What’s more difficult to develop, a mobile app or a website? Obviously, this depends on the project; but on average, mobile app development services are definitely more expensive – most web studios will charge you 5 to 7 times more for an application than for a website. The price range starts at around $10,000 and can easily go up to $450,000–$700,000. To understand the reason behind these eye-watering prices, we first need to look at the nature of mobile development.
Types of apps
In terms of complexity, mobile apps can be roughly categorised into two groups:
- client-only applications
- client-server applications
An e-guide with tourist attractions, an offline game (think Sudoku on feature phones) or notes are essentially "standalone” apps that don’t need to be connected to a server. These applications start at around $10,000.
But if the program is supposed to exchange data with the server – which is needed for even something as simple as logging into a personal account, publishing news and reviews, awarding points, etc., – you’ll need a client-server app. As the name suggests, it relies on two systems: the client side (the app itself) and the server-side (or backend), which is everything that is kept under the hood. Developing such a mobile app will cost you at least $40,000 – and that’s just for the most basic projects.
Cost of labour
The cost of building a mobile app depends largely on the salaries of the people who work on it. A development team is usually composed of the following specialists:
- Backend developers
- Frontend developer
- Tester
- Designer
- Systems architect
- Team leader
- Business analyst
- Project manager
The key people here are developers (duh), which you need to have at least two of – one for Android (Kotlin) and one for iOS (Swift). Why at least? If the client wants complex functionality or the deadlines are tight, you might need several specialists for each OS.
Experienced senior-level mobile developers are considered subject matter experts, which is why their median monthly salary is higher than that of backend and frontend specialists ($2,700 vs $2,500 and $2,200, respectively). And that’s just one employee per month.
It’s almost impossible to find a versatile developer who will write equally well for both Android and iOS. However, creating a single mobile app that works on both platforms is well within the realms of possibility: this is something called cross-platform development and it’s done on such frameworks as React Native, Flutter and others. Sadly, this option doesn't come cheap: to create an app like this, you’d need to develop a separate UX system, and that takes a lot of time and money.
What about deadlines?
The longer your project goes on, the more money you spend on the team, so the costs are directly related to the length of the project. But even if you hire more developers in an attempt to hasten the launch, there’s no guarantee that it will help. First of all, each phase of project implementation involves certain activities that you simply cannot skip, such as layout design, approval, testing, etc. Second, there is an inverse-scale effect in IT: when there are a lot of people on the team, it becomes more difficult to manage all the processes effectively.
The time it takes to create a mobile app doesn’t depend on the number of specialists so much as on the distribution of workload. A good way to streamline project development is to work on several processes simultaneously. For example, once the prototypes have been agreed with the client, the systems architect and the designer can both get to work. Frontend and backend can also be developed side by side. However, even with this optimisation the development of a client-server mobile app for Android and iOS will take at least 6–12 months, depending on the complexity of the project. And for cross-platform apps, this time will be even longer. If you multiply the months of development by the salaries that you have to pay out to the employees, it becomes clear where these prices come from – and that’s without taking into account the risks, costs and margin.
Don’t forget the ecosystem
When making the decision to launch an app, you should budget not only for the product itself, but also for the ecosystem that will surround it.
So what’s that about, and why is it important? Well, imagine you’re building an application for booking doctor appointments. On top of the actual app, you will also need a CRM system to keep track of appointment schedules. On a similar note, a food delivery app and an online store will both need a logistics infrastructure (and the latter will actually need CRM and payment systems too).
Another step that can be awfully expensive is pre-project analytics for assessing the potential marketability of the product. In mobile gaming, for example, this research is absolutely vital: it costs a lot of money to create a mobile game, and if people don’t play it after launch, your budget will take a serious hit. So before proceeding with the development, companies create a clickable prototype of a non-existent game, run ads and monitor the click-through rate. If users don’t find the idea interesting, the project is scrapped.
Pre-project analytics isn’t cheap, but it will help you understand what features your app needs to have, when you are going to break even, and whether people want your product in the first place. Surprisingly, sometimes it makes more sense to simply install a chat widget on the website and add a phone number for order placement than to digitalise the delivery process and develop a GPS tracker. The purpose of an app is to monetize your business, so it’s important to understand how the product will fit into your company’s processes.