Outsourcing
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Today, mobile apps have spread to all parts of people's lives, from ordering pizza to booking doctor's appointments to managing business messaging. As the number of smartphone users grows and the mobile app market expands rapidly, it seems there is no better time to implement your product idea. For a fast-track success, consider outsourcing mobile app development as a helping hand.
What makes application outsourcing an attractive option for businesses of all sizes and domains? First of all, budget savings. This is the major benefit that outbalances all other associated risks and concerns. On average, businesses can save up to 40% of their budget when preferring outsourcing to in-house development.
Outsourcing helps businesses at different levels. Development outsourcing saves limited resources for startups, allowing them to focus on innovative ideas and new features and invest in growth. For SMEs, application development outsourcing saves time and money while increasing efficiency and quality. Large enterprises are 128% more likely to outsource software development to access local market expertise and diversify their operational risks.
Now that we know that outsourcing suits businesses of any size, including startups, let's take a closer look at its advantages.
With outsourcing, you can enhance the quality of your mobile application by hiring a team tailored to your project needs. For example, you are a financial institution wanting to launch iOS and Android apps for loan management. Choosing to outsource, you can select a team with relevant experience in FinTech, solid knowledge of security practices and regulations, and a robust tech stack for both platforms. That gives you an advantage of gaining quality products developed with the latest technologies and best practices in mind.
Mobile app development trends like AI integration, IoT connectivity, and AR/VR require programmers with fresh knowledge and technical skills. Outsourcing opens you opportunities for innovation at reasonable hourly rates, allowing you to implement fresh solutions without the delays of selecting, hiring, onboarding, and adapting new experts.
Another advantage is not being tied to your location when making a choice: there are many skilled professionals worldwide, and you can seamlessly integrate the person with the right skills to work with your team remotely.
Will your app be a success? In no small measure, it's a matter of time. Time to market, to be more accurate. You need a highly flexible team to achieve a fast launch and seamless development process. Outsource mobile app development companies provide professionals who can adapt to changing business requirements, apply different development methodologies, and synchronize working schedules according to your needs.
Swift changes in the development process and requirements may lead to rapid team scaling, up or down. Your outsourcing partner will meet your needs and provide a more on-demand workforce. In contrast with in-house development, you won’t spend extra resources on hiring, onboarding, or training.
NEKLO's example: our business messaging app project showcases our scalable team capabilities. Initially hired to develop new features for their complex communication platform, NEKLO started with a 10-member team. As the project grew, we efficiently expanded our dedicated team to 40 full-time professionals, including additional developers and QA engineers.
By outsourcing mobile app development, you can get diverse professionals with the desired tech stack and skillset. In this competitive market, outsourcing agencies care a lot about their teams' expertise and certifications; additionally, outsourced teams have a wider range of experience with different projects. They have faced and solved many challenges and know how to keep projects going to hell or high water.
Another advantageous point is access to rare talents. With the technologies rapidly evolving and new ones emerging, it can be hard to find specialists in the local market. Outsourcing can solve this problem, as you'll find experts abroad if they are lacking in your location.
Application outsourcing allows you to get the product without extensive management efforts from your side. You can focus on your business development and core responsibilities while the outsourcing team and the project manager work on your app.
The outsourcing partner ensures reaching the key milestones and deliverables, provides you with reports, and monitors schedule adherence. Outsourcing companies often go the extra mile by suggesting new features, ways to cut development costs or deploy the application ahead of schedule.
Developers are not the only experts outsourcing services can bring. The availability of project managers, QA engineers, and IU/UX designers allows for the composition of a multilevel team with relevant expertise.
Mobile app development outsourcing eliminates the need for hiring, training, and establishing and maintaining infrastructure for development, significantly reducing development time. Your vendor can estimate the resources you need to complete the process according to your schedule.
NEKLO takes only 2-3 weeks to assemble and onboard the team, which considerably accelerates the development process. With a talent pool of 100+ professionals and a turnover rate below 7%, we ensure that your dedicated team is consistent, productive, and reliable.
