As a startup, you are expected to have an outstanding digital product that can effectively represent your core mission and generate initial traction for your business. But, again, you’re a startup, which often means that you’re pressed for time and have to grow on a dime. Against this backdrop, resorting to no-code and low-code platforms to build your app seems like a great idea.
But can ready-made solutions compete with almost 5 million apps out there and do justice to your company’s unique selling proposition? That’s the question we’re going to answer in this blog post.
This article compares the top two most popular options – custom application development vs. white-labeled solutions.
Custom mobile app development vs. ready-made solutions
As the name implies, custom mobile application development means building an app from scratch based on your unique business needs. Conversely, ready-made solutions come from app builders or ready-to-purchase adjustable platforms.
Often, ready-made solutions have limited functionality and fewer design options compared to custom applications. No wonder the end-user product based on canned solutions fails to stand out from competitors.
However, there is also a bright side to ready-made solutions. Besides being cheaper, off-the-shelf solutions are:
- Quicker to implement. If you need a high-speed train to the market, off-the-shelf apps might fill the bill as they can be used as soon as they are installed.
- A good option to use as a prototype. Ready-made solutions come in handy at the initial stages of your startup, especially when you need a tangible representation of your concept to gather initial feedback or secure funding for further product development.
So, why do businesses spend more on custom mobile apps when it's much cheaper to get a ready-made solution? It's the benefits of custom app development that make a difference.
Advantages of custom mobile application development
Custom mobile app development services are an investment, but the rewards often outweigh the initial costs. From high-touch experiences to unrivaled integration capabilities, custom mobile apps are the drivers of high-performing startups.
Customization
Customization is among the main reasons why you should build a custom app. Custom mobile applications enable you to meet your business goals and needs on your terms and based on the technology stack of your choice.
When dealing with white-labeled solutions, you have to settle for the available set of features that may be unnecessary or insufficient for you. The advantage of customization is so significant that it drives four more benefits:
- Personalized UX: Off-the-shelf solutions typically offer a basic set of features and templates that provide a rather mediocre user experience. This can hardly help you win over your audience and provide maximum convenience when navigating your app.
- Brand identity: In the eyes of a customer, an artfully made mobile application with branded UI and UX always sets the business apart from its competitors. Given an overly competitive market, a custom app is perfect for sharing your authenticity with a wider audience and raising brand awareness.
- Freedom of creativity: You can implement almost any idea and integrate any feature if you go off the beaten path. This also includes technology stack – programming languages and frameworks – which may not be an option in ready-made solutions.
Scalability
A custom mobile app is easier to improve as you can add new features when needed. This approach allows you to start small and then iterate on the project. The architecture and codebase of a custom app can be easily adjusted to meet the growing user needs.
With app builders, you are bound to a proprietary platform. Off-the-shelf apps are designed for a standard user base and may face performance bottlenecks caused by the increased user load. Also, scaling up might lead to higher subscription fees or additional costs.
Ownership and terms of use
Usually, even if you buy a pre-made app, you still won't fully own it. Pre-made apps also have the following limitations caused by third-party ownership:
- A lack of a solo image: Canned apps often come with unwanted branding. It can turn out to be a problem for businesses that value distinctive brand image.
- Restrictions: Businesses that choose ready-made solutions might experience troubles with distribution restrictions, copyright claims, etc.
- Hidden risks: The provider may go out of business, have a data leak, get into a public scandal, and interfere in the app activity – in a word, it's easy to lose control of your app.
Owning the intellectual property places you in control of your app and reduces risks associated with third-party dependencies, safeguarding your investment.
Integrations and compatibility
Going custom is a sure way to integrate seamlessly with your existing business ecosystem and connect your application with the needed devices, software, and operating systems. You can equip it with all the necessary functionality to communicate with your order processing, asset monitoring, or any other software.
Ready-made solutions have limited integration capabilities and can only connect with a few partner third-party services.
Efficiency
A mobile app isn’t always a means of dealing with consumers and enhancing the service. Very often, apps take the place of a reliable supporter that facilitates business operations, optimization, and automation.
Although it’s more expensive to build a custom app, it will better meet your business needs and establish a rapport with other software you may be using. While an out-of-the-box solution can still provide a sufficient number of features, it may also include unnecessary functionality that will only clutter your solution.
Security
Nothing can compare to a custom app regarding security. When building your app, your custom app development company pays due diligence to the chosen operating systems and API requirements. Also, your mobile app development team analyzes your unique security and regulatory requirements to build a compliant application, which is a deal breaker for healthcare and fintech startups. Moreover, they can integrate additional security measures to safeguard your users' personal data.
Off-the-shelf apps are pre-coded, so you can never be sure if the code is vulnerability-free. Although canned applications might meet basic compliance standards, they won't be able to address your industry-specific data handling practices.
Additional revenue opportunities
When making a custom mobile app, it is in your power to choose a monetization strategy. You can sell branded products, advertisements, subscriptions, or additional services. Everything is up to you, unlike with a ready-made solution, where you have limited control and flexibility in revenue generation. With off-the-shelf apps, your in-app purchases are often restricted to specific items or features determined by the app developer. As for advertising, canned apps give you less control over ad placement and content.
