How long does it take to develop an app? When should you expect, as far as timing goes, to release your app to the market? To get a feel for total app development time, let’s look at project phases.
App Development Process
As I mentioned earlier, the app development process is broken down into several phases, each requiring attention to detail and most importantly, time.
Entrepreneurs often wait until they have funding to start working on their app. The problem there is that investors want you to be in revenue before they put money in. Your first goal should be to conduct market validation exercises to prove that you have a customer who will pay to use your app. To learn more about funding your app, read our article on App Development Funding.
Next you’ll want to begin focusing on writing user stories – mapping out the path of the user through the app. Creating a good user experience is a major key to attracting and maintaining users. My personal recommendation is to spend a solid month on this. You should work on it as if you were writing an essay. Write your draft, review, edit, update, and repeat. If you have cofounders, invite them to review and contribute ideas.
Along with writing user stories, consider the branding within the app. You want to make sure that the branding values come through during the user experience. This may be done simultaneously with your user stories, but expect to spend at least a month developing your brand.
Moving on to the next step, designing the user interface. Draw out the wireframes and mockups so that the developers will know what they are expected to create. The time spent here may vary, but depending on the team, it will probably be somewhere around two to three months. If the user experience is simple, then it may not be as long, but time spent up front designing a great UI is time saved down the road. You won’t have to revisit the pesky details you didn’t consider before. In the past we have tried to move quickly on UX design but it still ended up taking just under three months.
Next comes the actual app development. If you have a skeleton crew of just one mobile front-end developer, one web developer, and one back-end developer, a simple app can be built in three months, not including time for testing and fixes. With one of our established SaaS clients, we had a team of three developers, two QAs, and a project manager; it took the team five months to build the enterprise grade back-end alone. Long story short, you can scale and speed things up with more developers, but that’s usually when you have a lot more work to be done. Three to six months is a good expectation for the actual dev work on a single app.
During and After Development
Testing and Quality Assurance are the next time chunk to plan into your timeline.
In this phase you’re going to try to do everything you can to break your app. Make sure to record the bugs and then send them back to the developers, and then test it again once they’ve been “fixed” to make sure the problem has been resolved. This process will add one to two months depending on how many and how complex the bugs are. A portion of this phase can overlap with your development.
User acceptance testing comes next. Here you will go through each feature, each user story and test them to make sure they were built according to the designs. You also want to make sure the user stories are going to meet business needs. On occasion, you might discover some enhancement that you feel your app needs. UAT is not the time to build new stuff. It’s better to capture those ideas and put them on a backlog for a future release. . To get through this stage, you can expect around two weeks.
Eventually, you’ll launch your app to a set of beta testers. Make sure to recruit beta users early so that you will have people waiting to test your app. The advantage to recruiting users early is that it will allow you to begin collecting data the moment your beta is launched. This part can – and should – overlap with the development and testing phases.
Continuing with this idea, you will want to make sure you are communicating to your users how to access your app, when to start testing, how long they have to test, and where to report feedback. These are more like single events that happen at certain points on your timeline. For example, leading up to beta testing, you’ll want to plan several messages to your target audience. “Here it comes… it’s almost here… get ready … Kick-off!” Use this to build your momentum, energy, and excitement around your app.
Make sure the testers have enough time to use your app. Check in with them and ask how things are going. Monitor their behavior and how they interact with your app to ensure it truly is a viable product. You should be monitoring for at least three months after you launch your beta. This will give you time to see how real users with diverse brains act on different devices with different internet connections.
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Factors That Will Lengthen App Development
The durations discussed and shown above are a general approximation based on engagements with past clients. Unfortunately no one cannot guarantee that app development will always be less than six months (though we wish we could). Instead, what we can do is share with you some factors that will add length to the app development timeline.
First, foreign language support in the app. The more languages you need to support, the more complexity you introduce, and the more development time you’ll need. Plus, you may not fully anticipate that complexity, so it will bite you with all sorts of surprises and delays. Languages that use the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are easier to support, while languages with hieroglyphics like Chinese or Japanese may take longer. Throw in Arabic, Pashto, or Hebrew where you’re writing from right to left, and your whole UI needs a revamp.
Second, complexity of integrations. Specifically talking about the back-end integrations, the more systems you tie together, the more time you need to build (and test) these integrations.
And third, payment processing. Having in-app payments can be more complex than you might initially think. You’ll need to have a merchant account, create a sandbox, integrate with the payment processor, test the integration in the sandbox, and then reconfigure the sandbox to go live (in what is called a production environment). The process is long and intense because you are dealing with people’s payment card information and PCI compliance.
All together, you should expect the entire app development process to take about 9 months to complete.
When you understand the app development timeline, you become better equipped to support and create your app. You will know what you need to do, as well as what to look out for on the horizon for you and your app. As we mentioned at the beginning, preparation will be a key deciding factor on how smooth the process will be as well as how successful your app will become.
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