4 most common questions regarding app development — Answered!

I am Vidit Shah from April Innovations and we at April Innovations help startups and businesses build Mobile Apps for their ideas and workflows respectively.

Before building apps myself I have been on the opposite side of table where I have hired outsourcing companies to build software products for me and here I am going to discuss about 4 common questions that I had when I wanted to build an app via an outsourcing company and answer these 4 questions from a perspective of an Outsourcing company owner. Hope you like it! So, let’s dive right into it.

Question 1: What is the process of App development? How does the entire process works from start to end?

Answer: The app development process can be broken into 7 steps:

1. Idea Conceptualisation

2. Wire framing

3. App designing

4. App development

5. Backend Development

6. Unit testing

7. Go Live

The above process can have other steps being added or removed depending on clients requirement and model with which the outsourcing company engages with them. Example for a fixed cost project an additional step of scoping will be added whereas some clients might have hired an external design agency for app designing so in that scenario steps 2 and 3 will be dropped.

Question 2: The average time taken to create the app? Is app development very complex in nature?

Answer: The time taken is completely dependent on the complexity and feature requirements. We have done projects which have taken 2 months and some projects have taken 12 months as well. So it is completely dependent on the client requirements.

- As far as complexity is concerned let me throw some light on app development complexity with some examples:

1. Note taking app with single user and saving of notes on phone- Simple

2. Note taking app with multiple users, saving of notes on cloud — Moderate

3. Note taking app with multiple users, saving of notes on cloud, sharing of notes, collaboration on notes — Complex

4. Note taking app like Evernote — Very complex

Question 3: The cost of development and/or if you could create an application based on a fixed budget?

Answer: Here again the cost of development is dependent on what the clients’ expectation from the outsourcing company.

There is no standard rate as App development is a service and not a product with fixed input and output.

We undertake Fixed budget projects only in the case where the client has strongly defined scope and wireframes are ready.

- As far as cost is concerned let me throw some light on app development cost with the example of note taking app above:

1. Note taking app with single user and saving of notes on phone- $$

2. Note taking app with multiple users, saving of notes on cloud — $$$$

3. Note taking app with multiple users, saving of notes on cloud, sharing of notes, collaboration on notes — $$$$$$

4. Note taking app like Evernote — $$$$$$$$

Question 4: The services after the app is released like Change Requests or fixing bugs etc.? Further more any other additional things that you could tell me about the project and how you guys operate?

Answer: There are 2 methods of engagement for bug fixing/change request:

1. Dedicated resource engagement — Here a fixed resource is working on your project and all the further development is handled by him. The client pays a fixed fee every month.

2. Ad-hoc service request — Client raises a service request which is evaluated by the team and a quotation is shared with the client. Once the client has paid in full or advance amount the work is started.

Apart from the change request above, we also provide AMC which takes care of maintaining the server uptime. Kindly note, AMC does not involve any development work.