Mobile app development is flourishing at a rapid rate and it is expected to see a major boom in the coming years. The ever-increasing rate of mobile users is expected to reach 7.1 billion by the end of 2021 and this brings a pool of opportunities for any Android app development agency. If we conclude various researches, almost 90% of the time is spent on exploring different apps by mobile users. The annual mobile app download is 258 billion with a 45% increase from 2017. These facts and figures are depicting the essence of mobile apps and their usage in daily lives.
Today, every business unit wants a mobile app for it to expand its reachability to more prospective customers. There is always a sort of uncertainty regarding the cost of app development and various developers have presented their point of view on this topic. This post will provide crucial insights about app development processes and cost incurred on each process. This will help you to prepare a fair estimate depending on various features and functionalities that you want in your app.
Nature or the Type of Mobile Apps
The upfront factor to decide the app development cost is to deeply understand the nature or the type of app that you want to build. Just like an ornament is never so precious until you decide with the type material used to make it, deciding the cost of an app is also as difficult until you decide with the type of app that you want for your business. There are different types of apps and each type has its own considerations and price tiers depending on the features, functionalities, team location, and platform used. Whether you want an e-commerce app, social networking app, on-demand app, data-driven app or a functionality app, each category requires different set of tools and development procedures which eventually add up to the development cost. So, telling an exact amount for the best Android tablet app will be like deceiving readers.
What Platform is used?
First of all, you have to choose among Native, Hybrid and Web app that you want to develop for your business unit. Then you have to choose a specific platform whether you want an iOS app or an Android app. You can simply choose Native mobile app development for a specific platform like Android or iOS. The native framework will use programming languages and tools which are native to a specific platform.
You can also choose Unity app development or a hybrid app that will perform at all platforms; this is also called cross-platform app development. Without changing much coding, you can have an app that will run on multiple operating systems. Native apps are preferred much preferred because they are designed and developed for a specific platform and can easily access programs and services within the device for ideal performance. A hybrid app uses the same codebase across different platforms that makes them compatible with several devices. A cross-platform app will perform effectively on both iOS and Android platforms expanding your reachability to maximum target audience.
Location of the Team
You might be wondering what location has to do with app development process. Just to let you know that various countries charge different per hour amount for app development processes. For an instance, if you have chosen a team that is based in US, the per hour development cost can range between $ 100 to 150 per hour whereas in Europe and Indian subcontinents, it is $30 to 45 per hour and in countries like Indonesia, it is as low as $ 10 to 15 per hour. So if you are a startup and have a limited budget, you can prefer to develop your app from an app development company in India where you will get both quality and assurance for smooth performance of your app.
Complexity Level
Complexity here means the kind of features and functionalities which you want in your app. In terms of complexities, we can categorize apps into three major sections:
Basic Apps: These are the apps which do not require any remote data servers. Apps like calendar apps and diet planners have low development cost as compared to those which require remote servers to perform at par. Such apps can cost you somewhere between $ 1000 to 4000.
Web Server Apps: These apps generally save their data on remote servers and require more sophisticated programming. The development cost of such apps can range between $ 8000 to 50,000. These apps are more dynamic in nature and allow swift operations as the web server takes care of the static portion and handles multiple functionalities.
Gaming Apps: It is almost impossible to put a price tag on such apps as these apps range between simple features to the use of highly complex virtual reality. VR Game development has gained much recognition in recent years. Still if we try to put the cost of these apps in a nutshell, the development cost will lie between $ 100,00 to 250,000.
Features and Functionalities
This is another crucial factor that impacts the development cost up to a great extent. The number of features along with the complexities involved in developing them decides a major portion of the total app development cost. The research stage, development, testing, and maintenance & support, all these stages incur different cost for any mobile app development company depending on the type of features, functionalities, platform, and designing part. To make it more comprehensible for you, let’s scale it up:
Research Stage: Up to $5000
Development Stage: Up to $ 5000
Testing Stage: Up to $ 5000 to 100,00
Maintenance & Support: Up to $ 5000 to 100,00 (for one year)
This figures and facts mentioned in this post are intended to provide you a fair estimate of the development cost for your business app. You have to be as specific as you can by preparing a well-structured plan for your app and its features and functionalities. Doing proper research will help you get the best development team that can eventually minimize your cost on various terms.
