What's At Stake When Startup Founders Try to Cut Their Mobile App Development Costs?

People tend to underestimate the work required for building a mobile app. They just think that it is just computer work, and their cousin’s friend is pursuing some degree in Computer Science, so he could do it at much cheaper rate, right?

Wrong!

What most first-time startup founders fail to understand is that the app itself is not expensive, but the amount of work required from mobile app developers and designers is expensive. You can find millions of mobile apps in App Stores and yet only a handful of them earns money or are really useful. Facebook and Google for example, have hundreds of engineers and developers working on a single app.

Besides, there are also apps which are fundamental to businesses that are worth billions of dollars. These apps were not developed by a single person or a team of 2-3 developers, most of them were designed and developed by at least a team of more than 5 persons.

Moreover, we can confidently say that a top-100 app has never been built by a group of freelance app developers or a small dev shop. Today, the competitive market has such high standards that these players can’t keep up. We don’t mean to say that it’s a good thing, but it’s just the reality.

We’ve heard from many people who invested $10-$15k to build a small app, but received shady final product. This was just one example, let’s go ahead and discuss what’s at stake if you cut your mobile app development costs by choosing shortcuts.

#1

The final app is poorly designed. It looks dodgy with cheap UI. Users generally don’t trust such shady interface, so they don’t download the app or spend their money in it.

#2

Quality is negligible. Poor or no testing was conducted, and no security or performance protocols were in place. User’s private data will be at risk and your entire source code could also surface online at any day.

#3

The final app isn’t scalable when the time arrives. New users strain the system. And when finally the app starts receiving increased traffic, the app becomes a liability.

#4

Because of the absence of clear app requirements, a detailed brief, and clear scope of work, every modified feature are labelled as “extras” in the end. Because of this, the low price tag suddenly turns into 200% of the contract value due to endless change requests.

#5

At last, the code becomes unusable for any other developer because of the endless times of modification. And even if you hire a legitimate app development firm now, they’ll have to start from scratch.

Benefits of Paying For Top Talent

Smart, expert, and experienced mobile app developers are keen problem solvers. They provide incredible amount of value. And given the demand for the top talent everywhere around the world, why should they choose to work for $5 an hour? They won’t, of course.

These talented, smart, and experienced app developers build mobile apps that are highly-scalable. Their mobile app designers create a UI that’s just addictive and sticky to attract more and more users. Just think about it this way - Why would Google and Facebook spend so much money on their development teams?

Simple. They obviously know the value of talented critical thinkers and problem solvers.

Now, when it comes to mobile app development, most app ideas do not require a team consisting of dozens of people, but it will most certainly require a team of designers, developers, quality testers, and managers, who can make your product useful and competitive. Therefore, make sure that your mobile app development firm forms a team of them all.

How Much Would It Cost To Hire Top Talent For Mobile App Development?

Generally, the mobile app development costs are influenced by many different factors. And even small changes during the app development can cause increase and decrease in the overall cost. It can also be influenced by number of platforms your app has to be compatible with. Most startups usually start with one platform to validate their mobile app idea. Besides, choosing both platforms (Android & iOS) will just double the costs.

Overall, mobile app development is expensive. However, our experienced mobile app development team can advise you on which core features the app must have and point out those which can be left out for later once your idea has been validated.

Facebook Messenger Update: The New Group Video Chat Will Allow 50 People To Participate

Shortly after Snapchat introduced Snapchat groups to increase engagements in this christmas season, Facebook also decided to go head-to-head by announcing new group video chat feature with up to 50 members. In this new feature, the Facebook group video chat will stream everyone’s camera feed to one another for the first six members. And in case the number is above six, the Facebook Messenger will display only dominant person’s feed.

Credits : fb Newsroom

This, however, makes video chat feature most robust in the market. The Facebook has surpassed both Google Hangouts and Skype by being the first app to add this feature. Clearly, the social network is interested in dominating both consumers and office employees whose job include telecommuting and video conferencing.

