A must-read for entrepreneurs: How long does it take to develop an App?

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With an estimated 350 billion mobile app downloads expected by 2021, generating an estimated $200 billion in revenue, it’s no surprise that mobile app development, marketing, and sales are growing exponentially.

In fact, there are currently 2.8 million apps available for download in the Google Play Store and 2.2 million apps available for download in the Apple App Store, and these numbers are growing. Mobile is becoming increasingly dominant over desktop, and mobile apps are here to stay, especially in the business and technology sectors.

Therefore, founders of startups in these fields are eager to know the answer to this question: How much time and effort does it take to develop a mobile app?

Current data: It takes 3-5 months to develop a mobile app

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Despite the fact that 1 million new mobile apps are released every year on major app stores, there is very little data on how long it takes to develop a new mobile app. Although you will find many websites claiming that it takes about 3-4 months to develop a mobile app, it is not easy to find reliable data to prove this information. However, there are at least two survey data worth mentioning in this regard:

(1) In a survey conducted by Kinvey in 2013, Kinvey asked 100 mobile app designers to indicate how long they thought it would take to develop an Android or iOS app version 1.0 with major features (i.e., a minimum viable product, or MVP). By averaging the feedback from the 100 app designers who participated in the survey, Kinvey found that it takes about 18 weeks (i.e., 4.5 months) to develop a native mobile app, of which backend development takes about 10 weeks and frontend development takes about 8 weeks. In response to this survey result, Kinvey also produced an infographic on the mobile app development timeline that is often cited and shared:

In the following, I will describe the essence of backend and frontend development, so please don’t mind if the above infographic is a bit confusing now.

(2) The second study worth mentioning in this area is a report released by GoodFirms in 2017. GoodFirms conducted a number of surveys in the application field, including the time and cost required to develop a mobile app.

Similar to Kinvey’s methodology, GoodFirms surveyed dozens of tech companies, asking them to estimate how long it would take to develop apps like Instagram, Tinder, and Uber, and then averaged the data provided by the respondents.

Based on this survey, GoodFirms’ report shows the following data:

• Feature-rich, highly complex apps like Instagram and Uber took 4.5-5.5 months to develop.

• A medium-complexity mobile app, such as WhatsApp or QuizUp, takes about 4.6 months to develop.

• User-friendly apps with fewer features, such as Tinder and Periscope, take about 3.8-4.1 months to develop.

Here’s the corresponding infographic created by GoodFirms:

In summary, both surveys show that it takes about 3-5 months to develop an app. Although the time required to develop different applications will vary to a certain extent, the approximate time range is definitely correct.

Let’s now look at the four key stages involved in developing a mobile app in order to explore the various factors and decisions that may affect the time it takes to complete an app development.

Four key stages of mobile app development

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Although we can think of app development as an iterative process, it is helpful to conceptualize the process as involving many defined stages. I will describe each stage of app development one by one, while keeping in mind that each stage is not completely separate from the other stages.

Phase 1: Research and Planning

The first stage of developing a mobile app requires answering two basic questions:

(1) Why am I developing this app? Why does this app need to exist? How will it bring value to the world? Do people really want to use this app? Who will use this app? Why?

(2) Is there already an app of this type on the market? If so, why do I believe that the app I developed can beat other competitors? What are the differences and advantages of my app over other existing similar apps?

Essentially, answering questions like “What do I want my app to do? Why does my app exist? How does my app beat the competition?” requires a deep understanding of your target market and target customer base.

You need to conduct extensive research on market demand and customer needs to ensure that you: (1) identify and validate a profitable customer pain point; (2) calculate the target market size; and (3) validate your product idea. In addition, you must also research your competitors, including their apps, customers, and business strategies.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how long it will take you to gather and confirm this important information, but it’s likely you’ll need several weeks to research and validate ideas.

Phase 2: Functionality and Features

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After you have collected enough data about the needs and requirements of your ideal customers and determined that there is indeed a large market demand for the solution you intend to provide, you must then decide which specific functions and features you should develop for your app. Many mobile app developers get lost at this stage.

At this stage, you decide exactly how you want your app to behave:

• What do you want your app to do?

• What tasks, functions, and operations will it perform? (One-on-one chat? Integrate with other apps? Etc.)

• How will it process data? Will it collect raw data from users, or leverage existing data frameworks?

