cost of building an app, the business must analyze where it would fit in the overall business model.

A business model is simply the assortment of factors that include targeting the right audience and their pain points to generate better solutions and turning it into a source of revenue.

2. App type

Ideas are useless unless they are worked upon to generate innovative solutions. Similarly having a great mobile app is one thing and turning it into an accessible mobile app solution is a completely different thing.

After building a robust business model, your mobile app development company will have to choose the right type of mobile application. This is a crucial step that would affect the overall cost required to build an app. Based on the need and complexity, there can be different types of mobile apps such as Web Apps, Native Apps, or Hybrid/Cross-platform apps.

3. Platform

A long and successful journey begins with small and simple steps. The ideal approach may seem to build an app for both the Android and iOS platforms at the same time, but this would turn out into an expensive and risky approach. As an example, Instagram first launched an iOS version in 2010, and it was only after 4 years that became available for Android users.

So, to decide the suitable platform, you would have to compare the factors such as Market share, Development complexity & time, and Publishing process for both the platforms:

• Market Share:

Talking about 2012, iOS would have seemed to outsmart the Android in-app development market share with a share of approx. 61 percent. But in 2022, Android is likely to rule the app development market with a market share of 86.2 percent.

• Development complexity:

Fragmentation is an important parameter while determining the app development complexity. Apple, on one hand, has a limited number of devices such as iPad, iPhone, and iPod, and all of them are updated to the latest versions, on the other hand, Android has several devices with different screen sizes and aspect ratios. This means that your mobile app should be compatible with all of these devices.

• Development time:

In comparison to Android, iOS development time is 40 percent faster, and the main reason behind this is also fragmentation.

Looking at the above factors, one can easily conclude that the average cost required to build an iOS app is significantly less than for Android.

4. Functionality

We all know that planning a mobile app is a hectic process, and with the addition of new features the base price of mobile apps keeps on increasing. With mobile apps becoming more advanced, they are virtually no limit to what we can do. Hence, there is no fixed figure for the cost, but it may range between a few hundred dollars to a few million.

From adding user login, to push notifications, with the addition of each feature, your app development cost may fluctuate higher t0 500-1000 USD.

5. Design and Development

Most of the vital factors that determine an app development cost have been discussed above. However, there’s one last factor that is yet to be talked about and that is Design and Development.

Determining the type of organization that you are going to hire for your next app development project vastly affects the overall costs incurred in the app development process. While hiring the option of freelancers, or new app development organizations might seem like a more feasible and economical option, but can be risky.

On the other hand, hiring a full-fledged app development organization with a proven track record would bring you the two most important factors, which are: experience and guarantee.

Hence, hiring an experienced app development organization might cost you more, but your project would be delivered on time with skill.

Final thoughts

Mobile app development is a resource and time-intensive process, due to which costs associated with the process also increases. Evaluating the costs required to build an app is vital since it subsequently impacts our overall business.

We have discussed five essential aspects of mobile app development in this blog, which directly influence the app development costs. After all this knowledge you should be well-equipped to build a robust and high-quality app that would fit your projected costs.

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