One of the first questions of the mobile applications’ customer, even at the stage of initial introduction to the concept of the application is the question “How much does a mobile application cost?”

On the one hand for us as developers, this question of “how much does it cost to develop an app” cannot be simple, especially at the moment when it is not really clear what needs to be done, not to mention the well-documented requirements and done criteria.

On the other hand – the question is pertinent. Let the answer is approximate, but it will make it clear whether it is worth venturing the work, whether prospective customer profits from this product are comparable to the potential cost of developing it. Thus at early stage you can stop and save your time and the client’s time and the developer’s time.

This article will help in the first place potential customers, not deeply familiar with the standard process of software development for mobile platforms, to understand the basic principles and pricing factors in this area.

To begin with we recommend to consider the very popular lately example of calculation the cost of a mobile application, published in the Darwinapps blog in the form of a visual comparison with the cost of cars. An example is, of course, rough, but fair enough and easy to understand:

And so, the app might cost as much as the car costs, depending on what you want to see as a final result. It also depends on the kind of app you want – enterprise or regular. The idea of the costs and efforts behind app development is very good for simple understanding. If you want to learn more about the difference between enterprise apps and regular apps, you might want to read blogs like this one – https://www.darwoft.com/blog/enterprise-mobile-app-development-darwoft – for clarity.

If the numbers on infographic seemed to you too big, maybe you are one of those many people who have heard of the thousands of developers from freelance sites, ready to make the applications of any complexity for just pennies. Imagine this: designers and composers create exciting things for free; Architects in a minute create a stable and extensible application framework that takes into account all your requirements, even those of which you forgot to mention; programmers with humility scribbling at night initially ingenious code; testers for a couple of taps detect and describe all defects, including problems with performance. Would you believe it?

The most amazing thing is that a lot of developers really create something for $ 3,000, and even publish it in the App Store and Google Play. If you only need something simple working, if you do not pursue quality, if you need a very trivial functional, then indeed would be reasonable to give the work to a student-programmer, who will do for you this something for very little money, for the sake of practice.

But no doubt that in harsh reality the development of qualitative, albeit small applications for mobile market – is a long, difficult and expensive process.

For companies developing mobile applications the most significant component of the cost of their services – is salaries of specialists, members of the project team, working on the project. This means that the cost of application development is directly proportional to labor costs of the project team. As it is known, the salaries of programmers, designers and testers are quite high in the market today. Ukrainian specialists are favorably stand out for customers for their very high professional level and lower wages than, for example, in the U.S. or leading countries of the EU. Consequently, the cost of developing a mobile application by Ukrainian programmers will be cheaper than, say, English, with all other conditions being equal, and the quality will be not worse.

If you look at the project through the lens of a standard software development process and the use of a project management methodology, it is possible to properly organize the cost of each phase of the project and for each type of work. But this article is not about the software development methodologies , so lets consider simplified process, and only the essential steps.

Each project must go through the concept design phase, when requirements are being produced and formalized, specifications are being developed, including application mockups, also maybe some additional research should be done to avoid technical risks. This is also the point where you consider any extra features or accessibility options you would want the app to have – text to speech conversion for your app’s content via providers like WellSaid Labs, for example. Despite the frequent misconception about the immateriality of this stage this is the most important point, on which depend the whole success of the development: the right thinking through the project will save us of labor-intensive and numerous changes in future stages, and therefore unnecessary expenditure budget. That is why we have to involve the best experts here, i.e. the most expensive, who must understand what the customer wants and explain to (to formalize and specify) developers what they need to do and how. According to the complexity and size of the project, this stage may take a week, a month, or longer. During this time, if there are any specific requirements such as implementing an AEM logger, perhaps to develop a secure app, then enlisting the help of experts may be the wisest choice. A simple start without this step is only possible if the task is completely trivial. During this and the further steps we will have to pay an amount proportionate to the period of specialists assignment and, no matter what kind of payment schema has been approved – hourly based or fixed cost: software development company will lay the calculation of man-hours in the fixed cost estimation.

