Mobile apps make your business more efficient and give you a competitive edge. However, trying to develop an app in-house may cause significant problems.
If you don’t have experienced mobile app developers on your team, then hire a professional app development company to do it for you. No more wasting time and money upskilling internally. Hand the project over to an experienced app development company and concentrate on the most important thing for your business.
There are many reasons to outsource mobile app development to an experienced company, we’ll focus on the top seven here.
Experience
You may have a team of developers in-house but are they skilled in mobile app development? That’s the question you should ask yourself before undertaking a mobile app development project. Lack of internal expertise leads to additional costs and time delays.
Outsourcing your app development project to an established app development company means giving your project to an experienced team of mobile app developers. These developers will have the required technical skills, professional expertise and past experience to deliver your project.
For many of these app development companies, their sole focus is on mobile app development. They'll provide a complete end to end service. This takes the headache out of your team needing to upskill in the field of mobile app development.
App development companies consistently work on new projects and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and advancements in their field. They are well informed when offering solutions for your app development project.
With an experienced app development company, no challenge is too big.
Costs
If you choose to develop an app in-house you'll need to hire developers with experience in this field. Hiring and maintaining a team of mobile app developers is time-consuming, tedious and costly. It also leads to permanent overheads, and you’ll need more than app developers to make your app a success. App developers, quality assurers, user experience and user interface designers, and project managers all come together to deliver a truly unique app.
Developing in-house sees costs rise rapidly. Whereas working with an app development company you agree costs and set aside a non-escalating budget. That’s on the basis that you don’t change your requirements mid-way through the project. Working with experienced app developers has the added benefit of greater clarity about your requirements from the beginning.
You choose a pricing structure that suits your budget. Most app development companies offer fixed-price, time and material or a virtual team. Fixed-price projects are good for small projects on a budget. The scope and time of the project are fixed so this type of project doesn’t lend itself to a project that may require changing during development.
Time and materials priced projects is a pay as you go model. You agree the hourly rate for the developer and the number of hours required. These types of projects are usually invoiced at the end of that month for the resources used during the month.
A virtual team priced project is where you may need the help of a team such as project managers, designers, developers and QA specialists. You pay similar to time and materials and you only pay for the agreed resourcing.
Working with a mobile app development company gives you total control over your costs.
Quality
Having a vigorous and robust mobile app quality assurance process is essential for the success of your app. Without a QA process in place, you’ve no way of telling if your app will cause problems for users. An app that’s hard to use and consistently buggy isn’t one users will want to use or keep on their phone.
A good app development company will carry out quality assurance on their own code. They’ll maintain test plans, run test cases, and manage a large collection of handsets on a wide variety of operating system variants. This is hugely important in the current environment as iOS and Android have very different upgrade behaviours.
A dedicated person within the company will look after this process. The role of the QA specialist is to carry out a number of activities to validate the software. They will scrutinise every detail of the app from the major crashes to the minor UI changes.
Hiring experts gives you a better product.
Clarity
A professional app development company will ensure you only develop an app if it’s the right strategy for your business. If an app is the right strategy, they’ll bring clarity to your project by advising what business problems lend themselves to an app and those that won’t.
With years of experience, they’ll advise on avoiding certain features that stray from meeting the business goals. They’ll also know what technologies are available that are appropriate to your apps needs, and will help you explore a return on investment.
Working with an app development company helps you move your basic idea from a nebulous concept to a well-defined concept.
Efficiency
Time efficiency is something an experienced mobile app development company offers you. They speed up the process of app development to a great extent due to their experience of working on a wide variety of complex projects. They also deliver on project deadlines.
By handing over the development work to an experienced app development company you have time to focus on other tasks that are core to your business. Your employees will also be more efficient and effective utilising their skillset for tasks that are in line with these.
The app development market is a competitive market space, by outsourcing you are guaranteed to be given a quicker and efficient service.
Design
User experience design and user interface design are at the heart of mobile app development. They give your app a purpose and help it to work efficiently.
User experience design consists of a number of focused tasks designed to make the user experience an enjoyable and effective one. If user experience design is done properly it creates a positive experience for the user and a better association with your app.
User interface design is what connects users to the products underlying technology, it’s about the look and feel of the app. It helps to create positive brand recognition.
Both of these make or break the experience with your app. If your team is not sufficiently experienced in these areas and how they relate to mobile app development it would make business sense to hand them over to a company that does.
End to end service
There are many factors to consider at each stage of the app development process. And each stage poses a risk to a company who lacks experience in this process. Mobile app development companies provide an end-to-end service, meaning they take on these risk factors. End-to-end service includes the initial ideation of your app right through to the finished product and all the technical support you need for its future success.
Experienced app development companies are well-versed in the challenges and risks that might hinder your path to enter the mobile market. They lower the risk through their end to end service and years of experience.
Maria Colgan
Digital Marketing Manager
Thanks for reading the Tapadoo blog. We've been building iOS and Android Apps since 2009. If your business needs an App, or you want advice on anything mobile, please get in touch