What Different Factors Affect iPhone App Development Cost?

There is no specific answer to the question- how much does it cost to develop an iOS application? Cost estimation factor always makes people think twice when it comes to the establishment of startup for mobile application development. However, the cost of developing an application depends upon many factors. For example, features, platform, additional infrastructure, marketing and more.

There are many freelancers who will charge companies to build the iOS application but end up delivering unreliable and bad quality results. There are also decent app development companies working on large-scale projects but concentrating on particular categories like banking or gaming. While other development companies strictly focus on UI/UX design, quality, and usability to ensure the success of the application. Thus, if one would try to estimate iPhone app development cost, he/she will find an unending trail of factors that matter.

Well, all kind of businesses are now demanding for mobile applications. For example, taxi services, entertainment, education, healthcare and more. Mobile application helps to support business operations in very efficient way. Also having an app for business can help in creating brand awareness, to educate the users and to facilitate the profit growth. Hence, the mobile application mainly serves as a marketing tool which can take Business to a whole new level.

These advantages of the mobile app might sound great but having a development cost estimation idea is also important. iPhone app development cost varies according to the business requirements. It all depends on what different features and functionality users want in the application.

Having an idea about app development cost will help to estimate the Return On Investment (ROI) on app budget. Therefore it is important to see how much one might expect to give away for a new iOS application. Following are factors that majorly affect the cost factor for iPhone application development

1. Platform

The development cost can change depending on a number of platforms that developers wish to support the application. More the number of supportive platforms more would be the app development cost. But, it is not always the number as code reusability of the platform also plays an important role. Thus, experienced developers always suggest concentrating on one platform first before moving to another.

2. Development Model And Scope

Companies need to finalize objectives and required solutions once they decided to go further with developing an app. Developers need to create technical documents which list down the different features of applications. These documents generally consist different application development models. For example, waterfall model, spiral model as these two are largely utilized, models.

So companies need to fix the application budget according to the model. Most of the times, companies preferred to use an iterative model which is a combination of waterfall and spiral model. Companies thus need to manage separate development teams which can cause investment of extra money.

3. UI/UX Design

The interface design of iPhone app makes a huge difference in user experience and ROI. The attractive User Interface (UI) design makes viewers to download the application. The designing cost depends upon tools and software used for UI/UX design. Businesses need highly customized and detailed design that require advanced and expensive tools. Also, UI/UX designers demand more payment as hiring them might cost more for the company.

4. Web Services

Web services are used to take the content to the remote access point so that users can update the iOS app with the help of XML files. Web services help to prevent the modification in raw code of an application while updating the application.

5. SDKs

SDK is the home of every mobile application available out there in the market. SDK play an important role in tracking the different functions of an application. Generally, developers can get SDK at lower cost but more advance the SDK more expensive it is.
The developers use the popular SDKs such as Google Analytics, Xplode, Chartboost, Tapjoy etc. Some of these SDKs are a little bit expensive.

6. Infrastructure

Some iPhone applications are not standalone offline. They involve some kind of server components that increase the
iPhone app development cost. Companies need to install servers inside the premises for efficient data management. Storage requirements, data encryption, and security features might increase the overall project budget.

7. Application Maintenance

Users can find a large number of inactive applications in the app store. Some developers have a habit that they deploy apps in app store without doing any further updates. Such applications are dead for the newer versions of iOS. So it is necessary for developers to provide regular updates to improve the compatibility of applications. To achieve this milestone, strong application maintenance is mandatory. Application maintenance activity includes support for newer OS and devices, feature requests, bug fixes etc.