Timeline for App Development and 5 Ways to Cut It Down

It makes logic, and you’ve probably heard this sentence a thousand times. However, have you ever considered the adage “money is time” in reverse?

The answer is straightforward: money should be time if time is money. Isn’t that correct?

We don’t know about the philosophies of the whole world, but in the context of developing mobile apps, it is accurate. In this case, time is money, and money is time. Let’s start from the beginning in order to have a better understanding.

You have a fantastic app concept, and you don’t want to wait forever for it to be released as a feature-rich app in app stores. Suppose you want to develop it. For the same, you will now need to work with a mobile app development business.

Additionally, the majority of them bill by the hour. This implies that you will be responsible for the price of each hour a developer spends creating your mobile application. That’s how it works. You will have to pay more the longer it takes.

An Ipad App Development Company creates unique iPad apps for companies that would enhance user experiences, productivity, and Apple ecosystem connectivity.

Five Elements That Will Impact Your Timeline for Developing a Mobile App

One size does not fit everyone, as you are aware. The same idea holds true when attempting to determine how long it will take to construct an application. Numerous variables influence the amount of time and money needed to develop an app, thus it is impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all estimate for all applications.

Let’s examine how your app concept connects to the following elements in order to provide you with an approximate timeframe for app development:

1. Your App’s Type

I’m sure you’ll discover a lot of app categories if you go and look them up. The majority of the millions of mobile applications that are accessible in app stores provide a variety of features and capabilities.

However, you need to know which category your app comes under in order to determine the app development duration.

Find out whether you want to create a clone or a bespoke app. Creating a bespoke application is really difficult. There are unique difficulties in creating a whole business plan for mobile devices.

However, creating clone applications is rather simpler in comparison. However, clone applications also fall into a variety of areas, including social networking, gaming, education, utilities, food delivery, music, taxi booking, and many more.

In general, it takes longer and requires more complexity to design apps that fall under categories like gaming, navigation, medical, and entertainment. Additionally, it will take less time to design apps that fall into basic categories like reading, news, or utility.

2. Your App’s Features and Functionality

The amount of features an app has is one of the key factors that determines how long it takes to build. An application takes longer to create the more features and functions it has.

For example, creating a feature in an application that gives users the best possible path takes more time than creating a conventional application that just handles material and demands the bare minimum of user experience.

An app that is straightforward and doesn’t need many features may be created in two to four weeks. However, the developers will invest effort in creating your software if it needs the following features:

Push Alerts
Remittance
Integration of Social Media
Verification
Tracking Geolocation
Search Features
Audio and Video Calls
Combining Wearable Technology

You must integrate your app with other services, APIs, and third-party tools in order to use the aforementioned functionality. Additionally, putting these tools and services into practice takes more time and effort to comprehend their complexities. If your developers are not familiar with these functionalities, it might often take longer than anticipated.

For instance, creating an app similar to Uber that needs almost all of the aforementioned capabilities (apart from audio and video conversations and wearable connectivity) would take longer than creating a straightforward news app.

In addition to these features, it will take a lot of time to build up algorithms for your app if it has to include cutting-edge technology like AR/VR, AI, chatbots, or machine learning. The development of these kinds of applications often takes four to five months.

3. The platform that you are creating

Android or iOS?

When creating an app, many people are plagued by this question. Building for both of these platforms is quite costly and time-consuming, so picking only one is certainly not a smart choice. Both platforms have a sizable user base, and losing out on one of them results in less visibility.

Two teams—one of iOS developers and another of Android developers—will be needed to develop for both platforms since their technological, third-party tool, and programming language requirements vary.

Because Android requires more optimization work and works on a wider range of devices, iOS development often takes less time. To put it simply, developing an Android application will take you around 20–30% longer than creating an iOS application.

A Taxi Booking App Development Company works on making strategies that make ride-hailing easier and more feasible. These solutions include real-time tracking, safe payment choices, and changing prices to meet market needs.