The next step – is the development of graphic design. If your project is mostly graphics solutions, then this most creative stage will be the most difficult. When it is hard to understand why everything is being done so slowly, when there are many disagreements about the solutions, many of which being redesigned, many being approved a long while. The cost of the graphic designers for mobile applications is slightly higher than of the web designers, but lower than of the programmers, for example. The cost of this phase may be small, if you decide to use the standard controls in the main, if there are not a lot of graphics in the app, such in case when the application is composed of a small number of screens and these screens don’t have much differences from each other. Otherwise – the cost increases.

Coding. Usually (there are exceptions) the longest stage. Mobile developers are expensive specialists. Price is high, depending on the complexity. How to understand how much this phase will cost for your particular application? This will be estimated by developers who, after having received the specification of the conceptual design phase, will be able to evaluate their tasks with a good degree of accuracy. We recommend to prepare the largest budget exactly for this stage, especially if the project is not easy and unforeseen technical difficulties are possible.

Separate important point for this phase is integration with server-side, if provided. Often a lot of time is spent on debugging the application work with the server. For developer is very difficult to foresee problems in this part, problems appear almost always. By the way, if the project involves the backend, admin panel, etc., then of course it is another part of the additional cost.

Testing. QA specialists are the cheapest resources, but only in comparison, for example with the programmers. It’s not just users who are trying to test the just-written application, they have special knowledges, they are using different research methods and approaches, they are experts in search of defects and inconsistencies.

On average, the testing process can last 30% of the time spent on coding. It should be understood that the testing phase is also a stage of bugs fixing, which also involves programmers.

Support – post-release support for the project, which includes the improvements and bug fixing. Do not confuse with the warranty period, when all fixes are made for free. The interesting thing is that you have to realize that you have to pay even for inaction or rather waiting for change requests for support team. And this is justified, because the time of professionals is money, nevertheless they do something or just wait for the tasks, they have to be paid salaries in any cases. Why can not they do other work while waiting for change requests? They can, but then you have to wait until they finish that another job before they can start your very urgent matter. So, decide for yourself what kind of support you need, for how long and under what conditions, and negotiate with the developer company. But it is better to raise the issue before the project commencement.

On top of that the customer should keep in mind a wider range of costs in accordance with his business plans and strategies.

Obviously the budget will be needed to bring product to market: advertising company, and everything that can be connected with it, the creation and support of multiple versions (for example, free and paid, for different segments of the market), the collection and analysis of analytical data, customer assistance, periodic application updates. How much money will it take to marketing – a topic for another conversation, but it is important to understand that mobile application, even if it is very good, can easily get lost and “die” without marketing events among millions of other applications.

Finally, we can give some useful advices that can help customers plan their expenditure on mobile application:

The development of each mobile project is unique and demands to itself the creative approach. So it is impossible to determine in advance exactly how much the service costs for the development of the mobile application. But it is not worth saving on mobile applications, if you do decide to do it and implement your business plans. It is important to get a good, comfortable, functional application that will appeal to and be useful for users. It is better to not to do it at all than to make an application that can alienate customers, create to them a negative experience with your company.

Rockwolf team is always happy to give you a free preliminary estimate of your mobile application and advise the best solutions. And when we agree – to implement your mobile plans and dreams for reasonable money with the best quality and on time.

You create a business application, mobile software for corporate clients or want to use a purely marketing potential of the smartphone. Which platform do you choose? Perhaps the decision should be made until the development is not started?

Try to answer the following questions:

• Is there really a great need for your business in a mobile application?
• Where will you find the users of application?
• What resources are required for the development of your application and how much of them are already available?
• The application must be complex or simple?
• Is it likely that your application will be blocked by the platform?

During the development and launching of the application, you have to juggle these restrictions to try to create the best mobile strategy for your company. Also, if you want to understand whether a mobile application or other business changes could benefit your customers more, you can do market research as well. Look for tools or research methods such as MaxDiff Analysis to acquire analytic data and make decisions accordingly that would profit your and your clients, both.

