There are a lot of questions that arise when a business approaches for their custom application development.
As a business owner, you are always looking for ways to expand, grow and nourish your business establishment. With the growing competition and trends, various businesses have opted for their custom application as it has various advantages. There are various factors to keep in mind when it comes to having your application made. Along with factors comes the questions. One such question is how long does it take? Before we discuss the duration and what influences the duration, we would like to present you with a brief overview of custom application development and their various benefits.
Contents:
Overview
What is a custom application development and what are the advantages of having one for your business?
A custom application development is an application that is customized solely for your business to an individual presence of it in this digital world. This application is made according to your demands and needs. A panel of developers that you select will be responsible for the creation, design, and maintenance of the application.
Now one might ask what the advantages of having your application are. We’ve shortlisted a couple of them:
- Flexible to needs
A custom application development is highly customizable. It is tailored to meet all the requirements you have for your application. - Scale flexibility
Since it is absolutely for you the website can be scaled when your business expands. - Lower costs
Since having your application is a long-term factor, it is better to have a custom app than a ready-made. This is because in the long term with your customized application you need to spend less on maintenance. - Uniqueness
A custom application development is designed to your needs and it absolutely is yours and nobody else can use it. - Longevity
custom application development are there to stay for as long as you want it to. It’s a one-time investment. - Security
When an application is a custom application development the security provided is like the owner requires. Making it the most secure possible. This cannot be obtained if you use general-purpose software.
Software Development has various stages of development. These stages require their individual time. This influences the time factor of the development. It boils down to “it depends!” On market average, it can span anywhere from 3 to 6 months depending on various factors.
Following we’re going to discuss the various stages of custom application development and how they influence the duration of development.
Key components that influence the time-to-market
There are various phases through which application development goes. Different phases use different durations. From mapping ideas to launching and marketing applications, everything contributes essentially to the timing required in development. Every process has its individual timing. But every phase is dependent on each other hence requires proper attention.
- Brainstorming and research phase : This phase is the base phase of everything. Every other duration depends on your ideas and their complexity. Often a member of your development team might come up with an idea that they think is great but, some other member might just contradict it. This happens a lot. It takes a good number of days for the team members to settle on an idea. After this there’s a sub-phase where these ideas need to be tested, this ensures that the audience you are targeting loves the application. Another important thing to consider is to target the correct audience. Targeting the correct audience helps in shaping the application better. It also helps in boosting it after it has launched. A research survey should be conducted on an aggregate audience to determine these factors. Apart from the audience, one needs to take a detailed analysis of the nature of the competition in that selected area. Gathering details about your nemesis and potential threats help a lot in understanding and making better development decisions. This phase takes several weeks, but by the end of the research, you will know all the weaknesses, strong points of your nemesis, and your own business. You will also find out the strategies you can adopt for better outcomes along with your target audience. The idea and research phase should also provide you with the basic outline of MVPs, and prototyping.
- Planning Phase Once you know your details, the next step is plotting the how. This is where your plan is made. This is where the configuration is decided. It includes decisions such as choosing an operating system if you want to keep it limited otherwise, choosing the type of application you want to focus on and build. Hybrid (web-application), native development, cross-platform, etc. With that decided, it’s time to decide the features you want for your application. While picking the features make sure you don’t pick features that are complicated and slow down the mechanisms. The basic features such as a shopping cart, smooth navigation, login, and payment gateway should be there for an overall okay experience. You can add on extra features like filters, etc., the objective is to make it convenient for the users. The more features you have the larger the app will be. This is one complex phase and will require an approximate range of 1-2 months.
- Idea validation and design sprinting phase As we know, application development is a complex process with various branches to carefully map, each aspect needs to be tested. Design spring is a process that is used to tackle complex issues using a qualitative testing and analysis method. The basic idea is to gather data from a good number of different points of view for a better understanding of what will work and what won’t and then sorting it out sometimes even finding the alternatives to some aspects of the ideas. The design sprint method reduces the tedious full-cycle approach that was previously used to determine what will work and what won’t. It helps the business to understand if the users value a certain feature, if not what would they prefer in its place, if they find the navigation friendly enough or difficult, etc. This phase takes around a week.
