5 money-saving tips for businesses developing their own app
There are so many reasons why developing an app for your business is a good idea. You may be solving users’ problems with an app-based solution. You can connect with customers better through a loyalty app. You can even sell products and services – and deliver more value to the users – directly through the app.
Making the decision to develop an app is the easy part. The real challenge is making sure that the app itself is a good investment, and that it produces a good return on investment or ROI. One of the first things you want to do in this situation is to make sure that the app development cost is in check, and there are several ways you can save on your business app development.
Keep it simple
It is very tempting to add everything to the app. After all, you are trying to keep users happy with your business app, right? Well, adding every feature you can think of is not the way to keep users happy. You will end up with an app that appears cluttered and is actually less functional for the users. On top of that, you will end up spending more money than you should on an app that doesn’t convert.
Keeping the app simple and easy to use is the way to go. By limiting the number of features you add to the app, you are limiting the cost of developing the app. At the same time, you are also making sure that the app development roadmap is highly targeted based on customer feedback and what the market really wants.
Simpler apps are also easier to maintain in the long run. When the app has simple features and a simple UI, you don’t have to update the overall design every few months. The app becomes timeless and your development team can focus more on refining the app’s functionalities to keep users happy. This, once again, produces a higher return on investment.
Collaborating on development tasks
Another great way to save money on app development is by hiring external developers rather than maintaining an in-house team. Hiring developers – and collaborating allows you to leverage their experience and expertise without having to increase your overhead by a significant margin.
Other development tasks can also become collaborative tasks. Security, for instance, is something that you want to take seriously, especially when the app captures and stores user data. Rather than risking a security breach and spending a lot of money trying to develop an in-house data security team, you can strengthen the security of your app with the help of security experts.
The same is true with testing. Testing needs to be an inseparable part of the development phases, and the best way to do that is by working with an external partner capable of handling different types of testing. Global App Testing has a great article on QA manual testing, and how this type of testing can be outsourced for maximum convenience.
Code once
Ideally, you want to have native apps for both Android and iOS if you are targeting mobile users. These are the two most popular operating systems and they represent billions of users from around the world. However, you don’t have to write native codes for the two platforms. Today, there are frameworks and programming languages that are designed to be universal.
This means the development team can focus on writing codes in a single language, and then adding frameworks on top of the base code so that native apps for both platforms can be compiled. The approach doesn’t only save a lot of time but reduces the cost of developing the app too. You can also push incremental updates at a faster pace.
Coding once and using a multi-platform framework is also great for long-term sustainability. You don’t have to review two codes, test two apps, or even check security compliance twice every time you push an update. These tasks can be completely simplified and integrated with the development process. Testing before compiling is also possible in some cases.
Watch your features
We spoke about limiting the number of features added to the app and keeping the app itself simple before. This next tip digs deeper into the kind of features you want to avoid. Yes, there are features that will make developing and running the app immensely expensive in the long run, and they are worth avoiding if you don’t find them beneficial.
Push notifications, for example, are costly. You pay for every push notification you send to every user, so you may end up paying a lot of money when you have thousands – or even millions – of users loving your app. If push notification is not an essential feature for your business, you can lower your development cost by up to 30% by removing this feature alone.
The same is true with image uploads and storage. When you want users to use their camera and give image input, it is best to keep the process on the users’ side rather than on the cloud server. The cost of storing user images, purging the app’s cache, and sending feedbacks to user devices is far too big to justify for most app development projects.
Go with timeless design
Last but not least, there is the UI of the app itself. We’ve mentioned how trendy designs and complex UIs are expensive to develop, but those are not the only problem with having complex UIs. You also have to develop explainers, tutorials, and a more comprehensive onboarding wizard to get users familiar with the app’s interface.
Timeless, simple UI works best if you want to keep the cost of developing the app at a minimum. More importantly, you want a UI that doesn’t require a lot of customization. Keep everything standardized, integrate your brand elements tastefully, and make sure you design the app according to what users actually want – not what you want as the owner of the business.
Combined, these tips will help you reduce the cost of developing a business app substantially. The lower the cost of getting the app released, the higher your return on investment will be.
