App development?

Glaucus · 16 Jul 2012 at 13:18

Was wondering if anyone has ever contracted someone to build an app?
If so would you care to share your experience and costs, make any money, how long did it take to program. We talking 10s of hours or 100s of hours?

More generaly, what would be the sensible design approach?
Obviously template screen shots and working out what functionality you want. But I assume there's a better way of working through this, than just start laying out templates.

India seems pretty cheap, depending how long something takes to program and that I have no idea.

Also on iOS can you pull data from other apps? Or would that require the other app creator to allow you?

Tunney · 16 Jul 2012 at 23:53

This way brought up in another thread and it was generally agreed that £5,000 is the bare minimum you're going to get away with. Apps take hundreds to thousands of hours to create - especially once you consider in design, artwork and testing.

If you've got an idea, you'll need to come up with a specification for it. Mature software houses will have examples you can follow if you don't know how to lay the specification out. Generally, it should include design, flow and business logic. The more thorough this is, the less likely that the software house will get things wrong.

And no, you can't pull data from other apps. iOS apps all live in their own little sandbox, unable to communicate with other apps. You can access the same web services as them but you can't interact with the other apps beyond launching them.

Glaucus · 17 Jul 2012 at 14:55

Wow that's insane, not in the $1500 range then.

POB · 17 Jul 2012 at 20:42

I've been looking into this, but never find the time.

I have looked at the following system: http://www.appcelerator.com/platform

It appears to offer cross development for a few platforms, without going down the just wrapping a website as an app route.

Apparently you code in JavaScript and it converts and compiles it to the native language for iOS & Android.

durbs · 21 Jul 2012 at 13:36

Glaucus said:
Wow that's insane, not in the $1500 range then.

Lol, no. Even a simple app takes a significant amount of hours to produce to release standard. Even if you offshore it, good IOS developers in India, Eastern Europe etc etc still command a decent hourly rate (at my last contract for example, offshore developers in India were £200-£300 per day, more for onshore. They don't pocket that kind of cash, their management company creams off the bulk).

Multiply that by the 150 hours that even the smallest app would take to build and release along with graphic design and testing costs and you'll see $1500 for a fully contracted app is not feasible. Note, i'm talking about a bespoke app here, not a ****** 'build your own HTML5 App' template wizard thing.

Saying that though, the first App i released into the store only cost me around £400 because I did all the work myself. But note, thats half your budget gone for an app I wrote myself!

I'm currently writing an iPad game, again, doing the work myself. Even so, it'll end up costing me £3000+ for the bits I can't do.

Arthur17 · 22 Jul 2012 at 17:34

I can't find the link at the moment, but even an icon for your app is going to cost somewhere in the region of £500-£800+ if you hire a decent designer (the sort you find on Dribbble).