At this point, you need to create a storyboard, i.e. a visual representation of the app’s user interface, the screens that display content and the connections and relationships between those screens:

Storyboards help you identify usability issues and improve the user experience.

During the phase of determining the functions and features of your mobile app, you also develop use cases, which serve as templates for how ideal users interact with your app. As a team member at Crew said, the more features you develop, the more complex your product will be and the longer it will take to develop your app.

One of the most important decisions you have to make at this stage is whether your app will support multiple operating systems and devices, or just one. In practice, this usually means you have to decide whether your app will have iOS, Android, and Windows versions.

Why is this choice important from a timeline perspective? Mainly for two reasons:

(1) Developing an app for multiple operating systems and devices takes longer to complete.

(2) Although this difference becomes less significant over time, it generally takes more time to develop an Android app than an iOS app (usually 20-30% longer).

Regarding this, Valeriia Timokhina once said: "iOS is usually the first platform for launching applications, because there are only a small number of target devices and operating systems that need to be adapted. Compared with adapting to multiple operating systems at one time, it is much easier to ensure that your application runs perfectly on one operating system at a time. In addition, there are more than 12,000 different Android devices on the market, and it is almost impossible to optimize the APP for every Android device. Therefore, it often takes more time to develop and test Android apps unless you limit the number of supported devices and supported screen resolutions. If you want to develop iOS and Android apps at the same time, the time and budget required to develop your app may double."

As for how you should develop apps for multiple operating systems at the same time, Cruxlab's staff pointed out: "Traditionally, Android apps have been developed in Java, while iOS apps have been written in Swift and objective-objective. Despite this, there are still a large number of other alternative tools, Xamarin, React Native and Ionic are some of the more popular ones."

Without getting into the technical details, if you want to develop both iOS and Android apps (and possibly Windows apps), you can choose one of two paths:

(1) Using two completely different programming languages ​​to develop two different versions of the app;

(2) Use cross-platform development tools (React Native, Ionic, etc.) to develop two versions of the app at the same time, thereby simplifying the process.

Let me reiterate here that although it is impossible to accurately predict the time required to determine the core functional features of the app, the approximate time range is certain: about 3-5 weeks.

Phase 3: Technical Feasibility, Design and Development

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After determining what you want your app to do and how you expect it to work, you must then clearly confirm that it is possible to develop these functions and features and run them properly. In this process, you need to involve your technical team to confirm that the functions and product front-end interactive experience you want to bring to users can be achieved through programming on the back-end. In other words, you need to ensure compatibility between the front-end and back-end systems. To do this, you must consult and work with your technical staff.

Front-end systems include the visual front-end elements of a software, application, or website that are directly viewed and accessed by end users. In contrast, back-end systems consist of the core computing logic of a website, software, or information system that is indirectly accessed by users through front-end applications or systems.

Front-end development focuses primarily on the client side of development. Front-end developers will be involved in analyzing code, designing, and debugging applications while ensuring a seamless user experience. You manage and control what people see first in their browser or app. As a front-end developer, you are responsible for the look, feel, and final design of the website.

Back-end development refers to server-side development, where you focus on how a website works. This type of web development usually consists of three parts: a server, an application, and a database. Back-end developers write code that gets database information to the browser or application. Anything you can't easily see, like databases and servers, is the job of a back-end developer.

Technically, front-end processes include caching, synchronization, wireframing, UI design, UI development, etc. Data storage, user management, server-side logic, data integration, and version control all belong to back-end development. Since back-end processes are responsible for operations such as calculations, business logic, database interactions, and performance, most of the code that makes the application run is back-end code.

It is critical that backend engineers maintain constant communication with frontend designers. Otherwise you risk getting into a dangerous situation where the backend engineers are unable to develop what the frontend designers want.

If you want to develop front-end mobile apps together with back-end infrastructure, then it is most important that you prioritize the features to be developed. Let your back-end engineers develop first so that your front-end engineers can develop functional code. If the back-end is not well defined and does not have the corresponding functions, the front-end engineers will work much less efficiently.

A critical part of developing an app is being able to successfully access the core data that your app runs on. Will you use a public API key, or will you develop your own abstraction layer?

API stands for Application Programming Interface, which represents a unique code that allows applications to access each other (developers). Some of the world's most famous applications have open APIs, such as Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Twitter and Uber, which developers can use to develop their own applications.