Although, after one week, Slack also added the video chat feature in its app to beat the Facebook. And in mobile space, Facebook is actually dealing with lot of competitors. Even the Snapchat added this feature earlier this year, and Whatsapp also made the feature open to the public last month.

However, Facebook’s capabilities are way ahead than the competitors in the video chat feature area. And the company stresses that the other features of the Facebook Messenger also stay intact. So that the app users can still send texts, stickers, and animations along with new group video chat feature. 

And how can we forget the Facebook chat bot? It has helped a vast number of companies to reach their potential audience. These bots are coded to read and write messages, and to perform certain automated actions. Thanks to Facebook, companies can now deliver automated guidance, customer support, and other interactive experiences through Facebook chat bots. By hiring Facebook Messenger chat bot developers who can easily write code to develop customized chat bot for your company, you can too reach out to a wider audience for your product/service. However, if you’re still not sure, you can contact few experts, or consult with development companies to get detailed information. 

Whatsapp Users Will Soon Have An Option To Recall, Edit Sent Messages

Has it ever occurred? Your message was intended for your wife, but mistakenly sent to somebody else from the contacts?

It's frustrating, right? Explaining them how you made a stupid mistake, and then apologize to them.

Well, Whatsapp now has a solution for it. Whatsapp may soon launch new feature to recall or edit your sent messages, which you might sent mistakenly. Even many Whatsapp like social messaging apps have also started to implement the recall feature.

According to a report in WABetaInfo, Whatsapp, a Facebook owned messaging service is testing new features at their development center that will allow Whatsapp users to recall and edit sent messages.

“WhatsApp has added in beta the possibility to edit messages that you already sent. It is actually disabled by default and it’s under development,” the WABetaInfo’s tweet read.

However, the Whatsapp users will only be able to edit recent messages, not the too old messages.

This functionality is expected to appear soon. Currently it has only appeared on Whatsapp beta verison 2.17.869 on iOS.

Got A New iPad For Your Business Use? Checkout Best iPad Business Apps of 2016

Apple’s iPad is the most successful device in the modern professional’s working life as it is considered as the undisputed king of the business state.

Among all the iPad models, iPad Air was the revolutionary device that took the real iPad concept and shaved off an impossible amount of weight and framework, resulting in a more portable and potent device.

If you have got an iPad, you may have downloaded some of the apps like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and LinkedIn. These apps are the common apps that used by everybody in their daily life.

Do you know that there are other iPad applications that can help you to boost your business, work productivity, and manage workload in an easy manner? Yes, you read it correct. There are various best business apps for iPad, allowing you to perform complex business tasks easily. If you are not using these apps, you are not using your iPad to its full potential.

Here are the 6 Most Useful iPad Business Applications of 2016

Mint

With Mint, you can manage your money and budget in a better way. It is a free financial tracker application that easily pull all your accounts, credit cards and investments into one place. By allowing you to create budget, track bills, receive bill reminders, and get fully-customized tips for reducing fees and saving money, Mint is a right choice in money manager app.

Moreover, the application automatically organize and track your expenses, finances, and generate a budget so that you can easily save money. Through Mint, you can securely connect your bank accounts and other finances.

Features of the App

• The app allows to see and track all your finance accounts at one single place.
•  It automatically categorizes banking and credit card transactions.
• Charts and graphs show you at one single glance that where you are spending, so you can save money.
• To better understand your transaction patterns, you can manage your budget using it.

Easy Books: Accounting, Bookkeeping & Invoicing

Easy Books is one of the best professional business bookkeeping and invoicing apps for iPad users. The application comprises in-app help and space for 60 transactions, allowing you to see if you like it. Within the application, you can update to unlimited transaction as well.

Easy Books is the perfect application for small businesses to keep track of all their bank accounts, customers, suppliers, sales and purchase invoices, earnings and expenses. Users can also reconcile their statements in the app for bank and credit card accounts.

