Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine our daily life without custom applications, as they provide us with comfortable ways of shopping, exchanging information, paying for goods, booking services, and many other activities. Custom applications bring multiple benefits to companies, but probably the most important of which is the possibility to improve the internal workflow of their business, as well as provide a unique experience to their customers. Such type of app development allows one to easily adapt to any type of industry, business model, project management style, or business size.

There is a huge variety of custom application development companies all over the world that have experienced programmers who can create apps tailored to the business objectives of your company, but most importantly meet the needs of your investment capabilities. In this article, we will discuss all the benefits that custom development brings to a business, trending methodologies and technologies, the most valuable aspects of the development process, the benefits of hiring a development team, as well as discuss the price ranges of developers in four famous outsourcing destinations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ukraine.

What Is Custom Application Development?

Custom Application Development Definition

Custom application development is the process of building customized application software in order to meet the specific needs of an organization. It aims at having a narrowly defined set of requirements and is designed for a specific set of necessities which may vary according to the industry, niche, business goals, and so on. Mostly, custom application development is built by an in-house team of coders or an outsourced app development team.

Custom Application Development Benefits

As custom application development is aimed at fulfilling the unique business-centric requirements of an organization, it brings an immense amount of advantages. Here are some of the most common benefits that businesses obtain by designing and building software tailored to their needs.

Business Processes Optimization

It is not a secret that every organization adopted its own business models and processes. That is why it is of high importance that software was built in such a way that could align with them and be easily modified. Choosing custom software solutions provides the opportunity to optimize the business processes instead of changing them to suit a particular application or software.

Scalability

Software scalability is crucial for the future success of your business. If your business grows, then your technical capabilities have to change too. In fact, many enterprises choose cloud servers as databases to diminish the need for hardware that is perfect for scaling custom applications. Scalability is not only an aspect of great importance for software development, it is crucial for successful business growth.

Maintenance And Support

Custom software application development offers the possibility to always stay in touch with the development team. Whenever challenges arise, organizations can count on their development teams that will take care of the problem. Moreover, being the creators of the software allows them to overcome challenges efficiently and quickly.

Security

Custom application development services allow implementing necessary security standards and protocols that would provide data safety and security for an organization. Moreover, businesses are given the opportunity to choose the security technology that will work best for the needs of their organization.

Flexibility

Organizations are given the possibility of choosing what technology will be used when building their application. Consequently, they can select all the functionalities they want to make the application work for their business needs.

Efficiency

Custom app software gives a unique insight into the business processes over time, which allows organizations to make better decisions and drive major efficiency and success. Indeed, it is one of the most valuable tools to grow your business and drive success.

Cost-effectiveness

Custom software development services include the possibility to plan the whole process. This means that an organization can start automating some workflows according to their budget availability and after that plan the next phase of the development process. Moreover, custom app development allows companies to invest less in the long run. There is no need to purchase additional extensions and functionalities of package software. Indeed, with the insights organizations can get with the apps tailored to their needs, they will generate profits in the long run.

Methodologies and Technologies for Custom Application Development

Methodologies and technologies for custom application development change over time. However, here are the most innovative ones that can help deliver innovative and highly functional software in order to gain effectiveness in timeline, usage, and cost.

Development Methodologies Trending in Custom Application Development

Agile Development

Agile development is probably the most effective and fastest way of transforming a business need into a custom software solution, offering a flexible response to change. It breaks the requirements into functions and quickly delivers them through incremental development.

DevOps

DevOps is a combination of development and operations. It is an agile-based approach that includes implementation, maintenance, security, and management of the back-end code of a software product, ensuring constant stability of all the systems aiming to reach the necessary business objectives.

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Rapid application development involves techniques, tools, and strategies that are aimed at making the development process faster and obtaining feedback from the product users easier. It reassures the complete correlation between the conception of the application and the product, meeting the business needs and requirements.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

The scaled agile framework offers to scale agile methodology to a bigger organization such as a global development team. This practice decentralizes decision-making and outlines activities, responsibilities, and roles within the objective of the project to keep the stakeholders aligned.