For example, the popular swipe-based dating app Tinder uses Facebook’s API: Tinder users log in to Tinder through their Facebook profiles, which saves Tinder from having to build its own user base from scratch.

Determining front-end and back-end compatibility involves a variety of different UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) design processes, including wireframing:

As part of UX design, a wireframe is a two-dimensional diagram of a page or app interface that shows the space allocation and priority of content, available functions, and expected behaviors.

Wireframes are primarily grey and primarily help:

(1) Build a bridge between the app’s information architecture and its visual design.

(2) Clarify a consistent approach to information displayed on user interfaces.

(3) Determine the expected functions in the interactive interface.

(4) Prioritize content by determining how much space to allocate to a particular item and where to position it on the screen.

Here’s an example of a wireframe from Facebook:

Wireframes can be created at different stages of the product development and optimization cycle. For example, some people choose to create wireframes early in the functionality and features phase, linking wireframes with the use of storyboards and other basic visual representations. Others create wireframes during the design and development phase, linking it to the investigation of front-end and back-end compatibility.

As Sheila Olson says, wireframes and storyboards can serve as a guide for the backend architecture you’ll use to support your app — APIs, data graphs, servers, data integrations, and push notification services.

For those who create wireframes during the design and development phase, the general sequence is this:

Wireframe → Low-fidelity prototype → High-fidelity mockup → Code.

Once you have your wireframes designed, it’s time to create your app’s graphical user interface (GUI). This is where you’ll add your specific fonts, colors, themes, and icons.

As the folks at Aim Consulting put it, once the design elements are complete, the design results will provide a clear visual direction for your engineers to understand the envisioned final product and how the interactions in the app should feel, move, and flow.

You can develop your new app by utilizing a software platform designed for this purpose (e.g., app developers, many of which have drag-and-drop interfaces). However, we recommend that you work with a professional app development agency, as agencies have extensive experience in helping entrepreneurs successfully execute their ideas.

All in all, conducting a technical feasibility assessment, determining the front-end design elements, and writing the back-end architecture can take 1-2 months to complete.

Phase 4: Testing and Refinement

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The last stage in developing an app (besides the actual launch and the associated marketing activities) is the testing and refinement phase.

Now, in a way, testing is part of the development phase because your programmers and alpha testers will constantly try to break your app during development in order to find and correct bugs in the code before it is released.

Alpha testing is done internally by your company, as your developers (whether in-house or outsourced) will perform standardized diagnostics on your app before it is released to real end users.

The purpose of beta testing is to test your app outside of the lab: what happens when real users have the opportunity to use your app the way they like, rather than the way you thought they would? The key to beta testing is to find out whether your app holds up when everyday users download it to their phones and use it the way they like.

Alpha testing needs to find major bugs and minor glitches, while Beta testing needs to be able to find problems that may occur in the app in the real usage environment of real users.

Both Alpha testing (development phase) and Beta phase (testing phase) are essential components to building a reliable app.

Once you have completed Alpha testing of your app within your own development team, you should open your app to a select group of the public for Beta testing.

How can you find qualified beta testers for your upcoming app? You can find testers through a number of web-based services and platforms, including BetaFamily, BetaList, ErliBird, PreApps, TestElf, Reddit, and UserTesting.

If you have completed one or several rounds of Alpha testing, your Beta testing phase should take no longer than 3-4 weeks.

Conclusion

Based on the above time, we also left a certain amount of time buffer for the four stages of APP development, so we finally calculated that the final time required to develop an application is about 4-5 months. Therefore, we will find that developing a mobile app is a rather long and complicated process that requires a lot of preparation, patience and investment to execute correctly.

Here are my top two tips for your app development journey:

(1) When setting an app development schedule, be flexible and be prepared for delays. Many unforeseen circumstances can cause delays, such as new iOS releases, changes in third-party integrations, and unexpected problems during quality testing. When completing development, give yourself a buffer time rather than a strict deadline. The last thing you want to see is to release your app to the app store and find that it crashes or something worse. You only have one chance to make a great impression on users, and you definitely don't want to be one of those apps that is immediately abandoned after being downloaded by users.

(2) Make sure you can still communicate with the development team at any time after the app is released. If you are working with an external vendor to develop your app, make sure you can continue to communicate with the development team after the app is released through a managed service agreement or similar partnership. Mobile apps are not the kind of products that are "once developed, you can live forever."