Developing a mobile app can be an extremely costly process, given the price of developers’ time, and the countless decisions that need to be made about the app. Should it work on one mobile operating system or many? How about compatibility with multiple screen sizes and resolutions? What coding language should be used? Read on for 4 ways to cut your mobile app development costs.
Developing a mobile app can be an extremely costly process. Here are 4 practical ways to cut mobile app development costs.
A great place to turn for advice is Robert Sheldon’s article, “Four tips for reducing mobile app development costs” on SearchMobileComputing.com. His first tip: Spend serious time designing an app before you write a line of code. That includes not just the main interface, but all the workflows, and the interface of every single screen. Work with stakeholders, and have them review the design and workflows to make sure meets their needs. No need for fine-grained detail when designing it at this early stage. You can sketch it out.
Next tip to cut mobile app development costs: focus single-mindedly only on what’s important, and leave out the rest. Sheldon puts it this way: “When building a mobile app, minimize functionality, and include only those features that are in line with the app’s main goals. The less complicated the app, the less mobile app development cost overall.” He adds, “Consider taking the minimum viable product (MVP) approach. MVP products include limited functionality but have enough to meet the app’s main goals.”
Cost cutting tip number three: target multiple mobile operating systems and types of devices, but minimize the effort you need to expend on building the app for each. And “Regardless of the development tools used, incorporate a responsive design into the app.” That way, the mobile app will look and work best on every mobile OS with every device and screen size.
Finally, he says that to cut mobile app development costs companies need to remember: “don’t reinvent the wheel.” That means using pre-written templates and similar techniques whenever possible. He also lauds the use of a rapid mobile application development (RMAD) tool, which makes it easy to build mobile apps without writing much code, or any code at all. He notes, “With RMAD, anyone can build apps using drag-and-drop operations to add different types of functionality, without writing any code, which can help reduce the mobile app development cost in the long term.”
We’d add another piece of advice to that last tip: Make sure the RMAD tool does cross-platform development. That way, you can write the app once, and deploy it to all mobile platforms and the web, without having to write any additional code.
Alpha Anywhere is one of the most highly rated RMAD tools. InfoWorld named it a top mobile app development leader and enterprises give it a perfect score on Gartner Peer Insights.
Here are more details about Alpha Anywhere’s RMAD capabilities.
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