4. The Idea of Your App Is Clear

Every popular app started as an idea. However, you must make sure that your concept turns into a clear solution that will benefit your consumers before you begin to create it or choose a suitable app development timeframe.

Who stands to gain from it? What would someone use this for? How will consumers’ lives be made easier by this application? What issues will it resolve? Your app will take a long time to create and it will be difficult to discover a purpose if all of your responses are random.

For instance, social network integration is a useful feature to have in a taxi app if you’re creating one so that consumers may register with just a touch. However, adding news feeds allowing users to share their riding experiences with their friends would be a pointless addition that will clutter your app.

In addition to being superfluous, these features will defeat the objective of your program. Additionally, you will turn what was once a fantastic software into a complete mess if your goal isn’t clear before you begin development.

Developing it will not only take years, but it will also cost you a lot of money. Therefore, while creating an app, keep your focus and save time and money.

5. Who’s Creating It?

Creating a mobile application is not a simple task. That cannot be accomplished by one person alone. You will need a team of developers with specialized knowledge in many fields if you want to create a successful app.

Now, you have the following choices to acquire that team:

Hire a group of devs internally.
Employ independent contractors to collaborate with you virtually.
Contract out an app development company’s services

You may believe that employing independent contractors is a very tempting choice, and many companies do just that. However, data show that 80% of businesses have problems when working with freelancers, including concerns with availability, response time, language hurdles, and sometimes even quality.

These problems therefore cause project deliveries to be delayed, and you may never be able to release your software at the designated times. However, if you are just starting out in the mobile space, hiring an in-house team of developers may be a little costly, but it will undoubtedly speed up the process of developing and releasing your app.

Hiring an app development firm is the third choice, and it’s neither a cheap nor a costly one. Hiring a trustworthy group of app developers will also ensure that your project is delivered on time and with respectable quality. In order to create an app that satisfies your goals and deadlines, it is thus ideal to outsource your project.

Let’s examine the mobile app development process that developers use and how it affects the response to the query, “How long does it take to develop an app?” now that we are aware of all the variables that affect the timetable.

Phases, Timeline, and Process of Mobile App Development

Before beginning development, a great deal of research, critical thinking, and market analysis are needed for mobile applications. Regardless of the development approach you choose, the fundamental stages of creating an app and the amount of time required for each are as follows:

Step 1: Making a plan

Planning around the business strategy your app will use is what this step entails. Everything pertaining to your app will be decided at this stage, including its feature set, revenue model, tech stack, competition analysis, and best practices that may help you save time and money throughout development.

Here, you need to be well-versed on your market and potential customers. This phase, which is also known as app concept validation, may take anywhere from 15 to 20 days if you are working with professionals.

Step 2: Designing UI/UX

Successful App = Outstanding UI + Smooth UX.

This is the most important rule of thumb when creating a successful mobile application. But adhering to it is not simple. To produce an application that is perfectly user-friendly, a great deal of planning, organizing, designing, and testing must be done.

And none of this ever occurs in a flash. It takes time to achieve great things.

Your designer will need to create user personas, organize the UI wireframe and task list, create mockups, and divide the feedback into sprints so that they may be revised. An application may take one to two months to finish this phase, and only then can you go to the development stage, when the real magic occurs.

Step 3: Development of the Backend

As the name implies, back-end development is concerned with the intricate logic that underlies an application, as well as performance, data management, and storage. In essence, it entails the following duties:

Server-Side Logics: To specify the tasks that the application server does.
Designing the databases that support the application is part of the data storage setup.

Push Notifications: This feature enables the server to communicate with the user interface via push notifications.

Data integration: To facilitate data sharing across several resources, especially those from external parties.

User maintenance: It outlines the procedures for security policy, profile maintenance, and user authentication.

Versioning is the process that enables back-end developers to work on the subsequent section of an application without affecting the prior one.

You will have a finished backend architecture at the conclusion of this phase, which will support the functionality of your app. Depending on the functionality and design of the app, backend development—one of the trickiest aspects of app development—takes two to three months.

