Are you planning to develop a mobile app to serve your customers digitally? That’s a smart decision, especially after seeing the rising scope of digital, on-demand services for the past couple of years. But how will you develop your business app?
There are several different approaches to app development, like hiring a freelancer, purchasing a white-labelled solution, developing an app from scratch, or getting a clone app solution. All of these options have their own pros and cons and their specific price range.
The blog focuses on two of the most common and trusted approaches from all of the aforementioned ones. Those two approaches are:
(i) App From Scratch
(ii) Clone App Solution
App From Scratch
The app from scratch or custom app development approach is the most widely used approach to build a mobile or web app. In this approach, a team of app designers and developers will (as the title states) work to create an app from scratch. They’ll understand all your app requirements, your business vision and process, design ideas, and then design and code each and every single element of your app from the ground up.
This approach takes a lot of time, resources, and money to execute to perfection. The end result, however (if done correctly), is stupendous. Your app is built perfectly and exclusively for your business; hence every app screen, every element has a purpose of serving.
Clone App Solution
The clone app solution is the perfect weapon for small businesses to fight against big enterprises and brands on the digital playground. The clone app solution will cost you less, and also the entire development time will get reduced by several months.
You must be thinking, how in the world is this possible. Let me answer your question. The secret is in the word “clone”. Let’s assume that you wish to develop a taxi app like Uber, but developing an app like Uber from scratch would mean months of development and probably millions in cost.
When you choose the clone app solution, you are basically purchasing a clone version of an app like Uber or Lyft. The designers and developers will use the pre-built code chunks of the app, re-code them to meet your app feature and design requirements.
This way, they have all the basic building blocks of the app code, reducing time and efforts to develop your app, reducing the app development project’s cost.
Let’s get into some comparisons to understand the difference between both approaches in a more detailed manner.
Custom App Development vs Clone App Development
No same company can offer both kinds of development services. You’ll get a pretty good idea about this from the initial phase of business consulting. Usually, the business consulting phase is quite small in the clone approach as there is a set amount of flexibility in the app features and designs. On the other hand, in the custom app development approach, the business analysis and documentation phase will run for days studying every aspect of your business as well as application.
The development phase is pretty straight forward for both approaches. Custom app development will take several months as the entire app is designed and developed from scratch. The clone app approach will, in most cases, be completed in a few weeks
In both the app development approaches, the important factor is the app features. The most common app features will be present in both the development services. However, to add advanced app features like GPS integration, AR/VR integration, you need to either go with a custom app development approach or find a really good clone app development company that can achieve this.
The cost of app development is the biggest factor that will make you choose any one of these two options. If you have enough funding to develop a full-fledged, high functioning mobile app, then going with the custom app development option is good for you. But, if money is something that you need to spend wisely across all the aspects of your business, then the clone app development approach is your best path forward.
Clone or Custom: What Will You Choose?
The debate on the pros and cons of both these app development approaches can go all day and reach no final decision. Or, we can weigh their merits on the two most important factors that matter to your business and choose instantly.
App Development Cost
As far as costing is concerned, there is a clear winner in sight, clone apps. With pre-built and advanced tested code chunks, the total timeline of the project reduces drastically. When the hours of development are reduced to a fraction, the project’s cost will show the same ratio of reduction.
So, if saving money on app development is among your primary requirements, going with clone app development solutions is the right call.
Reliability & Scalability
As the owner of a business or a brand, what do you expect your app to deliver? More than money and customers, it’s reliability and scalability that will drive the users and money towards your business. On the one hand, a custom-built application is made for your business’s specific needs and goals. On the other hand, you have a clone solution tried and tested for several businesses like yours in earlier iterations.
Conclusion
If you ask me, all the best decisions in business are taken by gut feeling. So theoretically, the decision for this factor totally depends on the quality of work and developers that your chosen app development company provides. But practically, the decision lies on how you feel about both these app development approaches and which one you think benefits your business in the short and long terms.
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Author bio
Chris is the Writer and Journalist. He loves to deep dive into the ins and outs of the technologies. His aim is to share the knowledge by writing on the technicals about Business, eCommerce, Startup, Enterprise IoT, AR, VR, and other Smart Technologies. To describe him in one word, he is a writer focused on Tomorrow’s World.
