Top 5 methods to help reduce mobile application development costs
For many organizations, mobile application now plays an important role to help further ensure their success in such an increasingly competitive business world. The app marketplace offers millions of app that helps users with their particular requirements from managing tasks to improve productivity to entertainment and e-commerce shopping and many more.
Additionally, mobile app helps business organizations to communicate and engage with their customers, providing a convenient shopping method as well as improving customer’s experience.
Despite the large availability of mobile developers and mobile app development companies as well as a strong growing number of development tools, many business organizations and individual entrepreneurs still find it challenging when it comes to building an app for their business. One of the biggest concerns is often the high costs of app development.
In this article, we take a look at a number of methods that can help you reduce mobile app development costs, as follow:
- Outsourcing
In many cases when your business is not in the IT/software business, it’s always a good option to outsource the tasks to an external app development agency or a software development outsourcing company. This way, the development cost is cheaper, and also the process also becomes more efficient. Of course, the final price will depend on the required functionalities, technologies, and platform of choice of your app, as well as the country that your app project is outsourced to.
Hiring a dedicated team of developers and outsourcing the project to them remains a cost-effective strategy for both small and medium-scale businesses. Outsourcing provides various benefits include lower development costs, time-saving, and access to advanced technologies as well as a large pool of IT talents.
- Cross-platform development
Developing separate native apps for each mobile platform (iOS, Android) can prove to be expensive. To reduce the development costs as well as the man-hours required, businesses can opt for cross-platform app development instead.
One of the most obvious benefits of cross-platform development is developers only have to write the code once and able to re-use it (more than once) for the other platforms. Some of the most popular technologies for cross-platforms include Xamarin, Appcelerator, PhoneGap, and React Native, etc.
- Agile project management
Adopting agile methodology for your mobile application development project provides numerous benefits including faster development, flexibility for requirement changes of project, and budget control among many others. By using Agile methodology, a relatively large mobile development project can be divided into smaller development iterations that consists of tasks and sub-tasks. Clearly, it’s easier to manage the smaller chunks of works than one whole large complex project.
With Agile, developers and testers can collaborate throughout all stages of the project and communicate with all the parties involved about the progress made, which in turn continuously improves the quality of product release as well as speed up time to market.
- Test early and test often
Testing and QA (quality assurance) is necessary for any app development project. However, if the testing and QA process is only performed once the project reaches the concluding stage, then it might be a little too late to fix any errors and bugs found. Things will become difficult and complicated for all the parties involved, including developers and clients. More importantly, it can increase the cost estimates of creating a mobile app.
With testing and QA performed often and in the early stage, errors and bugs will be found and corrected before they manifest themselves into bigger problems. Continuous mobile testing can help businesses avoid the extra costs through improvements at all stages of the release.
- Consider a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
A minimum viable product (MVP), in its simplest term, is basically a version of a product (mobile application in this case) containing all the core required features that constitutes the essential elements of the product. The MVP can be used to test performance as well as to gauge market reception before conducting further development for full-scale commercial release.
In the case of app development, an MVP provides numerous benefits such as lower development costs as well as helping to identify bugs and errors for product improvements before scaling for large development, which reduces further efforts as a result.
In addition, as it is cheaper and faster to develop, an MVP can help many business organizations such as start-ups to apply for funding and/or investment for actual development.
Conclusion
Mobile app development is a long and complex process that requires extensive resources and time to complete. By following at least one or more of the above methods, business organizations can turn a mobile app development project into a relatively inexpensive endeavor.
End-Note:
TP&P Technology is a top-ranked mobile app development company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Have a great app idea? Contact us today to know about our mobile development service and see how we can help effectively implement the mobile strategy required for your business.
