Who has bags of money and seven months to spend on app-development?
Mobile usage is on the raise and there is no denying it. According to Flurry people already use native apps 86% of their mobile time vs. only 14% spent on mobile web. Others like ComCast are more humble and say that tablets and phones “drive half of all time spent on digital”. No matter what, message is the same — having an app today is quickly getting as important as having a web site 10–15 years ago.
I know that there is a queue of problems which make this statement above bold in more than one way. I like how a recent report by Kinvey has created a good list of these. To name just a few:
1) Time for building an app is skyrocketing: for 56% of the people it is nothing uncommon to spend minimum 7 months in development;
2) Price for development is outrageously high: Kinvey has some rich respondents, that have reported spending between 500k and 1M USD for their latest projects. SandHill has taken more down-to-earth approach and spoke with large and mid-size enterprises to find out that over 50% pay North of 50k USD per project. Still a lot!
3) Lack of right tools and skills hinder mobile strategy of companies: marketing and sales want one thing, development struggles still with other and in the end there is a project that has 100 iterations before it make any sense. Lovely!
I like to think of this article as an informative blog post, so I won’t just go listing facts. Even though there is no one-size-fits-them-all solution, good news is that there is a solid way to get around these hurdles. You can get your own or company application live without spending a fortune — Use a platform!
Just look at web. Problems there were the same and then Wordpress came around. Now it has ~20% market share as most projects share similar structure to provide best results. Same goes for mobile. From media to learning, from tourism to coaching majority of apps use common building block. No need to re-invent the wheel every time. Just take costs down.
For you, using a platform like Appzio.com to build your next app would mean: prices that no developer can beat; complete product ready in days instead of months, native code for iOS/Android /web, easy maintenance, convenient OTA updates and much more. So who has the money and time to spend on old-school development?
