Nowadays, many start-up & small businesses are inclined towards mobile application development. And why not.
A mobile app helps businesses in:
Attracting customers to buy their products & services.
Provide them with the customized solutions to improve their user experience.
If you too, are a small business owner, and planning to build a mobile app, here’s a good news for you. An application can really help you grow your business significantly.
However, before you proceed ahead to hire an app developer, you must take into consideration the cost of mobile app development.
You should look at your app development cost carefully so that you don’t end up spending more than your budget.
Here are 9 ways in which you can lower down your mobile app development cost.
#1 Plan Well
Mobile app development is quite a complex process and it takes substantial time and resources to complete it perfectly.
Planning well in advance will help you brainstorm different ideas in the drawing board stage itself.
Advanced planning will help you prevent going though the expensive proposition of attempting to make substantial amount of changes to an app that has been already developed.
#2 Design Sketches
Your mobile app developer needs to write a lot of code to develop your app. It saves a lot of pain down the road if you can first draw sketches of what the final app interfaces will look like and share it with your mobile app designer.
These markings will help the app developer in designing the app and its workflow to satisfy your needs.
Having a rough sketch of what is expected will reduce the time needed for the job and thus reduce your app development cost significantly.
#3 Choose A Cross Platform
Mobile application development is not a cheap undertaking and you should be looking to cut costs as a start-up business.
You do have the option of developing for Android, iOS and Windows separately but using a common platform can bring down your app development cost by as much as one third.
Identify a cross platform framework that performs well for all the target platforms to maximize your return on investment.
#4 Outsource Your Mobile App
While it may seem like a good idea to exert more control on the design and development process by hiring in-house app developers, it may turn out to be a costly proposition.
When you outsource your mobile application development process to a third party, you have to pay them at a lower hourly rate for developing your app.
If you were to hire in house mobile app designers, you will have to pay them a fixed salary regardless of the hours they spend in working on your app.
#5 Use Ready Made Plugins
If your app builders have some handy pre-existing plugins, then the app development cost can be greatly reduced by integrating them with your app.
Integrating the readymade plugins will help your app developers to reduce the mobile application development time as they work on the main features they have been asked to work on.
#6 Proper Testing
You should do an intensive testing, find the flaws in your application & get them fixed by your app developers.
This will not only save you from embarrassment but also cut down on your costs that you would have to otherwise incur on redesign and development.
To achieve this, test the framework to figure out what parts of your app may not be working properly and fix the problem.
#7 Keep It Simple
Do not try to do too many things with your app to keep your app development cost low.
Overloading it with too many features may also lower the speed of your app. Just focus on the points that are important for your business.
#8 Hire An Experienced App Developer
Mobile application development needs multiple experts to work together.
A lot of agencies and developers do just part of the process and you have to hire multiple agencies to take care of other aspects. This increases your app development cost.
Find an agency or an app developer that can take care of all aspects of mobile application development in-house.
#9 Reduce Configurability, Wherever Possible
Though it sounds great to include global configurability for elements like color and text, it makes up for a huge portion of your app development cost.
Making each tiny element configurable takes a substantial amount of work and it involves some costs too.
Sometimes, you can get away with not providing configurability for certain elements without effecting the user experience by a whole lot.
Talk to your mobile app designers to come up with a workable solution. Focus on elements that matter the most, and make them configurable, leaving out the rest.
