iPhone vs website development times for website style app

Question

I build websites for a living and have a very accurate way to cost them. I am being asked to price an iPhone app for viewing real estate properties that is virtually a website on an iphone. I need to know roughly how much more/less it would take to build. Here are the screens.

Home page

View all houses (about 20)

Click on house for details

View images, floor plans

Add to favorites

The app is hard coded, nothing is downloaded from the internet.

There is nothing particularly "iPhone-y" about the application - no complex visual interfaces, no GPS functionality and so forth.

Could someone give me a rough estimate as to how long these apps take to build compared to a website for an experienced developer? I am not talking about a newbie, someone whose has plenty of iPhone experience.

Answer 1

It takes no time at all for simple static content. Actually, I would say it takes FAR less time than a website (Interface builder is WAY faster than CSS).

For an experienced developer, it would take a couple hours, max.

Answer 2

There's learning curve time and individual project execution time.

After you've learned the tools and the process, wrapping a simple web site or web app into a self-contained iOS app might only take a fraction of an hour.

Learning curve time is harder to forecast. A consultant might be able to walk you though the process in a couple hours. But some developers have spent days debugging their way though developer certificates, provisioning, the build process, and the App store submission process the very first time.