Your outsourcing partner will ensure seamless project management and a smooth development process. If unexpected issues occur, your service provider will make staff replacements, mitigate risks, and introduce team changes quickly without sacrificing quality. So, at the end of the day, you share all your project risks with your outsourced mobile development company.
Outsourcing companies adhere to international security standards and protocols like ISO/IEC 27001, OWASP, and NIST SP 800-53, guaranteeing that your app will work according to local legislation and data protection rules. Moreover, outsourcing service providers follow secure software development practices, ensuring the safety of app building even with the remote team.
While outsourcing offers benefits, it does not go without challenges. Concerns about managing remote teams and communication difficulties often arise, alongside stories of businesses facing negative experiences with outsourcing. Let's unravel the common impediments that can emerge with outsourced partners and the ways you can secure yourself from them.
When you have a remote development team, communication lets you stay tuned despite the distance. Bad communication may result in building a different product than was expected. When looking closer, this problem has several aspects.
First, it is knowledge of English. For outsourced teams, English is probably not their native language, and their poor knowledge may result in miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Second, time zone differences (up to 8-9 hours) may potentially lead to disruptions and slow development.
Finally, poorly set communication channels and the absence of consistent, regular meetings may also harm the project.
The good thing is that all these impediments can be foreseen and overcome. For example, it is reasonable to check English proficiency beforehand by asking for certifications, conducting interviews with the team, or initially looking for a development partner in countries with high levels of English skills, like Poland.
Even a 8+ hour time-zone difference cannot disrupt a well-organized process. You can communicate with your team within overlapping hours or ask your application outsourcing partner to change the team's working hours. Think about different time zones from the other angle. While your team is out of the office, you can check their work and send feedback, contributing to a continuous development process.
You need to set communication and project management channels and schedule daily/weekly meetings. Tools like Confluence, Jira, Trello, Asana, Skype, and others can help you stay tuned with the mobile app development team you outsource.
Imagine you asked your team to build a messaging app with one functionality and design. Still, when development was completed, you did not get the app you needed. Frustrating, isn't it?
To avoid a situation in which the team does not reach the expected results at the end of development, start by writing clear and achievable requirements for your future app. Define project deliverables and milestones and work out KPIs for the development team.
Remember to communicate regularly with your team and discuss the progress made, difficulties encountered, and ways to manage them. Additionally, send your feedback to your outsourcing partner so the team can adjust their work according to your remarks.
Finally, share your expectations and develop requirements, deliverables, milestones, and KPIs. That way, your project results will not surprise you.
One of the common concerns about mobile app development outsourcing is sharing access to sensitive data that may compromise your security. How can you trust a company on the other side of the world, especially when you may never meet them face to face?
Many outsourcing mobile app development companies are well aware of this concern and adhere to local and global security standards to ensure data safety. However, not all of them do.
To safeguard yourself from data breaches, sign an NDA with your vendor and ask about their software development security and access control practices. Introduce security mechanisms like activity monitoring security training and ensure that your partner is compliant with standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, or other mandatory for your industry.
Perhaps the greatest fear of referring to outsourcing services is associated with insufficient vendor competence. Choosing a team that lacks the necessary domain expertise and adherence to standards can lead to a messed up project, missed opportunities, time, and money.
Choosing the right outsourcing partner requires effort, for sure. You can start by looking for an outsource mobile app development company on dedicated platforms (we will talk about them later), learning about the potential partner as much as you can, addressing them directly, and asking about transparency, reporting, communication, security practices, the time for feedback implementation, and how they deal with unusual circumstances.
Do not choose the vendor that offers minimum hourly rates. Despite your expected intention to save money using outsourcing, minimum wages were never a great stimulus for outstanding results. Instead of focusing solely on price, understand the full scope of the potential vendor and compare their rates with regional averages.Choose vendors relying on their experience, ratings and reviews, and portfolio.
