Know All about Hire a Mobile App Developer? - A Perfect Guide

I know that new founders can find it difficult to hire a mobile app developer for their project. I mean, you might have a great product idea that you want to turn into reality. You have a list of features you want to include in your app. However, you’re stuck when thinking about what kind of mobile app developer to hire. I don’t blame you, there are a lot of technologies to choose from and you need someone experienced to get the job done right.

Well, in this blog, I’ll take you through the ins and outs of what it takes to hire a mobile app developer. Additionally, I’ll cover the technologies you need to keep an eye on and how to choose a technology that will suit your project.

Let’s dive in.

The million dollar question: How much does it cost to hire an app developer for your next project?

I understand, the cost for development might be the first thing that’ll come to your mind. You need to consider a few factors before you can understand the cost of hiring a mobile app developer. What technology you’re building your app on, how experienced a developer is, which part of the world they are in, and so on.

Typically, you can hire a mobile app developer for $15 - $20 an hour from a place like India, Philippines, and Vietnam. If you’re hiring from a place like the US or countries in Europe, your cost will jump to anywhere from $40 to $120 Dollars an hour. You may even have to pay $200 an hour if you want a very experienced developer.

Unless you’re running a multinational organization working on a very large product, you’re better off outsourcing your mobile app offshore. Usually, you can get an entire team of experienced developers from an offshore provider for the price of hiring an experienced developer from the US or Europe.

Why are mobile apps for business so important?

Soon, we will talk about what to look for before you hire a mobile app developer. But first, let's talk about why mobile apps are important for businesses.

Everyone uses a smartphone today. Mobile technology has grown so exponentially over the past 5 years that even your grandma probably uses a smartphone. This means that mobile phones get the most screen time out of all the other alternatives you have.

When you’re offering a product or service, it's far easier to acquire customers through mobile platforms. For example, if you have a lot of employees, you can make internal communications easier through an app like Slack.

Because of this worldwide adoption and the fact that smartphones are so affordable now, you can save time and money if you offer your products and services through a mobile app.

Hire Mobile App Consultants for End-to-End Services

You might be surprised to know that even large multinational organizations hire mobile app consultants or consulting firms for building products. This is because building a team from scratch or adapting a team from an existing project can be time-consuming and expensive.

When you go to a consulting firm to hire a mobile app developer, you will have the flexibility to choose from a very large talent pool. Most consulting firms you’re going to find will have a lot of experienced in-house developers and can assemble a team faster. This is because their expertise is in outsourcing and fulfilling requirements as a package deal.

Additionally, going through a consulting firm means that you don’t have to worry about the availability of resources. Lets just say that you start a project and a developer gets sick for a few days. When you’re hiring independently, there’s nothing much you can do about it. You will have to wait for your developer to recover and come back to work or additionally hire a mobile app developer if you want to continue your project. However, consulting firms usually have developers on the bench. What this means is that in case a resource is not available, they can easily replace them with another resource with similar experience.

How to evaluate mobile app developers?

Of course, you always want your app to be of high quality. Even if you decide to hire from an established mobile app development company, it always pays off as a founder to know who you are hiring. Additionally, you have to understand what scale your project is before you hire a mobile app developer.

For example, let's say that your product is in its early stages and you only want to test things out in the market. Here, you don’t need to launch on multiple devices or hire a large team. You are far better off hiring one or two developers and launching an MVP or Minimum Viable Product to see how the market reacts to your product.

Now, let’s say that you’ve validated your product and see some interest with your target users. The next step would be to expand and scale the product. Still, you don’t necessarily need a very big team. If you’re not making profits initially, it might not make sense to do so.. Here, you can hire a mobile app developer that knows how to code on Flutter, and seamlessly launch your app on both iOS and Android devices.

Ask yourself these questions before you go ahead and take the dive:

• How large is the scale of the project that I’m trying to make?
• Is the developer I’m hiring experienced? (unless you’re tech expert, hire someone with at least 2-3 years of experience)
• Has the developer worked on multiple projects previously?
• Will they be charging me hourly or on a cost per project basis?
• Can I communicate with the developer? (if you’re from an English speaking country, hire a mobile app developer from a country like India where there are a lot of English speakers).

Why You Need iOS Developers and When?

Now, if you’re searching for developers you can hire, there’s a lot to choose from. Whom you should hire has to be based on what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if you’re only building for the Apple ecosystem or if you’re a large scale product, you should consider hiring a dedicated iOS developer. You can hire a software engineer who works on multiple tech stacks like Android and iOS. However, the best option would be to hire a mobile app developer that specializes in iOS apps.

This is because iOS apps are quite different from Android apps and Apple is very specific about what they allow on their app store. You will find that most software development providers will have separate teams for iOS development. It's quite easier to hire from an agency than finding a freelancer because even if a resource is not available between projects, you can easily replace them with another resource with similar experience.

