Developing a mobile application is the number one goal of almost all startups these days. Without it you're just not sexy enough. DishClips is no exception. In fact, being that DishClips is the Social Video Guide for Restaurant Dishes, our application is really a mobile application.
Trouble is, contrary to popular belief, mobile applications cost a lot of money to produce. There's the server side components and API, the graphics, sounds, UI design, UI programming, testing, marketing and hundreds of hours of constant pivoting is required to produce a worthy mobile application that has any social ties. At a minimum, you're looking at $15k + 3 months of time to get your first iteration released to the market. And that doesn't including any marketing costs. Also worth noting, is that the cost of developing an iPhone app and an Android app is nearly the same as developing two different applications. That is to say there isn't much gained in the way of leveraging one towards the other. So while developing an iPhone app might cost you $15k, developing on both platforms will likely cost close to $30k.
The fact that most startups are cash strapped not withstanding, it doesn't make much sense to develop the app for both platforms at the same time. The two platforms have different audiences and different advantages. Additionally, the lessons learned while developing on one platform can be leveraged when developing for the second platform. An advantage that is lost if you're developing for both platforms simultaneously. It is not surprising then that most applications are developed for one platform first and then for the other.
So how do you make the decision on which to develop for first? Here's a list of things we had to consider and so can you.
1) Who is our audience? As a social video guide to restaurant dishes we're targeting the 20-45 crowd in major metropolitan areas with dispensable income who can afford to eat out several times a week. As it turns out the cross section of this population with the iPone-Owner world is over 75% vs. 45% for Android users. This made our choice a lot easier.
2) What does your app have to be good at? For instance, our app has to be great at video capture and geo-location. The video capture quality of the iPhone 4S is consistently great. On Android devices however, depending on the device the experience may vary. It will likely take several days of quality testing on multiple devices to ensure the same quality on an Android device as it does on an iPhone device when it comes to video capture. Precious times that startups like DishClips just can't afford.
3) What is your competition doing? Being a startup has lots of great advantages. Being small is one of them. The big competition in our market segment like Yelp does lots of research on our behalf. We looked at several foodie applications on both iPhone and Android before making our final decision. It turns out that the adoption rate of iPhone apps within foodies is far greater than that of Android apps in the same localities within the United States.
Our application is currently in it's second beta release and we're super excited about it's upcoming release in early August 2012. We've learned so many things while developing our application that have changed the original design tremendously. I cannot imagine the additional costs we would have had if we were making all these changes on two separate development platforms. We're also learning that what will work on the iPhone seldom works the same on Android so the UI design elements will have to be completely redesigned for our Android application which we're currently wire-framing. I'll leave the differences between the two for another post.
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