How Long Does It Take to Develop a Mobile App?

Once you have an app idea, many questions arise, including the common query "How long will it take to develop a mobile app?" This is a natural question to have, especially with the growing competition in the app market, where numerous new applications are being released daily.

Our clients have often found this question challenging to answer, so we are here to provide guidance on how to estimate the duration involved.

Firstly, it’s nearly impossible to accurately tell the time period until the initial release is ready to enter the market. Even if you have a clear idea of what your app will do and whom it will entertain, there are various other factors that ungovernable. And thus, can affect the time an app development agency takes for developing the app.

Factors affecting Time Required for Mobile App Development

Platform

The level of efforts and time required for creating a fully-functional app depends on the platform you choose. As per our experience, both the platforms demand a high time investment, but still Android takes a longer time. This is because of the fragmentation issues in building applications for a wider range of devices.

Though the Google has been updating and streamlining the Android Software Developers Kit (SDK) with time to deal with varying screen sizes, OS versions, pixel densities, etc., many more improvements are still necessary to beat the iOS platform. Similarly, the app approval time is lesser in Android than in case of iOS platform.

Complexity

How well the mobile app developers understand your idea also plays a pivotal role in deciding the time range. If your idea is too simple, like just a replica of any existing app or something like shorts app, the developers can easily understand and execute the plan.

But, if you are developing an application with some new and unique features, you need to spend more time in making your idea clear. And this is must since better the understanding, better will be the output.

Features

Again, the features you wish to include in your mobile application also alters the time an app takes to build completely. More the number of features, more time consuming it will be.

Again, the kind of feature or functionality you want to add in your application also counts. Some features can be easy to implement while other might take somewhat more efforts and time, depending on the complexity of its functionality.

The complexity of the app idea and functionalities to be included can make the situation risky! It might happen that you invest a hefty amount of money into it, but it does not bring expected outcomes. To overcome the loss of time, efforts and money, we encourage our clients to go for building MVP.

A Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is a product designed with limited and imperative features to figure out the scope in the market and gain valuable feedbacks for future product development. If the first version of the app fails, you can enhance your idea with feedbacks gained. And in case it accomplishes the goal, other features can be added into the app through successive releases. This is profitable yet time-consuming.

Targeted Audience

Developing a mobile app for a few simultaneous users like 1000 users involves lesser factors than when compared to those for a larger audience like 50,000 users.

As per our knowledge, an application for a wider audience needs additional investment in architecture, infrastructure, performance testing and tuning. All these factors again add on to the time required to build an app.

We believe that a bug-free and fully-functional app is more successful than a crashing app launched sooner in the market. So, we invest our time in performing all the tests and make sure the app follows all the crucial KPIs.

App Development Process

The process you follow has a considerable impact on the time required for development. A good process helps in getting everything from planning to designing, development, and testing on scheduled time. While an inappropriate process can create an imbalance in the whole.

Besides this, we prefer development of different modules in parallel instead of handling them one by one. This is done so that more of the outputs can be achieved in lesser time period.

Communication

For better results, it is must that the client and mobile application development agency remain in touch throughout. If the client and development team find it hard to communicate due to time gap or any other issue, the challenges arising during the development phase are likely to be solved at a slower pace. These delays can increase the time an app takes to build.

Our mobility experts are always ready to go an extra mile to maintain communication and speed up the development process.