Features of Easy Books Application

• It comes with in-built calculator, pre-filled forms and common linked accounts based on previous entries to help save you time.
• Set recurring transactions to match your standing orders. It automatically creates such transactions as they become due as per your schedule.
• You can lock the app using a four-digit passcode and Touch ID.

Dragon Dictation

An easy-to-use voice recognition application, Dragon Dictation is powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking, allowing you to speak and instantly see your text or email messages. Generally, this application is up to five times faster compare to any other typing on the keyboard.

Using this app, you can also command status updates directly to your Social Networking apps or send important notes or reminders to yourself using your voice. It is most useful app when you are on-the-go, just stop talking and start speaking.

Features of Dragon Dictation App

• It supports with a multitude of global languages.
• Dictate Status Updates Directly to Your Social Networking Applications (Facebook and Twitter)
• It allows to Send Notes and Reminders to Yourself Using Your Voice.
• It is a lot Better than Typing on any other Keyboard

ScanBizCards Business Card Reader

ScanBizCards is the most useful business card app scanner with cloud backup and sync across multiple devices, giving access to cards from any browser. Using this app, you can scan cards in seconds or submit tricky cards for 100% accurate human transcription. ScanBizCards app works with Evernote, Salesforce, and other CRMs.

The application allows you to keep your CRM up-to-date with direct card export to Salesforce, SugarCRM, mailer mailer, Oracle Fusion. In addition to this, the app adds contacts or merge scans with existing records.

Features of ScanBizCards App

• Assign Contact to Group/Add New Groups
• You can add notes to each contact
• Full Calendar Integration to Add Follow-up Reminders
• Allows to Send Instant Email and Your VCard to New Contact.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is ready for iPad Pro and it works amazingly on the iPads. Now, the Word document looks wonderful than ever on your tablet and phone. While editing and creating doc, you can be confident as it will look exactly how you want across PC, Mac, tablet and phone.

It has the familiar Office look and feel along with an instinctive touch experience, so you will be up and running in no time.

Features of the Microsoft Word App

• Images, tables, charts, SmartArt, Footnotes and Equations are all there that can be nicely formatted.
• Allows to Choose Between the Real Doc Layout or Easy-to-read Layout.
• Print Word documents to an AirPrint printer, with or without markup.
• Check Email Attachments and Access Word Docs from Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud for SharePoint and Business.

SlideShark

Do you need to showcase a PowerPoint presentation or PDF on your iPad? SlideShark is one of the most useful business apps for iPad that can make it happen easily. The app allows you to edit and interpret your presentations within the app too.

For sales professionals and businesses, SlideShark is a powerful and proven sales presentation app built by Brainshark. Equipped with numerous features, the app has integrations with OneDrive, Box, Dropbox and other cloud storage providers.

Exclusive Features of SlideShark App

• Upload PowerPoint files through SlideShark website and open from email attachments on your device or you can import from cloud storage too.
• Swipe up to go to Specific Slides & Access More Features
• Offline Presenting
• Tap or Swipe to Advance Animations and Slides, Swipe back to go back.

Conclusion

Now, you have found several options of new apps to download on your iPad. You can download any of the above-mentioned applications on your iPad and perform your daily business task a lot easily.

However, if you wanted to develop your own iPad business application, you can share your idea with us as we are one of the leading iPad app development company in India. We have already developed enormous iPad apps for our customers worldwide.

Build Like Uber - Earn Like Uber. Here's How

What would you do if your idea for a mobile app startup has already ripened?

Unique ideas are like rare diamonds. Also, the technology is growing rapidly and there is reasonable chance that the app idea you’re holding in your head might already be implemented.

Back in 2009, two entrepreneurs from San Francisco - Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp - founded a taxi booking service and named it Uber company.

Since Uber’s launch, taxi booking startup has grown enormously and turned into international transportation network company.

Today, Uber is expanded in 35 countries that includes more than 100 cities. Needless to say, such great ideas tend to be repeated.

Take a look around the latest buzz.

Taxify - An Estonian startup - closed a $100K seed round.

Another competitor of Uber in Spain called Cabify received $8M in series A.