Commersial iOS

The obvious choice seems to be Apple iOS, but that’s not quite true. Of course, Apple has a single platform that works across all product lines iPhone and iPad. But what if your business and Apple’s vision for your business – bipolar things? You will not know if the application you are developing will get to the AppStore until it is fully debugged and represented the company censors. If the application suddenly does not cater some of Apple’s qualities so that Apple does not want to put it in its shop, you will lose the investment in the development, because according to the contract between you and Apple, application distribution bypassing the App Store is prohibited.

Defragmented Android

The idea which wasn’t taken on iOS can be implemented on Android. Vendors of applications for this mobile OS has more flexibility. But, look at the comments to programs in the store Google Play, and you will find a long list of complaints kind of “this software works on the first device, it slows down on the second one, and on the third one does not start at all.”

Then focus on a number of identical or more common among the circle of potential users of Android-devices. For example, Amazon Kindle Fire. There will be many options of your application to customize for each device, adjust it under a smartphone or tablet. This will make the application fully compatible with the device group.

Weak competitors

iOS and Android platforms are followed by Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and once-popular Symbian, and also less well-known operating systems. All of them have a small share of the market, and this is the main factor not to develop versions for these platforms.

Despite the fact that Microsoft is investing heavily in the development of Windows Phone, the popularity of this platform still far behind iOS and Android.

HTML5 as universal tool

HTML5-applications running on browsers compatible with this language, positioning themselves as cross-platform. The idea is that they should work on any platform that supports web standards. Despite this, the exception to the rule does exist. Even large corporations are not always able to cope with the problem of optimization of the application. For example, HTML5-app Facebook criticized for slow loading pages.

In our experience and according to our experts, such flaws of cross-platform solutions should be distinguished:

• Extremely poor performance
• Not all phone features available for application
• Html 5 frameworks have limitations

And yet, we can assume that the technology for its strategy works fine. If you need to develop something simple and feasible within the limitations of HTML5 for both platforms. Also, if Apple closed the AppStore’s door in front of you, you can still create an application for HTML 5 for clients of your business.

But before deciding on HTML5 and, for example PhoneGap framework, look in the browser search bar for phrase “PhoneGap vs Native”.

Rockwolf Company often advises its customers to create two Native applications: one for Android and one for iOS in parallel or in series, first Android, and then iOS because of the greater flexibility of Android. When developing in series you first run-in the main functionality in a single platform, and for the second platform develop already using some experience.

It is also important to understand that each platform has its own standards and requirements for UI (Android UI, iOS UI). So do not think that having developed graphics for one platform, you do not have to separately develop the same for the other platform. It is sufficient to list a variety of screen sizes Android smartphones and rigorous selection iOS apps in AppStore.

So, let’s list the advantages of both the most popular and notable platforms.

Advantages of Android:

1. The largest database of users
   IOS and Android ecosystems are huge, however, numerous studies show that the Android platform is still superior to iOS in size and is growing much faster. Recently the company Nielsen, a global leader in consumer behavior research, presented a report, according to which the share of Android in the mobile market is 48.5%, while the share of iOS – 32%. In addition, the company NPD Group, engaged in market research, published a study according to which 60% of the devices sold in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2012, are a family of Android. The share of iOS accounted for 29%. According to statistics from Google, daily activates 850,000 new Android-devices
2. Advantages of “sleeping area”
   In some way Android is similar to the accommodation in a residential area – not in great demand with the public, but a great opportunity for quick-witted first buyers. Compare with the desired, but very expensive real estate on the iOS. Company Xyologic, dedicated to research applications, says that breaking into the top hundred iOS-applications is becoming more complex. “We see that in the last 5 months activity of production applications for iOS has decreased. We keep tracking several key indicators, particularly the number of new applications, caught the top hundred. “Google Play, by contrast, shows a steady increase. Xyologic reports that in March 2012, the volume of downloads of all the top 25 free applications exceeded the same positions in the iOS.

