How Much Does It Cost To Develop Your Own Mobile Application?
Tags: Startup, Technology, Entrepreneurship, App Development, Programming

Mobile apps are about to become the next big thing in 2021. Here’s a guide that will help you estimate the cost of your Mobile App. In real-world examples, it can cost you between $15,000-$25,000 having single functionality as their core feature. Whereas medium-complexity apps fall in the range of $40,000-$100,000.

What to look for?

Development of your mobile app varies & totally depends on the factors that affect the cost, every feature & quality of your app can become a factor of the cost but here are some of the major key factors on which development cost depends in most cases.

1. The Functionalities In Your App: The more you need to integrate features in your mobile app, having multiple screens & complex UI, AI integration, user authentication puts your app in the group of basic application which doesn’t require much handling.

2. Your Development Team: Your development team can become the biggest factor for the development cost, the location & work environment plays a major role in it, where you need a team of UI/UX designer, programmers, project managers, and their geographical work location. These small factors change accordingly to the quality of your output in work.

3. The Industry You Are Targeting: Mobile App industry is a well-growing industry and will be a game-changer in upcoming years, as you are making product in a growing industry you have to add security requirements and protecting users data which requires a professional approach to advanced development & a higher cost of implementation.

4. User Support & Maintenance: At the end moment you have to provide a user support system where you will be collecting a lot of feedback from your users and managing this work requires a separate team, also you have to make sure about providing the right support system in case your users run into trouble because no amount of users will praise a Mobile-App which they can’t trust.

Your Development Platform:

Even cross-platform Mobile App Development is doing pretty good, choosing a native platform can produce a higher quality of Apps. Your development is more concise with a chosen native platform, as it provides a more engaged development team & which will give you a huge advantage.

iOS & Android:

The cost for hiring an iOS developer & Android is pretty similar, but the iOS ecosystem will be a great advantage for you, as the iOS ecosystem comes with a very narrow range of devices with different screen sizes, but in case you are towards Android you will be having a lot of devices with different screen sizes to focus on, it will be more complicated to make your app work on different screen sizes properly & that's why it takes more time to develop an Android app.

The time frame might be 3 times longer to develop an Android app as compared with an iOS, that’s why most companies focus on developing an iOS first, and once they are good in their business they move to the Android market.

Cross-Platform: Choosing cross-platform as your development can save you a lot of bucks, here’s why.

A single development team with higher engagement in the work.

2. Single codebase to maintain that work without any issues on both the platforms (iOS & Android).

3. Saves a lot of money with speedy development allows you to release your app quickly in the market.

Development Team:

According to Glassdoor & PayScale, here is what it might cost you to hire your developers.

Developers:

An hourly rate for mid-level developers can vary between $70-$100 in the US. Average Android Developers in the US expects $100K-$120K for their salary. iOS Developers get nearly $100K-$125K on average in the US, it can vary accordingly as high-end Developers expect twice this amount.

UX/UI Designers: The annual salary ranges from $60K-$130K in the US, whereas freelancers expect $100 per hour for good quality services. In European countries, the prices are around $30K per year. Project Managers: In the US software project managers expect about $125K per year. In Europe, it can vary between $30–35K per year. Mobile Testers: Around $60K-70K in the US market and half the value in the European market.

How Features In Your App Affects The Cost:

The way you plan to add features in your app affects the development cost, mobile apps can be more featured-packed as they are more hardware in Mobile Devices, GPS, Bluetooth, Fingerprint Reader & camera, having features related to these hardware makes the development more costly, so focus on making a simple MVP(Minimum Viable Product) out your app, remove all the unnecessary feature at first and test the core features, doing so will give you better clarity of what feature you actually need.

You don't need a well-polished & fully-fledged mobile app with all the fancy features in it, to start getting in front of your customer or investor you can learn a lot by building an MVP because no matter how good your apps are, premature scaling will result in a massive failure.

So instead of going towards a feature-packed app try building an MVP first.

Attracting investors should be one of your goals while developing your app, building an MVP makes this task a bit easy as you can modify the changes in your product to make it better even without making it cost you more. Building an MVP usually takes 310–330 hours, distributed among the entire mobile app development team accordingly to your app’s complexity.

The Reasons For Slow Development That Impacts Development Cost