Development Technologies Trending In Custom Application Development

Cloud-Based Development

Cloud-based development is the perfect choice when it comes to adapting to the needs of an organization, providing an agile and rapid infrastructure when setting up workloads, and much more. Cloud environments support the actual coding, design, testing, integration, and other functions, promising speed, cost control, and on-demand convenience.

Blockchain

Blockchain allows creating secure financial applications for a great number of purposes, such as keeping track of physical and digital assets, tracking ownership, and speeding up transactions among others. It removes the vulnerability and cost of intermediaries such as banks and regulatory bodies, making the transactions transparent and decentralized.

Low Code

Low code is a practice in application development that allows one to minimize the necessity for coding and helps build applications at lower cost and quickly.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence builds machines capable of performing problem-solving tasks without human help. The implementation of AI in organizations brings an immense number of benefits such as business process automation, data security improvement, better customer experience, better analytics forecasts, staff training, etc.

Open Source

Open source is a software source code that is available to use not only to the development community but also to the public. It enhances the development productivity through reusing the coding components and avoiding proprietary architectures.

Data Analytics

Data analytics helps businesses control and use data to create better strategies, more efficient operations, improve income, and obtain more satisfied customers. It offers to evaluate data and get insights and forecasts almost immediately.

Mobile Applications

Mobile presence is crucial for business, as consumers mostly interact through smartphones. The reason for this is that mobile apps provide a better user experience most of the time and have a better interaction with already existing apps accessed through their mobile devices.

Custom Apps vs. Off-the-Shelf Apps

If you need to build an application from scratch, there are options on how app-building teams can deliver software products. Businesses can choose from custom application development and off-the-shelf applications that both provide numerous benefits in specific cases. It would not be a surprise to mention that custom application development is a more expensive option as its aim is to cover the specific challenges of a business. However, all of them should be applied according to the goals and needs of the business and its niche.

Custom Apps

It’s no secret that custom application development requires a lot of time, but every layer is designed according to the specific needs of your business. Coders build, from scratch, the development solutions that will work specifically for your business case. Such software is built keeping in mind the organization’s infrastructure, implementation requirements, branding and all the other aspects, so it will work only for that company. Custom development is probably the most valuable way of building apps.

Off-the-Shelf Apps

Off-the-shelf software consists of pre-built applications that can be included in the system of your company, which means that they do not include specific functions that your business may require. Such apps are available for a larger audience with similar needs, however, they will not provide efficient solutions for specific groups of users. Off-the-shelf options are perfect for those, who are on a budget as developers use already existing mechanisms and do not create applications from scratch.

Custom App Development Process

Custom application development requires detailed strategic planning and a team of professionals who can provide secure and scalable custom software development solutions. Highly professional developers undoubtedly will consider all the necessary factors and test the product before launching. They will plan the design, security, stability and other aspects to balance the whole development process. Here is a list of the most important steps of custom app development.

Identify Business Goals

Before developing any software for organizations, it is crucial to understand all the characteristics it should obtain to provide the maximum value. By identifying the necessities of the business, it will be easier to choose what functionalities the applications must have to cover the hardships. In such a way, an organization will obtain a custom app that will perfectly match the business requirements and meet business goals.

Choosing Technology

The technology stack is chosen according to the functionalities of your custom app. When they are discussed with the development team and approved, it will be easier to identify what technologies will make it possible in the most efficient way.

Development

After approving the technology track, developers will start writing code keeping in mind all the necessities. It will meet all the requirements of your software, as well as consider the needs of its users.

Testing

Testing is probably the most important aspect of the development process, as it provides more confidence in the quality of the code. It is crucial that testing is done after every development layer of any type of software, to see whether the application is secure enough and performs without any problems. Indeed, when you hire an app development team, always make sure that they have enough expertise in testing and securing a custom application.

Deployment

This phase makes the custom application available for use. It is when we can see how fast the software responds to changes according to its user’s preferences and the quality of each action.

