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App Development

What exactly is involved in creating an application?

The most frequently asked question by our clients. They want to know how much money and time will be required from them, how the work is built, where to start and how to earn money as a result, not lose it.

This important question, which cannot be answered in a nutshell, inspired us to publish this series of articles. They will not contain vague advice from the series “how to make an application: three easy steps.” But there will be the experience gained by Winfox over more than five years of work in the mobile development market, examples from practice and a guide to action.

How much does development cost

The cost depends on the type of application and the complexity of the work. There are two types.

Standard solution

For most ordinary tasks, there are standard solutions. If you need an app for a beauty salon, barbershop, or delivery service, there’s no point in building one from scratch. It is cheaper and more convenient to take a ready-made template, change the color scheme, fill it with content, add a logo – and you will have your own application. An example of such a solution from our portfolio is White&Smile.

For whom: mostly small businesses: service companies, restaurants, food delivery services, online stores with bonus programs.

Pros:

  • low cost;
  • speed of development.

Minuses:

  • not custom design;
  • you can not add new functionality;
  • sometimes it is necessary to pay the owner of a standard solution a percentage of orders or a fixed monthly fee;
  • all data you collect through your application belongs to the third party owner of the generic solution. It is not safe.

Cost: from 150 thousand per platform (iOS, Android).

Development time: from 20 working days.

Application from scratch

Some tasks are so complex and non-standard that there is no universal template or constructor for them. In this case, we make a mobile application from scratch: we conduct a business analysis based on data from the customer, prepare a technical task, describe user stories, and make prototypes. Examples of such applications from the portfolio of our studio: 1HonestCar, Elzhur.

For whom: startups who want to try out a new business model, corporations and manufacturing enterprises who want to automate business processes (accounting, dispatching, data visualization), auto business, state-owned enterprises.

Pros:

  • individual design;
  • solving user problems of any complexity;
  • full adaptation to the needs of the customer.

Minuses :

  • complex development process;
  • long development time;
  • high price.

Cost: from 600-800 thousand

Development time: from 2 months.

How to save

There are several ways to cut the budget without sacrificing product quality.

Focus on the main function

Refuse additional features and do not add everything that is possible to the application. This will confuse the user, and you will waste money.

Most often, we suggest clients to abandon a large number of screens, not to fasten video and audio processing in real time and not to add tools for working with augmented reality, if this is not the main feature of the service.

How much you can save: up to 50% of the cost of the stage.

Follow the guidelines

No need to come up with your own unique design, trying to surprise everyone. It is more logical to follow the guidelines from Apple and Google. The designers of these companies have already made recommendations on how the application should look so that it is convenient and understandable for users. You just have to put this guide into practice using the recommended fonts, interface elements, transitions, animations.

How much you can save: up to 100% of the cost of the stage.

Optimize user scenarios

Ideally, when a user can do what he downloaded the application for, in a couple of clicks. If he needs to do a lot of actions to complete the target action, this is bad. And for you, as a customer, it will be cheaper to draw three screens instead of seven. To do so, pay special attention to the design stage, try to reduce the number of screens and make the service user-friendly.

Imagine that you are building a house and violated the technology at the stage of pouring the foundation. If you caught yourself in time, it will not take much money and time to redo everything. But if you have already erected walls and laid a roof, and the house suddenly squinted, you will have to demolish it and rebuild it. As a result, you pay for two houses and get one.

Making an app is like building a house. It is better to think over user scenarios in advance and fix everything at the design stage than to rework the finished design and pay for the work a second time.

Application of mobile applications

Construction

For construction companies and developers, a mobile application is a way to retain customers and bring them to a purchase.

Usually. The developer began to build a new residential complex – he needs to sell the apartments, and preferably as soon as possible. He makes a landing page, spends a couple of million on context, gets some very expensive leads and works with them on the phone. People are not ready to buy an apartment right away, they need to be periodically reminded of themselves, coming up with more and more effective ways than calling a call center.

In mobile. Together with the landing, you can make an application. When the user installs it, the developer will constantly be in touch with him. The company will be able to send push notifications at a discount, invite them to view the apartment, and show video from webcams at the construction site. And it will also be able to analyze how the user reacts to messages – and make them more unobtrusive and useful. Potential buyers will like this approach more than talking to a manager.

Industry

Enterprises use mobile applications for dispatching and operational control so that employees can remotely manage the engineering systems of one or more objects.

Usually. The chief electrician at the plant needs to understand when to carry out scheduled repairs of electrical panels in different workshops. To do this, he needs to communicate with his subordinates, collect data from them about the devices and enter them into a computer program so that it calculates the optimal start date for work.

In mobile. Employees on the shop floor use the app to keep electrical panel information up to date. Through the application, they scan the code of the shield, marking the date of work and fixing what exactly was repaired. This data is stored on an enterprise server or in the cloud and can be viewed in a single report. It is enough for the chief electrician to open it in the accounting program or on a smartphone to find out about the status of all the shields at the plant.

Short

Companies from various fields use mobile services to solve various problems – from automating routine actions to detuning from competitors. You can follow the current trend or create your own. In any case, you need to understand what the cost of a mobile application depends on and whether it is possible to save a little on development. We will talk about this in the next article.