It is recommended that you check out all the competitors before you begin to start your startup.

By the way, have you read our article about: How Uber-like On-demand Services are Disrupting Traditional Businesses?

This time, we’ll share the secrets behind how does Uber work and how does Uber make money.

photo credit: Yalantis

The Matter About Maps & Location

Any startup company that provides delivery of physical goods to its consumers needs to deal with mapping, especially in taxi booking services.

Most of the taxi-booking apps rely on the following features.

Identifying the customer’s device location.
Giving driving directions.
Drawing routes.

Uber Technologies

It is, without any doubts, necessary that you must determine the current location of your customer.

So how does Uber accomplish this?

Well, the Uber iOS app basically uses the Corelocation framework that gives user’s device location. This framework also allows Uber to define geographic regions and monitor the movements.

In the Uber Android app, they integrate Google location APIs to get the current location of user’s device.

But What About Directions & Routes?

To display directions on the map, the Uber team used Mapkit in their iOS app. This Mapkit registers the app as a routing app and makes directions available on user’s device.

Similarly, the Uber Android app gets routes and directions by using Google Maps Android API v2. This new version is even much simpler for the developers to display route drawing.

Push Notifications

To implement the push notifications service, Uber has integrated Apple push notifications in their iOS app and Google Cloud Messaging Service for their Android app.

This is good but what if user’s mobile data is unavailable and offline?

How will a user get notification for the ride status?

The Uber has already took care of that as well. From developer’s point of view, all push notifications are unidirectional. This means, all the push notifications that are being send might not be received.

This is why the Uber also started sending ride status through SMS. because if the SMS is failed to deliver, the SMS provider always informs them. By doing this, they made customer experience even more efficient.

Revenue Model

Talking about money, Uber’s revenue model is giving around $20M per week from the global revenue.

Now if you don’t know, Uber uses cashless system. Customers use debit card or credit card before they ride, or they use a promo code. This eliminates the entire human-to-human cash transfers, including the driver’s tip. Uber automatically adds 20% driver’s tip in your fare.

Talking about profit, Uber takes 20% of a driver’s fare that makes quite a profitable revenue model.

photo credit: Yalantis

However, for accepting card payments, Uber has partnered with Braintree. It is a leading mobile payment platform. Paypal bought Braintree for $800M back in 2013 and currently Braintree makes $4 billion per year on mobile.


Uber has also integrated Paypal’s Card.io for credit card scanning in US. the app usually “sees” the card, reads the information and enters the data for you. While in Android, you have to manually enter all credit card information for the Uber account.

Point is, Uber has taken care of each and every small aspect in their business model as well as revenue model, leaving no bugs behind. Also, they’re always consistent for making their customers’ lives easy by offering quick ways to book a taxi.

Even we at Space-O, offer Uber app clone development. So if you’re looking into building next Uber targeting either a specific region or all over globe. With over 200 developers, not only we have expertise in mobile app development, but we also suggest & include features that are locally acceptable and are in-demand.

Tips to Get the First 5 Thousand Users for Your Dating App

Gaining a huge amount of users is challenging for startups. And gaining users for product-based platform is even more problematic.

To attract such a huge amount of users, you need to make sure that you already have enough users on-board already from the beginning.

Therefore, in this article, we’ll share few tips to overcome the issue of gaining users at the beginning, especially for the dating apps.

You’ll also learn how to gain the initial user base and how to keep that number growing.

What You Need to Decide First

Before you start working to gain first users on-board, you need to first define who your users are, how you want them to see your app, and why they should prefer your app over others.

Target Audience

The fact is, a dating app’s value is in its users only. So while planning for a dating app, always remember the audience that your app targets.

There are many other popular dating apps like for farmers (Farmers Only), for pet-owners (Twindog), for minorities (JSwipe), and for several other demographics.

Positioning

Once you define your target audience, determine how to communicate with them and most importantly, how you want your target audience to think about your app.

An app with a clear message will resonate than all promotional materials.

