About 1 million applications are published in stores every year. In 2017, the number of app downloads was 197 billion, with a forecast of 352 billion by 2021. This whole celebration of life will generate about two hundred billion dollars in revenue according to the same forecast. All these big and beautiful numbers only mean that a lot of applications are being developed, and more will be developed.

World experience in development gives a certain understanding of various aspects of creating mobile applications, including the main ones: cost and development time. In this article, we consider the issue of timing: how long does it take to develop a mobile application?

Research

Kinvey surveyed 100 UI / UX professionals in mobile app development with a single question: “How long do you think it will take to create an MVP (first working prototype) of a mobile app?”

The average of all responses was 18 weeks
(about 4.5 months)

This estimate implies costs of approximately 10 weeks for the backend and 8 weeks for the frontend…

Kinvey also made this beautiful infographic:

Estimated stages include:

1. Storage design
2. Thinking about caching
3. Data Synchronization Issues
4. Prototyping
5. UI / UX design, development
6. UI / UX design polishing on a prototype
7. User account management
8. Server logic
9. Integration with external services
10. Implementation of push notifications, onboarding
11. Version compatibility support

During the same time, it is possible to assemble 1.3 Boeing 777s and launch the Apollo mission to the Moon 40 times.

The second study was conducted in 2017 by GoodFirms. They approached the matter more thoroughly, interviewing various experts in the industry to estimate the time and cost of developing specific examples of mobile applications (Instagram, Tinder, Uber, etc.). The results are as follows:

1. Complex applications like Instagram or Uber, which include large functionality, are estimated by the development time 4.5 to 5.5 months…

2. Development of an application for iphone and other smartphones, medium in complexity (WhatsApp) require about 4.5 months working time of the team.

3. High-quality applications with little functionality will require from 3.8 to 4.1 months…

The average estimates of the cost (in million rubles, two platforms: iOS and Android, the server side) and the terms of application development were as follows:

A total of 55 mobile application development companies from 15 countries were surveyed. At the same time, the scatter of estimates turned out to be quite large:

Some companies estimated the volume of work to be no more than a month, some – no less than eight. Someone gave an estimate of 300 million rubles, someone – at 13 million.

results

Based on the combined results of both studies the average development time for a mobile application is 4-5 months… We are talking about a full cycle: from thinking through an idea to launching, which includes many stages.

If you are planning to create an android application from scratch or develop a relatively small iOS application, expect a period of 3 to 4 months. Complex application – about 6.

At AppCraft MVP studio is done quickly: we understand that in 4-6 months the state of the market and the needs of customers can change significantly. Therefore, preference is given to the ability to test the product as quickly as possible on real users instead of implementing additional functionality.

On our website you can fill out an application for the development of a mobile application to order, and in the blog you can read about the cost of developing a mobile application.

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