   According to statistics from Google, daily activates 850,000 new Android-devices.

   Perhaps the reason is that Android offers options for exploring applications, which helps new applications to win the market.
3. Full search functionality
   Often the Apple App Store and Google Play function as search engines for mobile applications. IOS search capabilities are limited – marketers cannot see users’ requests to increase the number of downloads of the application. Therefore, great importance gets the application rating, which is reflected in the value of market research. To achieve top line ranking competitors can apply large budgets, in the hope that advertising will pay for the costs.
   Google Play conversely provides full-text search, facilitating the users to select a specific application. This structural difference determines the behavior of users. Ratings are less influenced by the number of people involved. Research by Fiksu shows that 80% of users find the application Google play through search without searching through the shop.
   Also, the marketers have access to the statistics of peak requests. With it, they optimize the title and description, and even change the application settings. In general, search capabilities provide a little-known Google Play applications and brand additional funds in the fight for new users.
4. Lower costs to attract users
   The days when the written application was distributed by itself have passed. The success of the application is now provided with promotion and marketing opportunities. In a less saturated market, Google Play has an advantage – a lower cost of attracting users. Moreover, incorporating digital marketing strategies through SEO services can also target potential customers. Fiksu recently conducted an analysis of the available advertising media, which showed that the advertising possibilities of Android instruments exceed iOS by 12%. And since large shipments involve a discount price, these advertising services were 40% lower than the iOS service.
5. Fewer problems with confidentiality
   In recent months, the government and the press significantly increased control over the observance of confidentiality. Long used by the iOS method of marketing attribution was based on the Unique Device Identifier (UDID). This is a device ID, which is widely perceived as the digital equivalent of a social security number. Apple’s recent attempts to deviate from this principle has caused confusion in the market of iOS. As a result, marketers use many third-party solutions, each with its own pros and cons, which leads to fragmentation of the advertising market of iOS. This uncertainty forces developers to consider.
   Android provides a standard mechanism for marketing attribution. It is understandable and consistent with generally accepted practices that marketers use the last 15 years. Android automatically downloads the information requested and anonymously tracks the download source. Simple and transparent solution.
6. Highly accurate methods of marketing attribution
   Marketing attribution in iOS uses several methods that tend to require matching user data in the databases of advertisers and marketing firms like Epsilon (go to this website to know more). This principle of organization can lead to errors and inconsistencies. In particular, there may appear an overlap of users conversions so that the same conversion will be counted by multiple sources of traffic. Android uses a serial mechanism of marketing attribution.
7. Agility, Fast Turnaround – Ideal testing ground
   In a rapidly developing market of applications, the ability to adapt quickly is extremely valuable. Google Play created the perfect environment for the development of applications: Developers can quickly respond to feedback and literally in a few hours update the application to Google Play. For comparison, the process of checking the application in Apple App Store often takes more than a week, and if you are having problems the application should be re-tested. Such delays and lack of confidence in the result may create serious problems in the design. For developers who plan to refine their applications through rapid feedback and frequent updates using tools such as feature toggle, Google Play could be an ideal testing ground.
8. Acquisition of various skills
   With the rapid deployment of applications in Google Play and lower advertising costs Developers can learn from Android, for example, the rapid deployment of applications and reduce advertising costs. Wednesday Android allows you to test and refine the application, so that later you will be able to apply the skills learned in developing and deploying iOS-applications with a high chance of success.
9. Rank by better reflecting the preferences of users
   Application rating is considered the main factor in the growth of users. Google Play and iOS use different methods to define it. To determine the iOS rating great importance has the application downloads. Ranking of applications that do not often downloaded by users, quickly falls. The algorithm for calculating the Google rating works quite differently. Applications rating will increase as the date of its storage on the device.
10. Better monetization
    Research by Fiksu showed that the number of Android users, ready to pay for the application roughly equivalent, and sometimes higher than the same iOS indicator. So that the proper identification of target groups can expect equally good results.
    Of course, the monetization of Google Play is of concern – published reports estimate the monetization scheme, used in iOS, higher. However, it should be noted that the gap is rapidly shrinking. The company Flurry, perhaps, the principal investigator of the issue, said that the main reason for shrinking the gap is to use the mechanism of payment. Flurry and other experts predict improvement after integration Google Wallet and Google Checkout services. This improvement seems to have begun. The company Distimo, dedicated to research in the field of mobile applications, announces 80% increase in average daily revenue for the top 200 applications in the U.S. for the period from December 2011 to March 2012. Moreover, in its article Treat Android as a first-class citizen … it’ll pay off! developer company of games TinyCo said that indicator ARPPU (average users payment amount) in Google Play and iTunes approximately complies with the iOS indicator, as well as noted that the performance of Amazon significantly exceeded the similar indicator of iOS
    An additional reason: An easier transition to the Amazon Store
    Amazon app store is running on Android, which simplifies the process of verifying the application. Noteworthy recent study demonstrating that users are more willing to buy the Amazon store applications than users of the AppStore and Google Play.