Integration

When the custom application meets all the requirements, it is time to start the integration with your current infrastructure or third-party software systems and subsystems. The team of developers will ensure the application’s smooth performance with other systems and safe and quick information flow between them.

Launch

When all the steps discussed before are successfully performed, now is the perfect time to launch the outcome. It would be very much advisable to interfere during the performance of previous steps in case of some additional information, consulting, or possible changes. Only when you and your development team reach the total agreement that everything works to its full potential can you launch the result.

Training And Adoption

The quality of training will undoubtedly influence the adoption rate. It is worth considering using the training services of your custom software development company, as their team will definitely know how to guide the trainees. In fact, this is a constant process, as training receives much attention after the launch of the product, but not when new users are onboard. Having efficient constant training leads to successful adoption.

How To Build An App Development Team?

When you decide to build an app development team, you should decide how many and what type of specialists your project may require. Obviously, for each organization, custom applications will differ in many aspects, so the number of developers will depend on the complexity and scalability of your product. However, there is a basic structure of a team for mobile app development that works for an average custom application development process.

Custom App Development Team Structure

1. Business Analyst
2. Product Manager or Project Manager
3. UI Designer
4. UX Designer
5. Developers (front-end and back-end specialists or full-stack developers)
6. Quality Assurance Engineer

Custom Application Development Cost

According to recent research, the average price of developing a simple app with a basic user interface and must-have functionalities ranges between $40,000 to $60,000. If you take into consideration other data-driven resources that base their results on such factors as the complexity and functionality of an application, the cost ranges from $61,000 to $120,000. If there is a need for a complex custom application, the investment would start from $120,000. Nevertheless, developing an application does not have to be that expensive. Thankfully, the modern world offers us many other ways of hiring custom software developers such as outsourcing. Using such services, you can always find an outsourcing destination that will match your investment capabilities.

There is a huge number of companies worldwide that offer custom software application development services. However, every part of the world has its own economic conditions which the charging rates of IT outsourcing companies are based on. That is why it would be fair to mention that in the outsourcing industry there is no room for the belief that if the price is higher consequently the product is better, as the rates depend directly on the economic conditions of the countries.

Custom Application Development Hourly Rates

Let’s compare the average outsourcing rates of the following regions: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ukraine.

As we can see from the above table, the average hourly price range for custom software development in the United States is between $120 and $250 for both Android and iOS applications. Australian developers charge from $95 to $150 hourly, similar to the United Kingdom’s rates that vary from $105 to $175 hourly. Ukrainian hourly rates for custom software development are between $35 and $65, making it the leading outsourcing destination.

Custom Application Developers Rates Based On Seniority Levels

According to the functionalities of your application, you will need developers of different seniority levels. Moreover, the technology stack that you will choose for your product will influence the overall price as well. By using outsourcing services, you have the possibility to choose from a wide range of rates of a particular technology stack and developer seniority level to fit your budget.

Before anything, it would be fair to emphasize that those numbers are only estimates that generalize the information about the salaries. Outsourcing provides never-ending opportunities for finding an offshore developer or team of developers who will deliver outstanding custom software products according to your budget.

Let's compare the rates of the most popular technology stacks for custom application development based on the seniority levels of the professionals in the following regions: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Ukraine.

PHP Developers

According to this PayScale report, the average hourly rate for a PHP developer in the United States is $22.61, varying from $14 to $57 per hour.

Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

Talent.com reports that the average hourly rate for PHP developers in Australia is $51.28. However, it ranges from $46.15 to $66.15 according to seniority level.

Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

PayScale reports that the average hourly salary of a PHP developer in the United Kingdom is £13.39, ranging from £8.24 to £38.97 according to the seniority level of the programmers. Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

In Ukraine, the average hourly rate of PHP developers ranges from $26 to $53 depending on the experience level of the coder. According to dou.ua, the largest developer community in Ukraine, the average salary of a PHP programmer in Ukraine is $3,800 per month, ranging from $3,300 to $4,400, equating to approximately $45k per year.

