5 Mobile App Development Mistakes That Can Skyrocket Your Budget

Statistics reveal that every year the number of mobile app downloads continues to increase. In fact, stats show that users are starting to spend more time using mobile apps as compared to websites.

Consequently, businesses want to be where their audience is, so more and more companies are starting to develop and utilize mobile apps. 

A report by SensorTower reveals that by 2020, Apple’s app store will hit 5 million mobile apps.

However, businesses get so wound up in trying to build a quality mobile app that stands out from the competition; They completely forget to analyze their budget. The majority of the app development businesses end up spending double and triple times their original budget. 

If you’ve been thinking of developing a mobile app and are worried about your budget, you’ve come to the right place. I have worked closely with mobile app developers and designers, and I’ve seen many ups and down’s in the life cycle of mobile apps. From my experience, I have managed to round up the top five mobile app budgeting mistakes that companies fail to avoid.

So before you head on to turning your amazing mobile app idea to a reality, have a look through this article first.

The Top 5 Mobile App Budgeting Mistakes

Overlooking Cross-Platform app development

After you have decided on the type of app that you’re going to be developing and its various features and functionality, your first step should be to run thorough market research. Understand your audience and then decide on the platform that you will be developing your mobile app on. If you’re targeting an audience that has majority android or iOS users, then everything seems good.

However, if you’re planning on hitting the worldwide market and launching your mobile app at an international level, then, in that case, it will be better to reevaluate the platform that you should be developing on. Think about it, if you are targeting users all across the globe and you end up creating an iOS mobile app, then you will never be able to reach the android, windows, or any other platform users.

In this situation, it would be better to focus on cross-platform mobile app development. Not only will this approach be less costly it will also help you reach a greater audience. Instead of spending your money on developing your mobile apps for individual android, iOS, and other platforms, it would be a better approach to hire a cross-platform mobile app development company.

Treating App Development, the Same as Website Development

Many companies, especially startups have the notion that mobile app development is the same as website development. Even though the app and website development are two entirely different development processes, companies end up allocating the app development budget according to web development. Later on, when the app development process begins to get more and more complex, it becomes difficult to manage the budget.

It’s essential that companies understand what differentiates apps from websites. The user interface, user experience, the technology used, and platform performance are much more complex as compared to websites.  This makes it imperative that you hire professional app developers that understand the complexity of the process. This will allow you to map out your development budget according to the app’s requirements. Because mobile apps require special attention to all its details, it is comparatively costlier. If you keep the same budget as web development, then you will end up spending much more than the necessary budget. 

Not Paying Attention to Mobile App Marketing

These days no matter how great of a product you have and no matter how exquisite it may seem, it’s impossible that it will explode in the market ‘without any marketing efforts’. No matter what type of services or products you are launching, ‘marketing’ is becoming more important every day. Just think about it, asides you, there are thousands of mobile app development companies out there and the competition seems to be growing at an exponential rate.

Instead of considering ‘marketing’ as an additional service, consider it as an essential component in the app development cycle. So do your market research and figure out who your potential audience is. After that, brainstorm all the marketing strategies that will give you a maximum outreach to your audience. You want to ensure that your target audience knows that you’re planning on launching a mobile app of their interest. These are just a few essentials for customer acquisition and customer retention. 

So if you want to make sure that you get the desired conversions, you will have to make ‘marketing and planning’ an integral part of your budgeting process. Plan out your budget for paid advertisements, layout the channels that you will be using to reach out to your customers. If you ignore this step during the budgeting process, you will end up spending much more than that is necessary. 

Not Taking into Account the Regular Updates

Majority of the mobile app developers have the notion that once they have developed and launched their mobile apps, their work is done. However, your work doesn’t end there just yet. This is a very common mistake made by app development companies, they forget to take into account the budget required for future updates. New technologies and app development trends are always popping up, and if you fail to keep your app updated to the market trends, then you’ll fail to meet the user requirements. Not meeting the user requirements means that you will lose user downloads and fail to drive conversions.

All your efforts could go down the drain by making this mistake. If you decide on spending money for the updates after you have launched your app, your budget could exceed your limits. Therefore, don’t forget to account for the updates of your mobile apps.

No Adequate Continuity Planning 

Whether you’re developing a mobile app or any other product, if you forget all about it after launching, your product will eventually stop driving audience. The reason is that users are always looking for new and interesting features to interact with, if you don’t have something new to offer your users, they will eventually forget all about your app.  If you want to prevent this from happening, you will need to have a continuity plan in place.

Make sure that you keep adding innovative and interesting features that will keep your customers engaged. And in order to fulfill this purpose, it’s necessary that you have already planned out a budget for your app continuity.

Wrapping Up:

The bottom line is that if you’re planning on creating an out-of-the-box mobile app that has never been created before, there are a number of mistakes that can result in cost overruns. I’ve mentioned some of the most common mistakes that app developers make, in order to prevent your development budget from skyrocketing, make sure to avoid the above-mentioned bloopers. I hope you found this article useful if you’d like to add something, feel free to leave a comment below.

Featured image by Alexander Grey on Unsplash