Essential Considerations When You Hire Android Developers

If your objective is to launch an app for the masses, then you can’t go wrong with Android. When you hire a mobile app developer who specializes in Android, make sure that you find someone who has built apps for multiple device screens. Android is a big ocean to swim in because you have thousands of devices with different screen sizes and performance.

If you’re building an app for enterprise use cases, you don’t have to worry as much about it because most enterprise users will have capable devices. But, for example, if you’re building a social media app, you need an app that covers a wide range of devices. It's easy enough to hire a mobile app developer but you need someone extremely skilled and experienced to produce a quality product that works well when handling lots of traffic.

Compelling Reasons To Hire Flutter Developers

No, we’re not talking about butterflies here although you might get butterflies if you knew how powerful Flutter really is. Jokes aside, Flutter will be the perfect choice if you’re launching your app at a smaller scale but want to cover both Android and iOS devices.

So, should you hire a mobile app developer who specializes in Flutter? Let's explore some of the amazing things you have going for Flutter. Flutter is open-source, it's built by Google, and you can build entire apps (this means web and mobile, including Android and iOS) using a single codebase. Setting aside the Pig Latin, what this basically means is that you can code your apps once and then deploy it on multiple operating systems.

When you’re building something like an MVP, Flutter is a no-brainer. You don’t have to worry about getting lots of developers and launch quickly on any device you want. Hire a mobile app developer who specializes in Flutter, and you’re done. I think going the agency route would be beneficial here also because you can usually hire a team including UI/UX designers and testing engineers for a little more than hiring a single Flutter developer from the US or EU.

Hire Ionic Developers Where It Makes Sense

Speaking of cross-platform apps, you can’t disregard Ionic. It’s a UI toolkit you can use to build hybrid apps but you can use HTML CSS, and JavaScript or TypeScript to build your apps. You can easily hire a mobile app developer for Ionic if your core app is majorly web-based. The great thing here is that all Ionic apps start as web apps and you can save it on your phone or computer to use like a native app.

Additionally, Ionic gives you pre-built components for building your user interfaces. Which means that you can design your apps to look consistent on multiple device screens. The great thing about this is that most web developers who know how to code on Angular, React, and Vue.js can easily adapt to Ionic. You can achieve very good results without having to hire a mobile app developer. Keep in mind if your app is complex, Ionic might not be as powerful as building natively.

Hire React Native Developers To Quickly Launch Your Project

It is another framework for building hybrid apps but probably one of the most used by developers. React Native is your go-to framework if you want your apps to be on multiple devices but don’t need a lot of explicated bells and whistles. However, you don’t have to think that the apps you build on React Native won’t be powerful.

Most founders start their app journey on the web and don’t hire a mobile app developer until they get some sort of market validation. If your application will primarily reside on the web, then React Native is the right choice for you. But wait. So, why choose React Native when you already have Ionic? Ionic apps aren’t like your typical full-scale apps. You can’t publish them on any of the app stores. However, you can easily publish apps built on React Native on any app store.

Hire iPhone App Developers If Your Circumstances Are Special

Now that we’re here, you might be wondering why I’ve added iPhone app developers as a separate headline. Well, you can hire a mobile app developer who specializes in iOS but sometimes, you might want to build your app just for the Apple iPhone. For example, the majority of people use Instagram on their phones. Have you noticed how the app for Instagram works better on iPhones?

The reason for this is that Apple has a fixed number of devices. If you know that your app is only going to be on the iPhone, you can optimize it specifically for those devices. In this case, you will benefit greatly when you hire a mobile app developer who’s an expert in building iPhone apps.

You can really accomplish some great results if you have a niche app and you’re looking for market validation. Here, your user feedback will be very useful and you can tweak your app until it is completely optimized. However, the catch is that you’re going to need additional developers if you have plans to expand your user base.

Now, You’re Ready To Hire a Mobile App Developer

Building an app for your startup idea can be challenging when you’re just starting out. As a founder, you have to do a lot of homework before you hire a mobile app developer or team. Hopefully, this blog post has helped you understand the different options you have.

Just remember, finding talent won’t be difficult because there are plenty of developers and agencies around the world. I might be biased but years of experience in the industry has taught me that hiring an agency is the most cost effective solution for new projects. This is because you won’t have all the answers when you’re just starting out. You could hire a mobile app developer you find on a freelancing website but without someone to validate and verify their work, you’re pretty much shooting in the dark.

This is where hiring an agency will really help you out. Agencies have entire product teams with years of experience building software. You can hire an entire team from Asia for the cost of hiring a single experienced developer from places like the US or EU.

If you found this blog useful, share it with a founder who could use this information.