Lets now consider iOS.

1. Indissoluble connection of the operating system and device
   It seems that this feature is a great disadvantage, and at the same time a step up. Applications are developed just under one device with certain characteristics (iPhone, iPad, including the iPod touch). Thus, users will not experience glitches and hardware problems such as incompatibility.
2. Battery
   Android users believe that their platform is not fully debugged in terms of using battery power. It is known, when working Android drains the battery very quickly. To manage the process special tricks should be treated at a cost of considerable time. iPhone users know exactly how much their device lives. There are definitely no problems with charging “apple” products.
3. Proper multitasking
   IOS platform differs by successfully implemented multitasking. Without any difficulties an utility can be minimized and maximized. The most important thing is that the minimized programs have no effect on the operating system and do not reduce the battery life. Another huge advantage is the fact that each active process is easy to close in a few movements.
4. Comfortable work with wireless tools
   In iOS access to the network via Wi-Fi is used. Therefore, the device without outside help determine what to turn on. When there is no Wi-Fi nearby, mobile technology of transferring data turns on, and turns off automatically when it is not in use.
5. Easy to learn
   iPhone smartphones and iPad tablets work well “out of the box.”
   You purchase a certain device, open up and start to use it. Additionally, you can install the required application. All this makes it very easy and understandable. Even a novice user can understand how to use the device. And, of course, what Apple does best of all is user interfaces. In interfaces Apple is apart from the competition.
6. The lack of fragmentation
   At least in comparison to Android. Now there are not lots of iOS-based device, they are all manufactured by Apple. A bit more screen sizes have appeared after the iPad mini and iPhone 5, but it still not such a great problem as in the situation with Android
7. Large user base
   All of these benefits in fact are benefits to the users who buy devices on iOS platform, thus ensuring the stability of the large number of potential users of your application written for this platform. Owners of Apple devices say that having an iPhone or iPad is prestigious, nice and comfortable. Device market with the iPhone OS is growing.
   

   it is much easier for iOS users to spend money in order to purchase your program.

8. Qualitative users
   Apple is expensive. Devices based on iOS are not bought by the poor people, so that it is much easier for iOS users to spend money in order to purchase your program.
9. Closed Platform
   This is not only disadvantage, but also the advantage of a higher level of security (in theory). Also, nothing interfere with the desire to turn a closed system in the open (again, in theory).

Conclusion

Conventional wisdom is that to create a successful mobile application developers must write the first under iOS, and then on Android can now be considered invalid. The situation has changed. Android offers developers a great proving ground for testing applications for polishing and refining. The lower cost of attracting users, the largest user base and an improved scheme of monetizing applications – good arguments in favor of creating a strong business on Android, and then using the acquired skills to iOS, which is still the other half of the users, the quality users that are willing to pay for applications (of course for the good ones).

Of course, there cannot be a generic approach to selecting a platform. Consult with experts in developing mobile solutions who will prompt for every business with its specific objectives the best strategy to gain mobile market.