Onshore outsourcing involves contracting services within the same country or region as the client's company. It offers benefits such as a better understanding of local legislation, no language barriers, and easy face-to-face meetings with your provider.
However, the primary drawback of onshore development is the cost. While it allows for greater initial trust and control, choosing onshore outsourcing means you'll likely miss out on reducing development costs since hourly rates are comparable to those of an in-house team.
Nearshore outsourcing refers to contracting services in countries that are geographically close to the client's own country. These countries often share a similar time zone but not necessarily the same cultural or linguistic characteristics. This option offers more opportunities for cost savings while the risks of cultural mismatch and language barriers remain.
Nevertheless, outsourcing nearshore application development requires more work verifying developers' competencies and skills. Additionally, there might be a 3–-4 hour time zone difference, the available talent pool for certain specialized skills might be smaller compared to the more global offshore market, and quality inconsistencies might emerge.
Offshore outsourcing involves contracting services to companies in distant countries, often with significant differences in time zone, culture, and language. While offshore mobile app development is the most beneficial in terms of cost savings, it requires more thorough project planning and service provider selection.
Perfectly tuned processes and transparent and consistent communication decrease the risks attached to significant time zone differences. If you are from the USA or Western Europe, little cultural differences with Eastern European countries like Poland ensure that there will be no missed deadlines, low-quality results, or concealed issues. The global pandemic has also made remote work widely accepted worldwide, contributing to increased demand for outsourcing services.
A fixed-price mobile application outsourcing model means you have the strict development budget indicated in the agreement. It requires very clear project requirements and prior calculations on the time needed for the app's completion. Such an approach carries minimum financial risks, has expected results and strict deadlines, and requires no supervision. It is good for companies with exact requirements to know what results they want to achieve.
The main advantage of such a pricing strategy is high predictability: you know exactly how much the project will cost and what results will be delivered. On the other hand, it requires a lot of prior work, analysis, and investigation, detailed project specifications, and foresees no changes to implement in the middle of the development process. If negotiated, changes are of higher cost.
In a time and material model, clients pay for the time the service provider's employees spend on a project and the costs of materials used. This model provides the flexibility to adjust requirements, shift directions, and change the scope based on project dynamics and new insights.
Its key characteristics are flexibility, price based on hourly rates, transparency, scalability, regular result delivery, multiple steps, and easy adjustments. The disadvantages include uncertain costs, dependency on the service provider's efficiency, and investing time and effort in progress monitoring.
The time and material pricing model is often used in outsourcing when project scopes are not clearly defined or are expected to evolve over time.
Hiring a dedicated team gives you an opportunity to completely delegate your mobile app development project to the outsourcing company. The team consists of professionals that focus solely on your app development (in contrast with freelance workers), allowing you to focus on your core business activities.
Dedicated team characteristics are high control, robust communication, flexibility, cost efficiency, focus on the project, close collaboration, and fast development. The main advantages of such a pricing model are the team's high dedication to the project, flexibility and scalability, and better control. You'll always know what work has been done during the day/week and what you pay for.
Our step-by-step guide below unveils the nuances, hidden complexities, and useful tips for mobile app development outsourcing. Keep reading!
Core idea: Know who you are looking for and why.
Every development project, whether in-house or outsourced, starts with a thorough analysis of what you have and want to achieve. There are some questions that you can ask yourself in the beginning:
In other words, define the app's platform, domain, and purpose, as well as available resources. Building a mobile app is usually based on market research and understanding competitors' products. You should already have a clear vision of your target audience, your unique selling point, and your customers' pain points that the app will solve.
Talking about resources, time, and money will influence your actions the most. If, as a startup, you are short on budget and want to launch your mobile app as fast as you can, choose the MVP option. If there are enough resources for full-scale development, you can launch iOS and Android apps so that your customers can enjoy the native features of both platforms. Cross-platform apps seem to be a reasonable compromise between resources spent and the functionality delivered.
If you get lost in the middle of all the estimations, don't worry: a good outsourcing partner will unravel the complexities, navigate you through the process, and offer the most suitable development plan.