Python Developers

According to a PayScale report, the average hourly rate for a Python developer in the United States is $30.00, varying from $18 to $76 per hour. Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

Talent.com reports that the average hourly rate for Python developers in Australia is $64.10. However, it ranges from $48.97 to $121 according to seniority level. Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

Talent.com reports that the average hourly salary of a Python developer in the United Kingdom is £29.70, ranging from £17.95 to £43.59 according to the programmers’ seniority levels. Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

In Ukraine, the average hourly rate of PHP developers ranges from $26 to $53 depending on the experience level of the coder. According to dou.ua, the largest developer community in Ukraine, the average salary of a Python programmer in Ukraine is $4,000 per month, ranging from $3,500 to $4,500, making it approximately $48k per year.

Java Developers

An Indeed report shows that the average hourly rate for a Java developer in the United States is $65.99; this varies according to the experience level of the coder. Here is a summary of the total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following Salary Explorer graphic:

Talent.com reports that the average hourly rate for Java developers in Australia is $60.26. However, this ranges from $43.59 to $102 according to seniority level. Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

PayScale reports that the average hourly salary of a Java developer in the United Kingdom is £60.00, ranging from £28.50 to £68.75 according to the programmers’ seniority levels. Based on these numbers, there is a summary total compensation of each experience level that is presented in the following graphic:

In Ukraine, the average hourly rate of Java developers ranges from $26 to $53 depending on the coder’s experience. According to dou.ua, the largest developer community in Ukraine, the average salary of a Java programmer in Ukraine is $4,000 per month, ranging from $3,700 to $4,700.

To give an outline of all the compared data, here are the average salary rates of developers of different technology stacks from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Ukraine.

Why Hire An App Development Team?

What are the Benefits of Application Development Outsourcing?

Outsourcing has become one of the most popular and effective types of hiring IT professionals. According to Statista, only in 2018, the global outsourcing market has reached $85.6 billion which is considerably growing year by year. Moreover, Clutch reports that 37% of small businesses were already using offshore programmer services in 2019. So what is the reason for such quick success of offshore software application development services all over the world? Here are some most influential factors of why global companies prefer to hire developers overseas.

Cost-effectiveness

Before 2020 people considered cost reduction as a secondary benefit, putting the quality of service and agility first. However, 2020 changed priorities and made organizations adapt to the situation in such a way that cost reduction is back as the top priority for companies.

Outsourcing is a much cheaper way to complete certain projects. Instead of spending resources on a full-time employee search, it is more beneficial to contact a developer network that will provide you with the perfect candidate that will meet all your requirements. You are always allowed to communicate exactly what you expect to be done; thus, you will pay for exactly what you asked for.

Tax Saving

If you decide to hire an application development outsourcing company, you will minimize the troublesome paperwork. While outsourcing, there is no need to worry about taxes, insurance, vacation, or paid leaves. Thus, not only are there fewer legal issues but less paid labor responsibilities. When you choose to hire an offshore team service provider, independently of where in the world they are located, they are the ones who take care of the paperwork and legal issues. Looking from that angle, it is fair to state that the cost-efficiency of outsourcing is tremendous.

Seize the New Market

Hiring offshore dedicated developers from other markets provides the possibility of establishing a presence before your competitors. Thus, you are one step ahead of seizing new opportunities and bringing innovation. Being the first one is crucial in times of a rapidly changing market.

To Wrap Up

It would be fair to conclude that custom development is undoubtedly on the rise and custom software development companies all over the world are highly in demand. The way companies are operating now has changed drastically over the past decade, so investing in custom application development is a must-have for successful business performance and to maintain satisfied customers. Thankfully, every business has the opportunity to find its perfect match for the development of custom applications and obtain the maximum value out of the product.

Having discussed all the benefits that custom applications bring to companies in detail, the most important of them is the possibility to improve the internal workflow as well as provide a unique experience to their customers. Such an app development method allows you to easily adapt to any type of industry, business model, style of project management, business size, and much more so that your organization can get the maximum value of the software and perform better.

Now that you know what custom software development is , the benefits that it brings, trending methodologies and technologies, the most valuable aspects of the development process, and the benefits of hiring a development team, it will be much easier to make decisions around this topic.