You may begin working on frontend development concurrently after backend developers have a firm grasp of an application’s design and operation.

An App Development Company In Boston  occupies the city’s instructional and tech tools to create sophisticated mobile solutions for businesses in schools, healthcare, and finance. These solutions use custom features and the most recent technologies.

Step 4: Development for iOS and Android

At this point, you will have a functional application prototype that you can use to test the user experience and get user input. However, the front-end code will need to be written by your engineers.

The majority of the development time is spent on this stage, which typically takes three months. The architecture developed by UI designers and backend developers serves as the framework for the interface and is followed by front-end developers. Therefore, in order to prevent errors and rework later on, communication between the two teams throughout the development stage is crucial.

Step 5: Examination

Unit testing, functional testing, integration testing, and bug fixing are some of the test types that should be included in the testing phase to guarantee the quality of your software. Your beta testing phase shouldn’t take more than two weeks if you have properly tested your app’s alpha version. The application gets launched after testing.

Step 6: Implementation

The deployment of the software shouldn’t take long if everything was completed correctly in the earlier phases. All you need to do is publish your software on the software Store and Google Play Store. The remainder will be completed by your consumers downloading your app to their smartphones. Later on, however, remember to take customer input into consideration and keep utilizing it to update it.

It’s time to get started now that you are aware of the whole mobile app development process and the amount of time required for each step of the process.

But hold on. Do you want your software to be released as soon as possible and cut down on development time? To speed up the development process, you may test a few solutions, and you’ll be surprised to see that they’re also reasonably priced. Let’s investigate each of them.

Five Ways to Reduce the Time Needed to Develop a Mobile App

The aforementioned sections demonstrate that it typically takes three to four months to construct an app. However, with smartphones becoming more and more popular worldwide, it is crucial for entrepreneurs to use every opportunity to expand their businesses.

Therefore, if you’re one of those eager business owners who want to release their mobile app as soon as possible to avoid losing any current or potential clients, there are a few ways you may do it in less than a month. Let’s investigate these possibilities:

1. Try the MVP Method.

MVPs are a fantastic time-saver. By concentrating on the fundamental features of the app, they may be produced quickly. You may develop the final software based on user input and other features once the MVP is out to the market. Before the real applications were released, many major firms, like Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb, released MVPs.

2. Make Use of Hybrid Mobile Apps

Instead of generating native code for each platform separately, cross-platform app development technology allows you to target numerous platforms with a single codebase. You just need to write code once to create an app that you can release on both iOS and Android.

However, hybrid applications come with several disadvantages. High-end technologies like AR and VR cannot be integrated into cross-platform programs, and they handle animations less fluidly.

Because of this, some firms have utilized them to enter the market quickly before switching to native apps to provide a more practical answer.

3. Use outsourcing services.

You will save time and work by choosing this option. It is more effective to work with a top-notch outsourcing app development business throughout the development phase rather than assembling a team of developers internally.

If you want to develop add-ons for your goods or need to release an alternate version of your program for a different platform, the possibility becomes even more fantastic.

For instance, you might ask for outsourcing if you have iOS developers on staff and your iOS app is ready for release. This way, you can avoid making your team spend time learning a new tech stack.

4. Take a Look at White-Label Solutions

These solutions are goods made by one firm that are then renamed for use by another. Since you won’t have to start from scratch, this will help you save a significant amount of development time.

5. Use Automation to Test Your App

By doing this, you may avoid wasting time manually testing your software. Together, you can perform a series of tests using automated testing that might normally take hours to do by hand. However, this isn’t always the best option for all kinds of apps. Thus, use caution and keep in mind that the quality of your app should always come first.

That was it. You may choose from any of the aforementioned suggestions to cut down on the amount of time it takes to design your app, depending on its nature, functionality, and business goals.

Concluding

One of the many factors to take into account while developing a mobile application is the amount of time required to construct it, in addition to evaluating the requirements for the program’s features, platforms, and goal.