How long does it take to create a mobile shopping app?

This is a question with a thousand different answers, a bit like ‘How long does it take to build a house?’

It depends, because not every mobile app is the same.

But if we establish what features and capabilities a decent mcommerce app should have, we can get a better idea of how long one will take to build.

A good mobile commerce app needs to have, at minimum:

• An easy-to-use and clearly designed user interface to browse products
• A short, smooth and totally secure mobile checkout
• A back-end database that holds details of products, images, stock levels etc
• An admin system that allows retailers to make changes in real-time

This all adds up to many, many hours of coding time.

Longer than it takes to build an aeroplane

As a rough guide, the company Kinvey surveyed 100 iOS, Android, and HTML5 developers, and asked them all how long they thought it would take to build a mobile app (not specifically for ecommerce).

Their answer? 18 weeks. That’s 10 weeks for the back-end, and 8 weeks to build the front-end user experience. As they point out, that’s enough time to build 1.3 Boeing 777 planes.

You can see the whole infographic here on their website.

Making the process faster

There are a number of ways to speed up this process, but it all depends on your resources. If you have a big in-house team of developers who can all work on this project at once, and a back-end server ready to go, you can get this done faster, and without paying out large sums to an agency.

However, most fashion ecommerce companies don’t have this capability in-house. Even those companies that employ a host of developers often need them to work on other projects and not be tied up for a long time creating an iPhone app.

Here at Poq Studio we have spent a long time (over a year!) building a framework, structure, database, and integration system that lets retailers get their own mcommerce app a lot quicker.

You can see an example of an app and mobile website we made for LUCZA by visiting their website on your phone.