Core idea: Find a suitable outsourced team by checking the outsourcing company's background.
There are more outsourcing mobile app development companies than you can imagine: 40,000+ agencies around the world! So, where do you start looking for a mobile development partner?
Now, let's discuss your search quest in detail.
To look for a reliable outsourced mobile app development partner, you can use B2B platforms like Clutch, GoodFirms, TechReviewer, or freelance platforms like Upwork to find the workforce you need. While hiring freelance developers might seem a cheaper option, there are a lot of risks associated with their proficiency, timely results delivery, scalability, availability, and the continuity of your project.
On B2B platforms, you can see the company's ratings, reviews, and certifications. They usually provide you with verified profiles of agencies with a proven record of successful projects. In contrast, freelance platforms cannot guarantee a person's reliability and experience. Yet, hiring freelance developers might be suitable for small, simple apps.
The next step is to explore the potential partner's website. That is where companies show their expertise on portfolios or share their insights on software development in the blog section. Read relevant case studies, look at certifications, and check their knowledge of industry regulations. Once again, explore customers' reviews and testimonials.
The last thing when outsource mobile app development is to shortlist a couple of companies based on your research and schedule calls with them. At those calls/meetings, discuss project management and task tracking practices, approaches to communication, developers' English proficiency, etc. Don’t be shy, delve into all the details you want to know.
That is how you'll get a comprehensive picture of your future partner. As of 2022, the most valued aspects of development service providers were transparency, trustworthiness, and understanding of business. Don't agree for less!
Core idea: Set the development process together with your development team.
Establishing how you will work with your outsourced team will ensure that your project runs smoothly and without unexpected outcomes.
Core idea: Safeguard yourself from non-fulfillment of obligations by establishing a legal framework with your service provider.
A solid legal base is a good start for a fruitful partnership, as it defines service provision terms, scope of work, and payments and sets quality requirements for the developed product. The main agreements include:
Extra step: Establish clear software requirements and payment terms in advance with your outsourced mobile development partners.
Core idea: While software development, leave room for app growth and scalability.
Now, when the development process is over and you have placed your mobile application on the market, it seems as if you have reached the finish line. But the process is not over yet. Post-launch maintenance and support are a vital part of the app's lifecycle. Decide on performance monitoring and bug fixing, as well as plan for new feature development. Plan for the future!
Only your mobile app development outsourcing partner can accurately estimate the project cost, as it contains many components. The major factors that define outsource mobile app development cost are your future app characteristics. Such things as project complexity, app type, design complexity, development methodology, back-end infrastructure influence directly the number of working hours you need to complete the app.
The other factors are the project urgency, team size, developers' level of seniority, and tech stack. The more urgent a project is, the higher the expenses it requires.
Another curious point is the geographic location of the outsourcing partner. As you know, there are countries/regions with lower cost of living and hourly rates, such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. Outsourcing developers from these regions can save your budget by 40% and even more compared to in-house developers.
So, how not to take a false step with the mobile application development outsourcing? We created a checklist based on the tips above so that you have what to lean on while choosing the service provider.
Starting an outsourced development project requires time to define your goals, choose service providers, and carefully analyze the selected options, narrowing your list to one agency. Still, you win in terms of faster development and cost reduction. On the other hand, the hectic selection process puts the whole project at risk. So, outsource a mobile app development project and choose the company wisely!
Outsourcing mobile app development requires time and effort for preparation yet is rewarding in terms of quick product development for a reasonable price. Selecting the right service provider is the key to the success of your mobile app development project, and it must be taken seriously. Thorough research and a 360-degree view of the potential partner will help you make the right choice.
NEKLO is a trusted outsourcing partner with 15+ years of experience and 300+ completed projects. Contact us, and we'll help you create a mobile app using the latest technology, agile metrology, and best security practices.
US-based and operating globally, NEKLO spearheads digital transformation initiatives for businesses worldwide. We deliver software solutions complying with your market and legislation.
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