Outsourcing mobile app development is a good idea, which can bring you a lot of benefits over developing the app in-house. In this article, we will tell you how to outsource app development, what are the development costs, and what are the benefits and risks of outsourcing mobile app development.

Offshore app development – a good choice for companies

There are 3 most popular ways of mobile app development outsourcing. You can either hire a development company, hire separate freelance developers, or use off-the-shelf solutions.

Hiring a development company is the most reliable choice, which will be a good solution if you are planning to create a unique high-quality app. Hiring a full developer team is the most expensive option out of 3, but it will give usually give you the best quality and individuality of the app.

Hiring freelance developers is a cheaper and more flexible option. There is a big choice of talents throughout the freelance market, which means that you can find developers, who will be the most useful for your project if you spend some time searching for them. On the other hand, freelance developers can have limited availability problem – booked on some days in some periods and may not easily extend the contract. It can be hard to quickly find a replacement for freelance developers in case of sickness. It will also be much harder to manage a team of freelance developers, who never worked together before.

The third option is to use a template of the app, which can be found easily on the web, and hire developers to add your own content/features to it. This is the fastest and the cheapest way, but don’t forget that there may not be a template that fits your idea of app.

Either of these choices may be a good solution for you or your company. Choose depending on your goal, requirements, and budget.

How to outsource iPhone and Android app development?

1. Prepare detailed requirements and outline for your app – be ready to tell developers you hire as many details about your app idea as possible. This will lower the risk of getting an absolutely different app from the one you were imagining and planning.
2. Prepare estimations of your budget – you need to know how much money you can spend on different aspects of your project. Keep track of those numbers in order to not get any difficulties in the future.
3. Hire developers or sign a contract with a company that will do it for you – find a team that will make your ideas come to reality and sign a contract with them.
4. Be aware of how your development process is going – visit demos, presentations, communicate with the project manager and developers if needed.

Benefits of mobile app development outsourcing

• Lower costs – offshore outsourcing is always cheaper than developing an app in-house. Costs of living in the country you are outsourcing to are cheaper than in your country, which leads to paying smaller salaries than you would pay to mobile app developers in-house.
• Wide choice of offshore development companies – gives you a possibility to choose the exact company, which will fit your needs the most and thus bring the highest-quality product.
• You are saving your time – if you outsource your app to an offshore development team, you will not need to spend time hiring, training, and managing your employees. The team you hire is almost always already experienced in working over some projects/apps together and won’t take any time to accommodate.

Risks of outsourcing app

• Confident information leaks – sometimes you will need to give offshore developers some sensitive data of your company or even your clients in order to develop/test the app properly. Those risks can be minimized by signing an NDA contract
• Misunderstandings – sometimes there may be some miscommunications even if the requirements you prepared seem perfectly clear to you. Everyone makes mistakes, but you can minimize these risks by periodically communicating with your offshore mobile app development team and checking how things are going
• Different time zones – it may be hard to communicate live with your team if they are located in different time zone. Usually, an experienced project manager can find a solution to this type of issue.

Outsource app development cost

There are a lot of factors that may affect the price of the development, such as the technical complexity of your app idea, length of the project, location of mobile app development outsourcing, etc. Currently, the typical rates offered for developers by software houses in Central and Eastern Europe range from 6 USD to 50 USD per hour. Taking into account the software house margin, the typical rates for the customers can vary significantly and lie between 20 and 100 USD.

Outsourcing app development in BWC.Technology

BWC.Technology can solve all the problems which are connected with offshore mobile app development and help you with:

• saving on internal resources
• isolating from complex technical topics
• saving time on team and process definition
• saving time and focus on preparing detailed requirements
• saving time on testing

We work with proven technology partners to establish dedicated development teams, agile working practices and deliver digital product increments. BWC.Technology is experienced to comply with elevated quality standards, having worked for large clients on multinational projects. Our team will guide you through the process of transforming your idea into a working digital product.