How Difficult Is It to Create an App?

Introduction

How hard is it to create an app? This is a question we get asked a lot, but there’s no easy way to answer it. Various apps serve as a frontend to powerful databases and backend systems, designed over decades to overcome the most complex problems in science, math, and business. The team “application” covers a lot of ground, from complex feats of technological wizardry to unbelievable simple gadgets.

Over the last decade, the blogs have mentioned hundreds of app startups that have popped up from nowhere and sold for billions after a few months. After reading so many articles on building a successful app startup almost seems… Well, easy. But the media doesn’t mention the obstacles and challenges that you’ll have to face to develop an app.

There are very few business ventures who think of functioning without a mobile app because it enables businesses to develop apps that are scalable and accessible on multiple platforms. Mobile application testing is important to build software by testing it for its functionality, consistency, and usability that provides the same experience across various devices. According to Transparency Market Research, the adoption of test automation is expected to increase in mobile applications shortly.

In this post, we’ll discuss what it takes to create a real app and finally answer the question — how hard is it to make an app? So, without any further ado, let’s get started!

Defining The Objective and Determining How Realistic It Is

It is not just the complexity of the app that identifies the difficulty, but also the end product you have in mind. Putting together a usable mobile or web app prototype is one thing and creating a customer-ready and multi-platform app is another.

Let’s discuss the 4 main phases of the app development process:

Phase 1: Pre-planning and research

The first step is to define big picture concepts such as the purpose of the app, platform, your target market, and your revenue model. You should also identify your competitors’ offerings and other relevant topics.

Phase 2: Mental Prototyping or Sketching

Now you can start to create a plan of how your app will work. It includes whiteboarding the app, analyzing major design elements, and user flow.

Phase 3: Assessment of Technical Feasibility

Every app has complex technical requirements which you need to look into the backend system and make sure they can feasibly support the functionality that you’re trying to provide.

Phase 4: Prototyping

Lastly, prototyping. You create a proof of concept model to refine and test your concept depending on how you’re going about prototyping your app. Few prototyping tools are closer to visual models rather than the actual working prototypes. It shows how an app is laid out containing decent animations, but you can’t interact with them like an actual app user.

Things get complicated after prototyping. There is design and development work, coding, testing, and launch. It takes at least 12 to 17 weeks and requires a sizable development team depending on what you’re building.

Major Skills Required to Create an App

Building a high-quality and innovative app requires some technical training. Here are some skills that a developer must have to create a robust and reliable app:

1. Agile Methodologies and Scrum Management

To become successful in mobile app development, you must follow the Agile development practices consisting of a set of rapid design, build, and release events. It is the best fit for the fast-paced mobile industry, where modern technologies come and go as quickly as a single product life cycle.

Scrum Management helps to manage these projects and is suitable for highly cross-functional mobile development teams. It enables greater unity between clients and developers, with aggressive communication schedules and frequent reviews.

2. Backend Computing

Backend computing consists of:

• Implementation of memory allocation
• Security
• Hardware interaction
• Database management

3. Effective Communication

Agile and Scrum management requires vigorous corroboration between you and the app development team. For building an innovative and cross-functional app, every team member must be on the same page and it is possible through clear and effective communication — both in speech and writing.

4. Cross-Platform Capabilities

Whether you’re planning to develop an Android, iOS, or Web app, any successful app needs to be ported into the other two. Native apps coding for one platform has the drawbacks of making the transfer to other platforms which is a challenging task. In some cases, it requires a completely different team of software engineers. So, it is important to have your app development team having cross-platform capabilities.

5. Modern Coding Languages

As we all know, mobile is the technology of the future and you don’t want your developer to still code in the past. Before hiring a developer, make sure they are aware of the latest coding languages required for mobile app development such as Java, C, C++, Objective-C, C#, and HTML5.

App Development: Many Platforms To Serve

Web app development and mobile app development are significantly different from one another. When you create an app for mobile phones, you have to consider the variety of devices and screen sizes in the market. Whereas in web app development, the devices generally have a standard screen size in which your website can work well.

For mobile app development, there are two most popular platforms: iOS and Android. That is why many developers often find it more difficult than web development.

A developer has to make sure that the app works on all devices, and their functionality is not affected when the device is changed. The development process is challenging and requires expertise in modern technology and tools to build everything from scratch to make it compatible with each platform.

Choosing the Right-Market Fit App

After proper testing, when you launch the app, you’re not competing against other apps but you are actually competing with millions of apps available in the App Store. In the competition, every app is fighting to be featured and wants to be the king of its category, but that’s not easy. The clearer you’re about what market would benefit the most from your app, the better you’ll be at getting it in front of them and convincing users to download it.

Choose one market to begin. Even if you think that the solution has the potential to serve several markets, your marketing budget will likely be limited; so it’s much better to pay attention to your initial efforts on the market where you can be most effective.

Research the market, identify your competitors, speak to consumers and collect their feedback whenever possible. Find out your competitors’ pain points, identify their challenges and the qualities that they don’t like about competitor solutions. This will help you to serve better and more effectively you will be able to monetize them.

Hiring a Team for App Development

For every business organization, cost and budget is the main concern that comes to mind before hiring a team for app development. Why so much? Well, there’s a lot that goes into making a robust and innovative app. A traditional app development team takes at least four members, who will work for six months to get the app off the ground.

And that’s your labor. Don’t forget about legal payment to protect your project, contracts, and limit liability; software licensing fees, and other expenditures associated with the administrative side of running a business.

For instance, if you are starting to develop a free app to use in-house for your business, legal fees and accounting might not be a big factor, but still, they should be considered. For better estimation, there is a tool called How much to make an app, which will generate a rough costing estimate for you.

Another useful way of investigating costs is to research companies that are developing similar products and see how much first-round investment capital they’re asking for, by doing this you’ll get a clear idea about the app development cost.

Conclusion

To conclude, launching an app is a challenging task and it certainly requires various operations during the development process. Although many app ideas will fail on their journey and a few will survive. And to be part of those few, you have to search for the best software development company that offers expertise in various technologies and builds cutting-edge applications for your business.