- The development phase Once the planning is done, you approach the big task i.e. development. The development phase is divided into 3 tiers: The backend, the frontend, and the UI. This is the phase where designers and developers work simultaneously and bind the application with their magic. The backend is the backbone of an application as nothing will make sense if the backend isn’t well developed, the backend connects the system with the UI. Next is the front-end development, this is the code that users see, by that we mean the code that makes the visuals. These two parts are also known as backend and frontend engineering. Then it’s UI designing, this is the work of graphic designers, this the graphical interaction that you see. This whole process takes about six weeks.
- Developer selection phase There’s always a need for the best. In this stage, you look for a development company, or freelancer that flourishes a team under your wing. It is suggested that you have a current development team with experience of a great degree. This has various benefits, as the team knows each other they will be aware of their work pace and timings leading to efficient time management. Since it’s a team already flourished, there will be a project manager. This project manager will help to forward your requests to the subsets of the team. Another perk of having a team is that they’ll fill the gap in your understanding and understand what you want. They will also look after the whole process and the various phases of the development. The time needed for this phase is determined by you.
- Testing phase There’s no denying that there will be a couple of minor as well as major bugs after the completion of the development. To fix these bugs before the final launch, quality assurance testing should be run. There are various ways to test the capacity and functioning of the application in making. For instance, Alpha and Beta tests are run to observe if the application is running smoothly or not, after this, the application is launched. According to the user feedback, the remainder of the bugs is fixed. The testing phase takes about a week.
- Deployment and marketing phase Deployment has two phases: submission and review. There are several guidelines you need to follow while submission of the application is it Google Play Store or App Store. These guidelines are submission of screenshots, app icons, description, optimization, image demonstration. The time of an accepted submission varies from store to store. The process of Android or Google Play Store is fairly laid back, but Apple requires a detailed and precise application submission. The detailing and precision extend the launch time by a bit.
Factors that slow down the custom application development process
If we sum up from above, it takes 2-3 months to develop an application. But there exist issues and delays that can hamper the speed.
For example, development is constantly dynamic new ideas can be introduced at any time, this delays the original plan, especially if the code is already built it gets difficult to modify. Or if sometimes you just hire someone who isn’t capable of developing the given requirements, this results in a slower process and a poor performance app. The adoption of technologies can also curb the speed of development. These beautiful techs like VR, AR can enhance the overall performance but they can be really hard to fit inside the code. The difference in the type of industry plays an important role too, a social app may take 1-2months, whereas custom apps take more time to develop.
How to speed up the custom application development?
One cannot afford a slow development, since the industry is fast-growing and ever-evolving. There are ways in which you can cope with the problems that may arise in the development. Following are some of the ways in which you can boost the speed and timing of the development.
- MVPs : Before telling you how you can benefit from MVP, we will introduce you to what MVP exactly is. MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is the basic idea of the application. Early consumers can use this early or scratch version and give feedback to the developer. We can create various MVPs and use the feedback from the users to code the original application with better ideas. This saves a lot of deletion and recreation of code, which traditionally was used.
- Cross-platform The cost of going for native development and individual operating systems is pretty high, they also consume a lot of time, and we suggest you switch to cross-platform development. This will not only save you time and money but will also help you to target a better and larger audience group.
- Hiring expertise Hire a professional developer with good background knowledge in the development. Hiring a professional and experienced company will not only save you time but a lot of effort. They will also ensure that all the hassle process is not on you.
- Automated testing We can’t stress enough how wonderful automated testing is. It also goes without saying, but a lot of people ignore it. Automated testing runs several different tests at once, reducing the hours spent on manual testing. This will also help in generating error-free codes.
Conclusion
The time required for development varies from app to app and developer to developer. Once you employ a development team they produce a plan of estimated duration within two days. The duration depends on the complexity, your budget, and your needs. Although on average it takes 3-6 months to have your application from mapped to launch.
With a team of experts and resources, aTeam Soft Solutions extends a hand for helping you take your business to another level. Reach a bigger customer base, increase your revenue, gain success with the right development partner.
aTeam welcomes you at any stage of the development process and assures you of a successful launch of the product. We have the team and experience to deliver fantastic applications with innovative features.
Our team looks forward to serving and helping you achieve your business objectives.
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