How Long Does It Take To Make An App
According to the latest data, people spend around 90% of their time on mobile apps. Interestingly, the average American checks their phone 262 times a day, every 5.5 minutes. These numbers are beyond impressive! But why apps have become such an important part of our lives? Truth to be told, they have changed the way a person lives. There’s a wide array of different applications for all purposes. From common ones like Facebook which helps you communicate with friends and learn what’s new in the world to frankly weird apps like the one that says “Yo” to someone else instead of you. There are millions of mobile applications out there.
Apps serve different purposes, and it's widely believed that without a feature-rich and engaging app, a business simply can't survive. As the competition is great, it's important to deliver an application before your competitors do. In this regard, questions like "How long does it take to make an app?" have become way more common.
While there is no single answer to that question, it typically takes from 4 to 6 months to develop a decent app that can compete. Not because a team of mobile developers like ours has never built an app faster or longer, but only this much time is needed to build a good product. It also all depends on resources, the scope of an app that one wants to create, and a team's skillset.
This article will give you insight into what the development process of an app is and what factors affect the time needed to create an app.
How Much Time Does It Take To Make An App: General Factors
To have a better understanding of how long it will take you to build an app, consider the factors that influence the app development time.
The level of complexity of an app The smaller the app you want to build, the less time will be spent on designing, developing, testing, and launching. Basically, the size of the app depends on the number of features; that's why the functionality part needs to be defined in the first stage of its development. What we are trying to say here is, that if a planned app is objectively small with a few features integrated, chances are you will need less time than on average (just think of the “Yo” app we have been talking about earlier). Bigger and more complex applications, on the other hand, might take much longer.
Skills and resources available Everything is exactly as is written. You have to make calculations and make sure you have enough resources to create an app you think of. Are you a developer yourself who is searching for help with adding a few more features or mapping out a product strategy? Or are you a business owner who has an idea and needs to craft an app from scratch? These are completely different situations that require different resources and therefore timeframes.
For example, you are a small company or a start-up, and you don't have an in-house team of developers. In this case, you'll have to outsource your expertise by cooperating with an agency. Thus, you must have a budget big enough to cover all these costs. Although working with outsourcing companies is less expensive, it is more time-consuming. Or you are a huge enterprise that can hire more specialists for one project and consequently fit an app development process into tighter deadlines. As you can see, it depends.
Stages: Learn How Much Time It Takes To Create An App
To be able to establish a reasonable timeline for app development, you need to have a basic understanding of the procees. Although building an app might seem easy, don’t get fooled! There’s a lot more to this. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. So, take your time and go through each stage to have clear expectations.
The birth of an idea and thorough research As with anything else, any amazing application has had no less amazing idea first. But the thing is, what you see as “a progressive application solving tons of tasks” others might see as “another useless app wasting my phone memory”. For this reason, it is necessary to conduct thorough research before starting the app development process.
What is the purpose of the app? It is the question you are recommended to ask yourself. There are hundreds of crappy apps that are installed and instantly deleted. Of course, you don’t want to be among them. To avoid such a miserable destiny, take time and think everything to the last detail.
To begin with, figure out who might be interested in your app and how vast your target group is. Applications like Instagram are used by different people despite their age or gender. In contrast, the majority of TikTok's users are under 24 years of age.
Understand your target audience’s needs and figure out what kind of app will solve a particular problem or a market gap. Study the marketplace you want your app to be launched on, and inspect whether other applications offer the same functionalities and solutions beforehand. You can download apps similar to yours to find out whether you have something more to offer. Doing such research is time-consuming but in the long run, it will save you money and effort.
Crafting a plan Nowonce you’ve figured this out, start working on a plan.
Usually, the planning stage begins with deciding whether it will be an Android app, an iOS app, or both. Or maybe you want your app to support some other mobile operating system. A decision concerning which platform to with also depends on the target group and the resources you have. Of course, going on both platforms would be a win-win option, but it doubles the time you need to spend on development as well as doubles the costs.
Once you have that figured out, move on to the functionalities your app will have. Think of all the features you want your mobile applications to incorporate. It will take you some time since it is a rare case when an app includes just a few key features and that’s it. From primal features like login options to more complex ones like adding videos and messaging functionalities, everything has to be thought through. Here’s when UX design enters the game. It stands for user experience and implies prototyping of the future app layout to see whether or not the application will be easy to use.
Because of the scope and complexity of work that has to be done, this stage might take a few months.
Design and development Here comes the most difficult and time-consuming stage of app development. We’re talking about the actual process of development that includes the work of UI designers, Front-end, and Back-end developers. Being determined by the overall complexity of the app, this stage might take more than a month or two.
Once UX designers deal with your app’s functionality, UI experts take care of the visual part and create an intuitive interface design that people will love.
However, without mobile front-end and back-end, the product designed by a UX/UI team isn’t clickable. So, when the latter is ready, codes enter the game and make the design into an app by means of programming languages. It goes without saying that during this stage all participants of the project have to interact with each other on a regular basis. If not, misunderstandings might appear that will slow down the process significantly.
Testing The painful truth is, no matter how good your application seems at first there are always bugs to be fixed and improvements to be made. Needless to say, the testing stage is crucial before you launch your applications on the app stores.
There are two types of testing carried out:
Alpha testing (it is when the team of developers tests the application during its development searching for mistakes in the code and fixing them) Beta testing (several representatives of the target group download and test the app to make sure everything works following the plan) With a good mobile application, most of the flaws are found and removed at the stage of alpha testing therefore beta testing takes less time. All in all, the whole process of testing takes about a month. During this time all major errors have to be detected and debugged.
Launching the app and working on its future updates
Before you launch your app on whatever app store, you have to come up with a catchy and relevant app name, compose descriptions (short and extended versions), and think of the promotional part. Chances are, you have come across things like SEO and SMM, there’s an analog of them in the world of app marketplaces and it is called App Store Optimization. This basically means that you have to find important keywords and include them in your product descriptions, which, in turn, will increase the chances of your app being downloaded.
The last thing to do would be to get approval for your app from the marketplace. With Google Play Market, it won’t take more than just a couple of hours. Apple might make you wait for a day or more.
You have been approved? Congratulations! But it doesn’t mean that the work is over. Your app is a live organism, believe it or not, and it has to grow and expand to keep your users satisfied. Due to this, it is required to keep working on updates, adding new features, fixing bugs, etc.
How many hours does it take to create a quality app?
You can now predict how long it takes to create a completely functional app because you are fully aware of how hard the application development process is. Without a doubt, it will be an approximate number, but still. Simpler and smaller apps with a limited number of core features take somewhere 2 to 3 months, while big apps packed with advanced functionalities might take more than half a year.
There’s one thing to remember though! Time saves time. No matter how strange it sounds, it is true. The less time you save while planning the app and doing research, the less time you will need to put into developing.
Finally, if you have a great idea, there’s no need to waste precious time on overthinking. Start acting! Yojji is here to help you bring your ideas to life! Our team consists of creative UI and UX designers, front-end and back-developers who have vast experience in modern technologies and a thirst for learning new things. We work together to build high-quality apps in no time.
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