Mobile application development is a collaborative process that generally results in products that fascinate users. However, doing it in-house is way more complicated than you can imagine. Even the tiniest mistake during development can end up being disastrous for the business.
Fortunately, there are signs that indicate that you are doing it the wrong way. The next best option in such a situation is to outsource the development to a mobile application development company equipped to plough through the mess and deliver a polished, robust product that your business can rely on.
Here are 3 signs that indicate that you need to outsource your mobile application development.
Lengthy Development Time
Many recent surveys claim that, generally, for a company to build a mobile app in-house and deploy it for their business, it may take 6 months to a year or more on average. A year is a long time if you consider the fast paced evolution of this mobile-first world. If the business takes too long to develop and deploy the app, by the time the app does get deployed, it may be obsolete.
Among the many obstacles in app development, resource limitations would be the most common. A few other major factors include:
- Lack of a solid design
- Lack of proper communication between the UX team and the backend team
- Lack of knowledge of the best practices of application development
- Poor project management
Accomplishing all of this during the development phase can be challenging even for enterprise-level firms. Even one of these factors can delay the delivery of the application. If you ever have to keep pushing your app’s launch date, consider it a sign to outsource the development.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Pushing your MVP live and then finishing the app with iterations is an advice you get from various tech blogs. It’s quite effective too. However, when it comes to mobile applications, releasing MVP is a bad idea. The reason is evident from the present behavior of smartphone users.
Hundreds of thousands of mobile applications come out every month. However, once users get comfortable with an app, they wouldn’t generally bother to give new apps a shot. Why download a new app and spend time getting used to it when you can use a perfectly functioning app that you are already used to?
This could be one of the reasons. If you take a look at the figures, you will see that app downloads have slowed down considerably at present. People don’t download new apps like they used to. Considering such a situation, releasing a half-baked mobile app promising to fix it with updates certainly does more harm than good for your business.
First impressions do count for something these days. An MVP may not give your business a second chance if it fails to impress users. You should deliver a fully functioning app with an impressive interface to have a lasting impression on users. Outsourcing app development to a reliable developer actually increases ROI with a better product.
Lack of Expertise
Knowledge-gap in the development team does delay the delivery of the application. Many companies make the mistake of going forward with developing a sophisticated application despite the lack of skill set. We have to take into account the fact there’s a shortage of mobile app developers which forces individual companies to rely on rather unpopular talents to build their apps.
Their end-goal is to deploy an app that impresses users. Most of them tend to neglect other aspects of the app like integration with the backend, with the cloud, scalability, security etc. Even if the companies have resources, they don’t always have the expertise, which consequently delays the delivery of the application.
Companies may have to invest a lot of time on learning the skill set rather than developing the app; yet another sign for those companies to start outsourcing.
Conclusion
Even if you decide to outsource mobile app development, there is yet another challenge to overcome – finding the right developer to outsource to. If you manage to find the right developer, you can have your app deployed in no time, and at a quarter of the cost you would’ve incurred had you developed the app in-house.
