As we all know that 70% of users prefer to use the mobile application rather than a traditional website. majority of the business owners are looking to develop a mobile application for their business to reach a large audience and expand their business.

It is forecasted that the number of mobile app users would be 4.78 billion by 2020 (as per statista). You might not be aware but there are a lot of factors that affect the cost of mobile application development.

So, are you planning to consider the development of a mobile application for your business/idea?

Well, that’s a great thought to make a global presence of your business/idea. However, there are several key factors that directly affect the cost of mobile app development. You must be thinking, “Factors! What factors and how would it affect?”

Let’s check them out in this blog.

1. Development framework

The first and foremost factor that affects on the estimation is the development platform you select for your mobile application, i.e. Native application and Cross-platform application.

Native applications are the best choice when you’re looking to develop a heavy, data-centric application with the optimized performance, best user experience and want the access to the native device functionalities.

Native applications are expensive as they are developed individually for every single platform considering the specific operating system. Hence, they require specialized resources for that specific platform to implement that concept. Native applications are best choice for the business applications and industry-specific enterprise application.

Cross-platform applications require same piece of code to run on multiple devices hence, they costs less as compared to the native applications but at the same time, these apps has limited access to the device features, scalability issues and have dull user experience as compared to the native applications. As the single piece of code runs of multiple devices, it requires less resources and hence, it costs you less. Cross-platform applications are best choice for the small applications, chat applications and utility applications.

2.Target platforms

If you want to avail your application to the multiple operating system then it will surely affect your budget.

So, the more platforms and version support you want, the more you need to pay, since the operating systems keeps on updating frequently, a developer needs to provide the application support with the last 4-6 versions to make it available to large audiences.

3.UI design

The most important portion of the application is its visual appearance and the more user friendly and intuitive the design is the better user experience it will provide. Here, you can select between predefined design themes, designs with minimal visuals and maximum visuals to reduce the designing cost of application.

4.Features of application

This is the another criteria that affects your pocket in terms of cost of mobile application. The more features, security aspects and complexity your concept will have, the more time it will take to get it completed and hence, it would cost you more.

For example, if you’re developing an application for a marketplace then it would require complex payment system with the escrow features and security aspects as well which takes more time to be developed and it increases the cost.

5.Testing maintenance & app updates

This procedure is followed after the application development is completed. Once the development is completed, QA engineer needs to test the application to ensure that the functionalities of applications are working exactly same as defined in the project scope.

Along with that, the performance needs to be monitored to ensure that the application have great request response ratio when exchanging the information with the server.

Also, by the time, new updates in Operating Systems are introduced, the application needs to be updated to make it compatible with the latest OS updates and it exceeds the costs of application development.

6.API and CRM integration

While developing a complex mobile application, it is required to integrate various 3rd party API and some complex CRM to manage the functions. Like if you’re developing a complex application similar to UBER then you will need to integrate a CRM and develop an API which frequently checks the location of user, updates in the database, manage the user information and lot of other stuffs. So, in that case, integration of CRM would be helpful since, it saves the time to manage the details. However, you need to pay a subscription charge for that on a monthly / quarterly / half-yearly / yearly basis.

7.Resources

The more complex application concept you’re looking to develop, the more resources you will need. Some complex applications like enterprise applications take more than 6 months or a year to be completed and during development, it requires some complex API and features needs to be developed which can be developed by the highly experienced resources which will cost you more.

8.Hourly rate

The hourly rate varies based on the experience of a developer, geography of developer, rare technology expert etc.

The highly experienced developer you select the high hourly rate you will have to pay. Like 2+ years of experienced developer charges $$ and 4+ years of experienced developer charges $$$.

Along with that, the geography of developer matter a lot. For example, if you select a highly experienced software developer from USA then he/she will charge USD 220 – USD 250 per hour whereas the the same level of experience developer in India will cost you between USD 60 – USD 80.

If you’re using some rare or newly growing technology then it’s tough to find a ninja developer for your project and due to lack of resources, the specific developer charges you a big amount for your project.

I hope that above-shared factor will give you a clear picture of why any company is charging high / low as compared to other company.

Contributed byhttps://www.techuz.com/