Categories
App Development

What makes up the price of a mobile application

Platform

The choice between iOS and Android depends on the specifics of the business and the target audience for which the eCommerce application is being developed.

There is a difference between the purchasing power of iPhone owners and other smartphone owners. The typical iPhone user earns $85,000 a year, 40% more than the typical Android user. This is reflected in spending in applications: the average check of an iPhone owner is 4 times higher. Conclusion: Your store gets more profit from Apple products.

Android has the advantage of being the world’s leading mobile operating system, reaching 74.6% of users. By making an application for Android, you reach a huge audience. But this platform has a diverse lineup, so testing and fixing bugs takes a lot of time, which is calculated in money.

By ignoring users of one of the platforms, stores lose profit. Therefore, large retailers have both Android and iOS applications. But a young business can start with just one to enter the market and attract buyers – the second platform is connected as it develops.

Design

The meaning of mobile application design is not in beautiful pictures, but in creating a comfortable and understandable interface for the user. Thoughtful design accelerates the user’s movement towards a purchase. The work of the design department consists of several stages:

First, the designer describes the user scenario: he puts himself in the place of the buyer in order to understand how it is more comfortable to interact with the application. To do this, he asks targeted questions: what does the user see when the application starts? How is it more convenient for him to view the goods? How to quickly add them to the cart? The answers to them are navigation solutions that need to be implemented in the application.

Warframing is the creation of a “frame” of the application, a grid into which design elements will be inscribed. The designer schematically depicts the location of the main blocks on the screen, thinks over the logic of transition from one screen to another, adds buttons, icons and key visual elements.

Getting started on the layout on wireframe.cc

Prototyping is the creation of a color clickable prototype, which is approved by the client. Work at this stage is carried out jointly with the developers to ensure that the prototype is fully consistent with the functional task.

It seems to many that the main thing in the application is the code. But in reality, the code only serves as fuel: it allows the application to work. The result of interaction between a person and an application depends on whether the designers managed to understand the psychology of users.

Functionality

The functionality of an eCommerce application can be divided into basic and advanced. The base includes everything that the user needs to make a purchase:

search for goods in the catalog;

adding to cart;

registration and payment of the order;

authorization of the user in the personal account.

This is the basis of an eCommerce application that you can sell with. But in order to be remembered by the buyer, you need to add advanced functionality: recommendations, reviews, gamification.

For the MVP version of your application and the first releases, the basic functionality is enough, and the killer features can be implemented later, at the stage of support and development.

Support

Platforms release updates for their products, which means that an application that was developed under iOS 13 may not display correctly on iOS 14. Such bugs prevent users from making purchases. In order for the application to continue to make a profit, you need to support it.

Approximate cost of support is 25% of the total development price. When ordering applications, keep in mind that part of the budget needs to be set aside for this stage.

Is it possible to make an Application on No-code by yourself?

Of course, noukding, like everything else, can be learned. OK Google! But there is a trap hidden here, once you get into it, you can get bogged down in your project for a very long time, and never finish it.

The trap can be called like this: “Don’t imagine yourself as a No-code developer!”.

The main misconception that you may have while reading this article is: “Yes, there is nothing difficult, it’s a constructor! I’ll sit down and figure it out myself.”

This is not entirely true: not everyone will be able to figure it out and start “no-coding” on their own. Rather, “not only everyone can figure it out, few people can do it.”

Some services have a very complex interface and feature set. For example, you definitely won’t understand Bubble if you don’t enthusiastically dig through a bunch of obscure buttons and are not ready to go through dozens of tutorials and paid courses.

But that’s not the point. The main thing is that you must be a developer by nature. This means that you need to have certain character traits and mindset.

First of all it is:

  • perseverance,
  • persistence
  • high level of learning
  • willingness to spend hours doing boring and monotonous work to correct their own mistakes,
  • fanatical dedication (combining programming with an active social life is very difficult)
  • And last but not least, talent and the level of code or nocode knowledge matters.

No-code and Low-code are indeed easier than traditional programming, but they are not elementary.

Therefore, my advice: if you do not have a sincere craving for programming, I do not recommend following the desire to “Make candy without spending anything”. It is better to turn to professional visual programming studios.

Otherwise, you are guaranteed to stall at some stage and will be forced to turn to professionals for a paid revision of your “art”.

And this refinement will cost you 1.5 times more, because the developers, you know, are not happy to delve into other people’s “Augean stables” at their standard rates.

Remember – the miser pays twice.

By ordering a product from scratch from No and Low-code development studios, you will get it faster and better than sitting down to figure it out yourself. This will allow you to direct your energy towards those business processes that you are really good at and will benefit your business.

Summary

So, I summarize!

What makes No and Low-code preferable to traditional coding:

  • Time to market speeds up – you can launch a project many times faster and make changes, receiving feedback from the market along the way.
  • Low rates of nocoders and reduced man-hours make no-code development 4 times cheaper than on code.
  • Potential financial losses are minimized in case of failure to pass the MVP stage.
  • Low-code is a flexible approach to the implementation of an IT product that allows you to resort to different product release strategies depending on current capabilities and planned results.
  • The American market of No/Low-code development sets the trend for the growth of the sphere.
  • Even large companies like Google and Amazon have already released their constructors! Is this not an indicator of the relevance of the topic.

*****

That’s all! Soon I will publish an article with a detailed description of the technical implementation of the Skyeng functional clone, the “Online School of Children’s Speech Therapy”, which we created on Bubble in 3 months, reducing the development cost from $23,000 to $3,500.

Have you heard of No-code/Low-code before? Have you met him at work? Have you ever experienced a collapse of an IT startup due to lack of funding for development? Would you order the development of your product on No-code/Low-code?

Briefly Top 5 reasons why your store needs a mobile app:

  • Mobile apps reduce your customer acquisition costs.
  • The conversion rate and LTV in applications are higher than on websites, which means that the application brings more profit.
  • Applications provide an opportunity to study user behavior in detail and test marketing strategies.
  • Thanks to the application, your store will be close to customers 24/7, and a person will be able to shop at his convenience.
  • Any smartphone user can become a client of your store – you get 4.3 billion potential buyers.