A step-by-step custom app development process
Developing custom mobile apps might seem like a lot to handle: the process of custom software development includes quite a number of variables and requires you to put a lot of thought and effort into building a digital product. But with an experienced custom app development team, your app idea can seamlessly transition from concept to reality.
Step 1: Analyze your app idea
You should start the development process by shaping your business vision. Do you need an app for a particular business case? What are your target audience and direct competitors? What set of features does your app include? The more defined your business idea is, the less time it will take to build and release your product.
During this step, you should also decide on the platform on which your application is premised. Here, you have three options:
- Native mobile apps: Your custom software is designed to run on one platform – Android or iOS.
- Cross-platform apps: they cover both platforms with one codebase.
- Hybrid apps: Those are web applications put in a native app shell.
This fundamental choice depends on the unique requirements of your project, including your budget, timeline, application lifetime, and the maturity of your business idea.
Step 2: Find a trusted app development team
Unless you have a full-cycle development team on site, you will have to locate a reliable mobile app development company to take over your project. We recommend choosing an experienced partner with at least five years of hands-on experience and a cross-functional team to take over the end-to-end development process.
The go-to destinations for finding a tech partner include industry ratings like Clutch and Designrush. These platforms rank providers based on several quantitative and qualitative factors, including client reviews, company experience, portfolio, and more. They also feature a domain and service line breakdown of each provider, which allows you to select a mobile development company.
Once you reach out to an app agency, they analyze your project requirements and set up an optimal mobile app development team.
Step 3: Discovery and ideation
Brainstorming gets your collaboration with a development agency off to a good start. During the discovery phase, your development team (and business analysts, in particular) will perform thorough research on your project idea, study the market and your competitors, define user personas, and identify your product’s must-have features.
The insights from the business analysis stage turn into a project roadmap, functional requirements document, and product architecture. At this stage, you also get a clickable prototype of your application from the design team so you can validate the future look of your digital product.
Step 4: MVP design and development
Following the documentation and approved prototype, the UX/UI team creates a fully-fledged design for your custom mobile app. The final layouts of your app's design are handed over to mobile app developers for implementation.
Your development team then transforms your application requirements into features, sets up the frontend and backend of your solution, and integrates your solution with the necessary services or business applications.
Keep in mind that your MVP should offer enough functionality for the end user to explore your product. When your MVP gets enough user feedback, you can elevate your application and add other features.
Step 5: Test your MVP
Typically, development and testing are managed in the same sprint to ensure the high quality of each deliverable and accelerated release. Your quality assurance team and test engineers validate the code quality, check the performance of your application, and test it on real mobile devices to make sure it works as intended across multiple screens.
Step 6: Submit to the app stores
When your application is ready for launch, it's time to release it into the wild. Keep in mind that both Android and iOS applications must meet the guidelines of each platform to prevent rejection.
When your application is published, ensure your store listing has all the information to help your application rank higher.
Step 7: Post-launch monitoring and product scale-up
Mobile app development isn’t done after the release. Your next task is to collect user feedback, prioritize new features, and go through the same steps we mentioned above. Routine maintenance, such as security patches, version updates, and bug fixes, should also be performed regularly.
When your app gains initial traction, your development team can introduce new features to enhance user experience and drive continued growth.
Custom app development process at Orangesoft
Orangesoft is a mature app development company with over 13 years in the market. Since early 2011, we have been delivering custom, high-quality mobile and web applications to global startups. From healthcare to finance, our developers take time to dive deep into the unique challenges of each company and develop an impactful solution with added business value.
Building on our wide experience, Orangesoft offers a wide range of game-changing benefits to our clients:
- The full-cycle mobile app development process
- Cross-functional, autonomous teams with every skill needed for successful project delivery (iOS and Android developers, business analysts, DevOps, designers, QA engineers, and others)
- Adaptable hiring options (dedicated teams, time & material, fixed price, mixed collaboration models)
- Transparent, client-first development workflow (working build every two weeks, daily reports, etc.)
Following a calibrated and time-tested software development lifecycle (SDLC), we drive your project from ideation to delivery on time, within budget, and according to your expectations. Typically, an SDLC at Orangesoft includes the following milestones:
- Discovery – our team analyzes your business and project needs, elicits functional requirements, maps out the development process, and creates wireframes (design blueprints).
- UX/UI design – the design team proceeds with creating a clickable prototype based on the approved wireframes.
- MVP development – iOS and/or Android developers transform the design into a minimum viable product and set up integrations and other processes needed to power your application.
- Testing – our QA engineers and testers thoroughly check every component of your application to make sure it’s bug-free, operates well across devices, and meets pre-defined requirements.
- Release – our team transfers the product to the client and, if needed, helps submit the application to the app stores.
- Product scaling – our team adjusts the architecture and codebase of your product to facilitate its growth. We also implement additional features based on the feedback of the users and stakeholders.
Wrapping up
All in all, building a custom app from scratch based on your needs results in higher quality in the short and long term. Choosing custom iOS app development means that your application will be 100% aligned with the App Store and its regulations. Custom-built apps offer seamless, bug-free performance and high-quality branded design that makes it easy to win over your target audience.
Although building a custom mobile application might seem like a tough and time-consuming process, having a trusted development partner like Orangesoft can help you make the next big app. Orangesoft's team has all the required skills and 13 years of hands-on experience in building custom apps. Contact us today, and we'll find the solution together.