How Many People Does It Take on an App Development Team to Create a Successful Mobile Application?

Wondering how many people it takes to create a successful mobile application using an app development team?

With startups turning overnight into billion-dollar companies thanks to a great idea and innovative mobile app, this is the right question to be asking. In this article, we will be answering this question.

Your development approach determines the size of your mobile app development team

The mobile consumer market is saturated and users will not settle for anything less than high-quality software. The mobile dev platforms and frameworks are now extremely well-developed.

As a result, one person simply can‘t hold all the necessary knowledge and experience to build and support a complete product. Sure, you can find a few that claim they can, but even then they would tell you that they have someone else helping them somewhere along the development process (contract designers, dev-ops specialists, etc.).

What development approach are you adopting? This has a bearing on your development, and in turn, this impacts the size of your app development team.

You need to factor in the following while formulating a development approach:

Native-vs-hybrid app development:

Hybrid app development frameworks like React Native can deliver a near-native “user experience” (UX). You create one app only and run it on both Android and iOS, therefore, your development and maintenance costs remain under control.

However, hybrid apps still can’t deliver the UX that native apps can since native development utilizes platform-specific technologies. Native apps deliver greater performance and security too, as I have explained in “What is the best development approach to guarantee the success of your app?”.

Developing your APIs vs using 3^rd party APIs:

Would you like to reinvent the wheel every time? You probably wouldn’t, therefore, in some cases, you might want to use market-leading 3^rd party APIs. While that makes sense, you also need to exercise caution before adding too many external dependencies to your app.

I recommend that you develop your RESTful APIs for your core features, and factor this in while estimating the number of people you need in your app development team. Need help with API development? Read our guide “How to build RESTful API for your mobile app?”.

Securing your app:

Are you targeting a heavily-regulated industry like financial services or healthcare? You will need to pay extra attention to securing your app since these industries operate under stringent data security regulations.

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You need a sufficient number of competent people that can mitigate application security vulnerabilities and review your code to unearth any hidden security risks. Factor this while estimating how large a mobile application development team you need.

Wondering how to mitigate application security risks? Our guide “How to secure your Fintech app” could help.

Bearing in mind all this, it’s pretty easy to understand why the answer to the question “how many programmers does it take to make an app” is so complex.

But that’s not all there is.

Forming an app development team: Who do you need?

If you plan to invest over $30K and several months of your time in developing a project – you better do it right and get a professional team. Even if you choose to build a product internally, you will still need to build an internal team (which is harder than hiring an existing team).

So, who do you need to build an app?

Here is the list of people who would be involved:

• Mobile developer (full-time)
• Backend developer (full-time)
• Dev ops specialist (part-time)
• Designer (part-time)
• QA Specialist (part-time)

Total: five people!
Oh, and don’t forget about the tech project manager who can manage all these people in a mobile development team structure.

And that‘s a bare minimum for your app development team structure. If you want to move fast and build for both Android and iOS, you would need to add at least one more person. If you want to move even faster again then you should add two more people (that is both android and ios developers), which means a total of 9 people.

Sure, you can try to go lean and survive with only three people (mobile developer, backend developer, and designer). However, this would be enough only to start, but it still begs the question: how many hours should developers take to build an app?

Some stats say that on average, it takes approximately 18 weeks to build a native app. However, it all depends on the scope of your project, the complexity of the app itself, as well as the expertise of your developers.

And that brings us to yet another challenging task – how to hire mobile developers who are experts in their field, reliable, and ready to invest their energy and experience into building an outstanding mobile app?

But, there’s one more factor that plays an important role in determining how long it will take to complete your app – team management.

Team Management: Making your mobile app development team productive

Great developers account for only 20% of your mobile app success. 80% is down to good product management. And if you never managed a mobile development process yourself before, you will need to hire a product manager to avoid making a fatal error that will result in total project failure.

So at a minimum, any project to create a successful mobile app really needs from 4 to 10 people on the team. For example, we had to allocate 6 developers, one Project Manager, and one Account Manager to help Adventure Aide with their product launch and growth.

This helped turn their project into a success story. Here is what they had to say about our help:

To summarize: If you’re wondering how to make a successful app, you should prepare extensively before you decide to invest a penny and your time. You want to make sure your product development is split into phases so you have time to validate the market and core features before you invest more into growth.

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I would recommend you to start with only one platform, not a hybrid, but a native one, preferably iOS (though it depends on your target audience). Once you have a successful launch, you can validate the market and then start working on the Android app.

Keep in mind one more thing – marketing. For that, you will need to have a website too. Even if it is only a simple one, what‘s important is you have your own corner of the internet to showcase your products and start building your brand.

So add one frontend developer for creating advertising materials like branding websites, etc. on your mobile development team.

