You decided to build an app – now what?
5 things to reduce your stress levels and overall app development costs
Custom applications are becoming a crucial part of business in our digital world. Today, it’s common practice to build and deploy this type of technology. But unless you’re well versed in the development that goes into the creation of a custom app, you’re likely left scratching your head.
Follow these five tips to reduce the overall stress and cost of launching your own custom application development project.
Hire a team
The minimum cost of building a mobile app can range significantly from $150,000 to $450,000, but using an outside development team can often reduce this cost (sometimes between $10,000 to $80,000). Outsourcing allows you to use a team of experienced, skilled, and dedicated developers who can work exclusively on your app development project and provide you with necessary guarantees. Leverage a team with well-established business processes, making the process seamless, costing you less overall.
When choosing a development team, do your research. Make sure you have a team that can offer quality and skill rather than just a way to cut costs.
Consider Cross-Platform Technologies
If you decide to develop native app versions for Android, iOS, and Windows, it could pose a major cost. Keep your project and labor costs in check: consider cross-platform app development technologies. With the ability to work with reusable code, cross-platform technologies gives your app life across multiple platforms.
Note: If your app is extremely complex, requires hardware integration, or uses native interfaces, check with your development team to make sure performance will not suffer.
Cross-platform frameworks to consider: Xamarin, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, Sencha Touch, and NativeScript.
Test, Test, Test!
Don’t wait to test! Frequently check for quality and bugs to reduce stress on major stakeholders, customers and development. Failure to do so may incur significant improvement costs throughout every stage of your app release (and some launch delays!).
Errors, bugs and other system hiccups can accumulate during a number of stages during development. Testing continuously can help identify issues before they become too costly to fix, making release time easier and a little less stressful.
Be Agile
Use the Agile methodology in your app development and enjoy benefits like budget control, reduced development time, and project specification.
The Agile project management method involves breaking up large projects into smaller development cycles made up of tasks, sub-tasks, and modules. These smaller segments make it easier to manage teams, help developers and increase collaboration across the project. Through this method, stakeholders can be notified when progress as each task, module or cycle is completed, keeping everyone informed.
Help control timeline and quality by concentrating on smaller segments of the project at a time.
Get yourself an MVP
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP), is a working prototype of your app with all of its core features. MVPs are used to test and preview your app before releasing it for full commercial or internal use. An MVP is cheaper to develop, and helps identify improvements, and isolates bugs before implementing a full-scale app. Using MVP releases not only helps to reduce your costs, it can also help avoid failures.
Bottom line: Creating an MVP can help test and prove your concept, impress customers, quantify demand and provide opportunity for investments in the final product
With a proper foundation for your app and a clear idea for the final product, developing your custom app can be more affordable. Using one or more of these trends can make your app development and implementation less expensive, and can also help to ensure the quality of your app.