For example, “Chat & Dating - Local Single People Meet” uses videos so that its users can show their true authenticity by dialogue, facial expressions, and emotional resonance. Where tinder only allows people to upload couple of pictures and write a short bio.

(One of the Space-O’s projects, social networking startup Chat & Dating is social platform for meeting new people, especially for dating.)

Competitive Advantage

Sure, positioning expresses the philosophy about your app, but you must also express that how is your app different from other dating apps on the market. What unique features your app has? How it will eliminate creepers, spammers, and bots? Answering these question will solidify your app concept.

For starters you can focus on just one unique feature that is different from others. But keep in mind that dating app market is flooded today. And the more original & unique features your app provides, the more chances that your app won’t be drowned out from the competition.

Start Social Media Marketing in Advance

Once you know what type of app you are going to deliver and who your app users are, start attracting your initial user base.

Find out the popular social platforms among your target audience and start marketing there. These social platforms are the first place where you’ll find your potential users and will be able to establish emotional connection with them.

Create social pages before you launch your app. This will help you gather your potential users and post content that is valuable to your audience. Now by posting content doesn’t mean just news about your app, but also unique, entertaining, and provides practical value to your audience.

All in all, craft unique content or promotional materials that are attractive & catchy enough to spread across the networks.

Start With a Community

People generally date with a radius around where they live. This is the reason why most dating apps are location-based. But the problem is, you need to sign up enough users within a particular area. Even if you gain 5000 users for your app and they’re distributed all around US for example, your app won’t be able to produce many dates for your users.

What you can do is, first start with a promising area to launch your app. Pick an area where your audience socializes often. This way, your app will easily generate dates. Another solution is targeting local campuses. They help a lot for spreading word about your app through word-of-mouth.

Bottom line is, start from small region or campus, if your app succeeds there, people will automatically start spreading news about your app through several channels.

Don’t Even Think About Fake Accounts

Generally, the common idea is to create a certain number of fake accounts and remove them as the real users join. It’s known to be easiest way to populate your app, but it not recommended.

However, when planning to develop a location dating apps, it’s advised to consult a mobile app development company that can drive you on right path to success.

3 Proven Strategies to Boost Mobile App Engagement Like a Pro!

Developing a mobile app to receive a great amount of engagement takes much more than just an idea. What it actually needs is applying proven strategies that helps to drive better engagement in a mobile app.

I’m going to share 3 proven strategies that work like a concrete.

Track Your Users’ Behaviour

The first thing you should do is, track what happens after users install your app. How users engages with it and where they drop out. Checking these data will help you find and understand the weak points of your mobile app.

If you’re a beginner and not aware how to track these data, you can just google it and you’ll have a list of analytics solutions. And if you still feel confused, you can go with either AppAnalytics.io or Leanplum. They both have great features to track users’ behaviour and help you understand the weak points of your mobile app.

And once you know these weak points, establish segments around these milestones on which you want your users to reach.

Keypoint: Track how users behave with your application.

Write Enticing Messages For Re-Engagement

Before you do anything, it is vital to establish a creative strategy.

Offer your users something compelling in your Ads that will encourage them to re-engage with your app.

For instance, write few messages that speak with your users depending on how familiar they are with your app. Additionally, you can provide a reminder about the special feature of your app.

Keypoint: Write compelling reasons for your users that encourage them to re-engage with your app.

Setup Deep Links

Once you write enticing messages, decide where you want to land your users in the app. Ask your developers to set up deep links that will land the users where they can tap on your engagement ad, rather than sending all users on the home screen of your app.

Doing this can lead your app users directly to predefined spot that can meet their best requirements.

Keypoint: Setup deep links to the parts of your app where users can easily re-engage.

Conclusion

In this digital world, mobile apps are the new cool! However, developing and getting that app discover by your defined audience is just the beginning of your journey. You need to keep applying different strategies to get users regularly engaged with your app.

And if you’re just starting out and yet to develop your mobile app, hire iPhone developer to build your first mobile app, rather than doing it yourself.