
// Mobile apps
Mobile App Development for your Business — How Much Does it Cost
// Mobile apps
From this article, you will learn how much the development of a mobile app for your business might cost. We’ll tell you about the average cost of app development in the market in general and the cost of each stage. In addition, we’ll specify factors, which influence the development budget – starting with developers’ average salary and ending with the cost of implementation of the most popular features.
Developers’ experience and knowledge. When it comes to hiring mobile app developers, their experience usually goes hand in hand with the cost of their work. As a rule, their salaries are as follows (for the USA):
A frontend is a user interface and other elements, which an end-user of a mobile app interacts with. Here is an example of a tech stack for the frontend:
Backend is a hardware/software part of the service responsible for the implementation of the app logic and everything that is hidden from the user’s view. I.e. it’s everything that works beyond the user’s device. Here is how a tech stack for the backend for the mobile app development may look like:
API (Application Programming Interface) is a special protocol to connect frontend to backend and integrate with external services, which expand the app’s functionalities (geotargeting, payment gateways, notifications, and the like). Here is an example of a set of APIs for app development:
The stage of development planning includes, but is not limited to:
According to Clutch, most companies spend from $5 to $15 thous. on this stage. It’s enough to implement design for 10–12 screens of the app. This money goes for the development of:
The following table demonstrates the estimated cost and time of sets of the most popular user features – from simple to advanced:
Admin panel makes mobile app development more difficult, but it’s one of the crucial elements of success for most systems. Your employees can manage the system content, orders, payments, users and their data, reports, analysis, security, and other things through this panel. Here is the estimated development time of popular features of the admin panel of a mobile app starting with simple ones and ending with advanced ones:
When calculating how much the development of a mobile app costs, you should consider the time and effort, which you have to spend on the development of business rules, the logic of app infrastructure and API interfaces for their usage. This is one of the most expensive development stages, which in terms of complexity level is exceeded only by the implementation of advanced features of users and admins.
A list of minimum essential infrastructure elements includes:
The necessary amount of time to check an app depends on the types of testing procedures, service’s purpose, its complexity, required quality, and the number of screens. Thus, according to Clutch’s survey, 32% of development companies state that they spend less than $5 thous. on app testing and 31% of agencies claim that they spend $5 to $10 thous on that.
There are the following types of app testing:
But you should bear in mind the possibility of the marketplace detecting non-compliance with the platform rules, bugs, problems of performance or incompatibility. In this case, the marketplace gives a developer little time to eliminate the detected problems (2 days in the case of Apple App). It’s 8 to 20 working hours of QA engineers or programmers more, in rare cases — 50 hours. At an average hourly rate of $65/hour, this will cost $520 to $1300, or $3250 at most in rare instances.