With the smartphone usage growing exponentially, having an app for your company, product or services, is no longer an option. For the past decade, many consumers have rapidly shifted to mobile apps owing to instant access, easy availability and anytime presence. Hence, businesses can no longer keep putting off app development and deployment. This gives app developers and app development companies ample opportunities.
Leading app development companies in India today are working hard to deploy mobile apps for several clients. While mobile app development may sound expensive, there are several interesting tricks that app developers and mobile app companies employ to significantly reduce the development costs.
Incidentally, there are several visible and invisible costs involved while developing even the simplest of smartphone apps, but we will reserve that discussion for another article. In this article, we will explore the multiple tips and tricks that add developers use to reduce and optimize the development cost of mobile apps. While each app developer, coder, and mobile app development companies will have their own unique methodologies, here are some of the most prominent ones that will significantly impact the app conceptualization, design, development and deployment.
1. Understanding and Noting Down Exact Requirements And Expectations From The Mobile App:
A mobile app can be quite versatile and packed with several features and abilities. Cost of a mobile app development primarily depends on the number of features. That being said, a feature-laden app is preferred over a simple one with bare minimum features.
Essentially, a mobile app should provide the customer with the best user experience. While developers and clients can jointly decide which features are critical, app developers must also consider the deployment timelines. Hence selectively eliminating features after consulting with clients, and then fixing a timeline for adding them at later dates will help in reducing the development cost of a mobile app.
2. Updates, New Feature Additions And Revisions:
Speaking about adding features, app developers must have a clear idea about the staggered timeline for feature addition. Also, apps are bound to have a few bugs. To ensure the app development costs do not spiral out of control while continually fixing bugs, app developers can simply release a private beta version for testing and feedback.
Development costs of mobile app often spiral out of control simply because clients keep adding or demanding additional features that were never truly discussed or agreed beforehand. Moreover, app developers must allocate sufficient resources for addressing bugs and issues which is always an inevitability within complex apps and deployment schedules.
3. Native Or Cross-Platform:
The most critical aspect for any smartphone to succeed is reach or availability. While the Google Play Store and Apple App Store are mandatory platforms, ensuring maximum exposure to potential users should be any app development company’s priority. Incidentally, quite a few app developers often prefer one smartphone system over another. But with newer development tools, coding language and other tools, choosing one, between iOS or Android, is a huge mistake that app developers can avoid.
React Native by Facebook and Flutter by Google are undeniably the two most widely used cross- platform app development technologies. App developers can use these platforms to develop mobile apps that can be easily deployed on Apple App Store as well as Google Play Store. App development companies can surely reduce the development cost of mobile apps by ensuring cross-platform development of apps from the very beginning.
Incidentally, cross-platform app development is not as complicated as it sounds. Moreover, it doesn’t need any hardware integration. Although building native apps for a particular OS can improve user experience, this technique is by far the most preferred option to reduce app development costs.
However, cross-platform development should be chosen only when your app’s scale is not too high and there are only few features in the app. Cross-platform is always discouraged for an app having numerous modules and features in it.
4. Making Optimum Use Of Existing Technologies, Plugins And Open Source Software:
Top app development companies in India usually reduce the development cost of mobile apps by making optimum use of existing technologies, plugins, etc. The features and templates can be easily modified or customized to suit the particular app being developed, and the cost is usually quite less as compared to developing the feature or template from scratch.
Some of the most common features like push notification functionality or 24*7 chat support, can be integrated easily by opting for a third-party plugin. In fact, Google cloud platform can offer some of the most sought after and robust backend services like data processing, user authentication scaling and much more, at a fraction of the app development costs. The only word of caution is to always use plugins, templates and features from reputed and reliable sources.
5. Simplifying Mobile Apps Before Deployment:
Development costs of a mobile app can be kept low by making a simplified version of the app with the critical features first. Moreover, custom graphics, animations, and processes for user interface can also be avoided if the budget needs are to be met.
Interestingly, apps for Apple iOS and Google Android have a distinct style and approach to user navigations. Hence, development cost of mobile apps can be substantially reduced by retaining standard interface and animations rather than developing custom ones, if one has to focus more on the functionalities rather than the app’s look.