Costs and Scope in developing a typical iphone application

Question

Iam new to iphone development and have been tasked to development a fairly simple iphone application.

It would basically show listings of information eg accommodations, restaurants...around 8-9 different types. Drilling on one would show the details of it. These are dynamically sourced from a db (through an xml feed) that powers an existing website.

Also users should have ability to save favourites and also an interactive google map showing locations of these places.

Just would like to know how long would such an iphone application take to develop and what would it costs. As iam new to iphone dev, i do not know how big the scope is, any complications to anticipate, scope creep issues, and how much to charge. Want to give a reasonable estimate so that i dont overcharge.

Answer 1

The problem is, that you are new to iphone development. So if you are fast learning and you want to make an application that fits into the Apple way of making an application, I would guess that you need some 4 to 6 weeks to get it done.

As the learning curve is quite steep in ObjC and iPhone SDK, future applications will be faster to implement.

By the way: you should look for someone who is experienced with iphone applications (not necessarily ObjC) and who will review your GUI and the handling of your application (not the code). Otherwise you risk delivering a brick.

Answer 2

So you're a developer who's new to the iPhone and need to come up with an estimate and how much to charge?

Software development is an inherently unpredictable process, however there are many techniques to address the unpredictability. For any specific project, it's impossible to predict with much certainty the outcome, but you can aggregate many iPhone projects and calculate some averages.

What I've heard is for a prototype or wireframe, it's $10,000 to $15,000 USD and about a month of full-time work. For a simple app to completion, around $30,000. And for more complex apps, it is around $50,000 to $80,000.

I've heard that hourly rates range from $50 to $200, and that's in NYC. Rates are highly variable because the quality of programmers is highly variable. Even the most conservative estimates put good programmers at five times the productivity of poor programmers.

You're probably going to be spending many hours off the clock learning iPhone development, and the on-clock hours are going to be long because you're going to be making a lot of mistakes. My advice is to learn iPhone dev with your own project, because you can learn at your own pace without a client and do things right. Set yourself a deadline, etc.

But if you decide to go with your project, the above ballpark figures are a start.