What your experience outsourcing mobile app for your project?
Having almost finished a JSON-compatible backend, I am considering to outsource the development of mobile apps for both Android and iOS.
For context I have already users and I have clearly seen and heard the motivation of having apps. It would be super simple: auth, some CRUD to the server and push notification upon certain events.
I have seen mostly positive options in Fiverr and similars for a few hundred bucks each platform. Is this a real choice? What's your experience? How would you do it?
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Having done this many times, I will tell you: it's a crapshoot. You might end up with someone really great, and you might end up with someone really inexperienced or just a bad fit. Also, beware of the tons of scam profiles out there.
I would only do this under the following circumstances:
Thank you, very useful.
What platform you have used in the past with the most success?
Being my situation my own product and not cosulting, I can afford the time to be specific and go back and forth.
I've used Fiverr and Upwork, to varying degrees of success. Lately since I have need for consistent work I've developed a relationship with a company in Buenos Aires, TrueLogic, which works well for me since a lot of my projects are in LATAM anyway, and Argentina is very close to my timezone here in NYC.
I would try to find a local freelancer with some portfolio and start with him. It may take some time to find but the key point of SW development is clear communication and that's usually a problem with Fiverr or similar services.
In any case, clear project description and needs are a must, you will end up with a non-working project otherwise.
Yeah, main take away is to be very specific and concise. Also to check previous work.
As a freelancer myself, I’ve spent a ton of time fixing messes from offshore dev offices and fiverr for my clients. You don’t get what you want. There’s a severe lack of communication and it’s just a bit of a lottery (I’m sure there are good ones, but I’m yet to see it.). In my opinion it’s so worth just paying the money for a good, reputable consultant who works with you along the way, or building it yourself with a no code tool if you can get away with it. That way at least you know how it works.
Chances are you will eventually have to pay that money anyway for someone to fix it or rebuild it if you get a bad result the first time round. If you need any help with your project, please feel free to have a look at our site - shogundigital.io. I’m happy to provide impartial technical advice for free regardless of who you decide to go with, because it makes me sad to see people getting stung by the lure of cheap, offshore software development.
Hey Juanse!
Me and my team are in the last phase of building our mobile application/platform, and we were thinking about working on another outsourced mobile app, to earn enough money for releasing it and marketing costs.
If you are interested, contact me and we'll discuss about this.
PS: My e-mail is: [email protected]
I have to second @ryanvanderpol - I have had several bad experiences finding reliable folks to build out anything large. If this is a simple enough App then I would say go for it, but you have to balance the complexity, pricing and competence. For the outsourcee (is that even a word ha) it's just another project that they want to quickly move on from, they aren't going to take the time for detail and attention that you would expect. If you can micromanage the entire project then I would say go for it. That being said, you may get lucky and find someone competent, but also think about it from a different perspective, if you were a competent developer would you do something for 'a few hundred bucks?'
When I got the apps built for trainermade.com I was pretty meticulous and I still was unable to use the outsourcee's code. I ended up having to rewrite the entire thing myself, thankfully Xamarin was awesome to that end to build in one platform for both iOS and Android.
I have also consider using Ionic, but I feel like I can't do all myself.
feel free to email me if you want, I am not trying to work on your project/build it/charge you or anything like that, but can give you details about how I built trainermade, the length of time, etc.
How did you do it and how long did it take?
trainermade was/is pretty complex. I am still adding features and I think will always be growing. took me about 4 months to get all the features that I needed for the initial rollout - it was a lot. The 4 months, however, was not just working on the mobile apps, I was also simultaneously working on the web app portal (with my devs who I have outsourced some of that stuff to), testing what they are fixing, marketing (learning to write good copy, ads, analytics etc).
the thing that helped me a lot was that my background is in .NET so I was able to build for iOS and Android using one codebase in Xamarin, and unlike ionic, Xamarin spits out a semi-native app and not a hybrid web mobile app.
+1 for Xamarin :)