Most mobile marketing startups hedging their bets by developing apps for multiple platforms

Moconews has an interesting article about the challenges of multi-platform mobile development (iPhone, Android, Java, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc) today.

The trade-off between delivering an amazing user experience to 2-3% of mobile subscribers (e.g. iPhone and Android) or a mass market application for a wide range of devices (50% or more) is a difficult one for everyone. Our general experience is that Java applications delivered across Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and proprietary operating systems get up to 10x as many downloads as an iPhone app but achieving a similar user experience is very time consuming and costly.

The average cost of an advanced iPhone or Android game/app is in the region 25-50k euro depending on complexity whereas as a mass market app/game with 80% phone penetration (across multiple platforms) is about 200.000-400.000 euro when fully optimized across the devices.

So what about automatic porting services then? There are several companies that claim that they can deliver cross-platform porting at costs starting around 10.000-20.000 USD. Our experience however is that the tweaking and optimisation to make the ported application to look and work nicely on the individual platforms make the cost almost as high as doing proprietary development.

More comments on this to follow...

What is the cost of developing a mobile app (iPhone, Blackberry, Java, Android, etc)?

At Golden Gekko we often get into the debate with clients and partners about what the cost of a mobile app or game should be and even more so with the iPhone SDK. We know that it is possible for a freelance developer to develop a descent looking iPhone app in a couple of weeks for a minimal budget. At the same time developing a market leading app with great design, usability, content and interaction that doesn't crash is not an easy thing. Therefore it was interesting to read what other people have to say about the cost of implementing a mobile app.
"Although iPhone app development can cost as little as $12.000 a well-designed app can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000, take six to eight weeks to develop, and a couple more weeks more to be approved by Apple"

Read more at:
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/05/12/madison-avenue-and-the-app-store/

Now this is still the easy part. Developing an app that works across hundreds or even thousands of devices with different operating systems, screen sizes, navigation input mechanisms and capabilities is a whole different sport. When I worked Vodafone Group a couple of years ago the estimated average cost of developing a mobile game was about 200.000 euro whereof 50% for development and the other 50% porting and testing. Since then life for developer has gotten harder and not easier with more operating systems, screen sizes, touch screens, etc. At the same time budgets for app development have not increased so the only viable solution to deliver great quality apps and games is to make the development process more efficient and this is where Golden Gekko is currently developing all our R&D resources. More to follow...