It seems like everyone has a mobile app these days. Anyone that has what they term a great idea for an app, seems to be making one. Part of the reason for the explosion of new apps, and we’re talking about both Apple and Android, is the ease with which you can do it yourself. DIY app making is becoming more common place, and an industry of app making platforms has sprung up around this concept. It’s not so dissimilar to the advent of DIY site builders, which turned ordinary people that aren’t developers into website designers. The technology for that has matured to where you really can make a pretty good site on your own, especially if the platform you’re using is intuitive and easy to use.
I’m not sure you can really say the same about the solutions for building mobile apps on your own. This is a newer technology that still has some real drawbacks. That being said, there are some really good tools, such as those on Mashable’s list of mobile app builders, for those who aren’t coders. For a lot of apps, these builders might be enough to get a decent product up and running. While this option is enticing, there are some definite reasons you might still want to outsource the work of actually building the app.
You Can’t Afford To Be Bad
Have you seen the competition on the app store these days? It is fierce. Just as you cleverly came up with an idea for an app that you believe to be genius, so have hundreds if not thousands more. Everyone wants to break in and take advantage of the huge gold rush of apps. Competition is a good thing, but only if your product can stand up to it. You simply can’t afford to be another run-of-the-mill app that is trying to compete with professionally created ones. Successful apps are created by those who do it for a living. They know what looks and feels good to app users. Creating a good user experience design is a lot easier when you’ve already made dozens or hundreds of apps. This is something you can’t know as someone who has never created an app, and it is a big reason why many small apps fail.
You’re Blind and You Don’t Know It
Have you ever been so emotionally invested in something that you had trouble making changes to it? It’s human nature to hold fast to the original idea we have and nurture it. Yet, even when you grow a plant it needs to be pruned sometimes. When the hardest decisions of change need to be made, you don’t want to be the one leading it. You might say that you can be cutthroat about your app’s elements, but history shows that isn’t the case. There’s even a term for this in film: kill your babies. Directors will fall in love with a certain scene or particular music, and it takes the film editor to push them to “kill” these elements for the greater good of the overall movie. You need this person for your app too. A mobile app developer, with their breadth of experience, can push you to make decisions that are needed for your app, but that you are blind to see. Without somebody calling them out, you’re going to end up with a bad final product.
Your 30-Year App Project
When building your own app, we tend to elongate the process. We want to put so much into perfecting it, that deadlines are simply blown past. Okay, perhaps thirty years is an exaggeration, but your app project could end up being way longer than you expect. Having firm deadlines with yourself takes an exceptional level of discipline. Enforcing hard deadlines on an outsourced app developer, on the other hand, is much easier. They’re likely to give you a sound estimate on how long the app will take to develop, and you certainly won’t feel bad making them stick to the timeframe either. After all, you need to get your app into the world and making money for you. Time is money, so you can’t afford to have a quick app build end up taking as much time as it took to build the Great Wall of China (and that one only took 20 years!).
Concluding Counterpoints
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention some counterpoint. After all, some people do make apps themselves that do well. For instance, while it might be hard for you to set a deadline, you’ll also be more excited about your project than any outside hire you make. It could be that you get your app done even faster on your own for this reason. It will also, obviously, save you plenty of money to build your own mobile app instead of outsourcing it. At least on the face of things it does. Let’s not forget the time investment you’re putting in and the value of that. Even more than the time element, is the emotional investment you put in when building your own app. You have this great idea that you are super excited about, but now you have to expend more mental and emotional energies into making it a reality. Wouldn’t those be better spent on other aspects of your business? After all, creating the app is just one part of it. You still need to build a business model around it that works, and be able to optimize it after you see the results of human interaction. At the end of the day, letting the professionals do what they do best, in this case app development, will give you the best chance for success.
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