Hiring your mobile app development team

After evaluating your software development team structure and how many people you will need, you then need to decide where to get them. You have 3 options:

• Hire in-house
• Hire individual contractors
• Hire a dev team

In-house

Hiring in-house is brutally hard and risky. Imagine you find out that you need to pivot or close your company after your MVP isn’t accepted by the market. Also, hiring 5–10 really good people would take you several months.

Refining the mobile app development process so they will actually work well as a team would take you several months more. And dealing with the employment and other paperwork – you know what a pain that is.

However, if you have $2M+ in your bank account, experience in building and running teams, and project development then it might be an acceptable way to go.

Individual Contractors

Hiring individual contractors is super-risky, and also means your project won‘t be scalable. After all, for each of the individual freelancers you hire, you are yet another “project”, nothing more. In a scrape, they can easily leave you.

IP ownership, teamwork, and many other important aspects – forget about trying to get it all together with a bunch of freelancers.

Professional Dev Team

Hiring a professional dev team is a blast. It‘s not just a bunch of people, it‘s a team that comes with already refined and set-in-stone processes and standards. Obviously, you need to make sure to evaluate different teams and pick the best one.

I actually go through this process regularly at DevTeam.Space. I personally interview different dev teams together with my colleagues. We regularly interview new dev teams and accept only the best of the best in our exclusive community.

The software development market is so big that the number of teams is enormous. That‘s why we pick less than 1% of the teams who apply to work with us. This allows us to have a super-tight community of the best dev teams where each team is a field expert in a particular market or a technology stack.

We then keep track of their performance by rating each dev team from project to project. This way, we can guarantee that our clients only end up working with top-rated dev teams.

Another crucial point is the actual process teams follow. For example, at DevTeamSpace, we have created our own unique process and trained all of our dev teams to follow it. So, we can effectively manage 100‘s of projects. You should have your processes in place too, or you should learn the processes of the dev team you hire.

Additional factors that impact the app development team structure and strength

The following additional factors influence the number of people you need in an app development team:

1. Project complexity

Have a complex project at hand? You should have some cushion built into the software development team structure and strength. Complex projects often require more app developers than simple or medium-complexity projects.

2. Technology stack

Do you have a run-of-the-mill native mobile app development project at hand? You will use programming languages like Java or Kotlin for Android development. For iOS development, you will likely use Swift.

All Android app development teams know Java. Many of them know Kotlin. Nearly all native iOS application development teams know Swift nowadays.

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Kotlin and Swift are relatively modern languages. However, we can’t call them niche skills by any stretch of the imagination. You don’t have to mitigate niche skills-related risks in such projects.

On the other hand, does your project also involve cutting-edge technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Internet-of-Things (IoT)? You need to mitigate niche skills-related risks. You need more software development team members for such projects.

3. Complex UI/UX

Does your app idea involve complex interactive features? You need to put a lot of thought into the user interface and user experience. Consequently, you might need more senior UI/UX designers. You might also need more designers.

4. Complex backend

Certain app development projects involve complex backend development. You might need to develop several APIs. You might need to choose carefully between using SQL vs NoSQL databases. Some of the APIs might utilize complex queries. You might need more backend developers for such projects.

5. Stringent non-functional requirements

Some software development projects have stringent non-functional requirements (NFRs) like performance, scalability, security, maintainability, etc. Highly challenging NFRs can make the whole app development process more complex. You might need more developers for such projects.

6. Experience level

Do you have access to experienced developers? Such developers have sound knowledge of technology and the app development process. Their knowledge of the software development processes, methods, and tools comes in handy! They can better navigate the complexities arising at the various app development stages.

You might need fewer developers if you can find experienced developers. Engage a trusted app development company like DevTeam.Space to hire experienced programmers.

7. Using a remote team

Let’s assume a realistic scenario. You have an in-house team for software development. This team is highly skilled and experienced.

However, this team has its hands full. You can’t use it for new projects to develop web or mobile apps. Your project manager speaks highly of this team, and the PM wants people with similar track records.

Hiring highly skilled and experienced developers locally can be hard due to the demand-supply imbalance. You are interviewing remote developers to access a larger talent pool.

Hiring remote teams can indeed help. However, managing a remote team can be hard. It adds to your project risks. Adjusting the app development team size is a common way to mitigate risks, therefore, you might end up hiring more programmers.

Final Thoughts

As you can imagine, the hardest part is finding the best dev team to create a successful mobile app. I just described how we do that. So from now on, you should do that too. Here, our guide “Freelance app development team vs. field expert software development teams” can help you

Now, where is the best place to hire the dev team? Abroad – legal risk and IP ownership risk. If you know how to handle that then go with that option. If you don‘t know then you are much better off hiring mobile app development companies, or a dev team that has a legal entity in your country and a physical office with employees. That way you are fully protected. 

If you are looking for such a local mobile app development company in the US, DevTeam.Space can help you with its field-expert software developers community and AI-powered project management processes. Leave us your initial mobile app development requirements via this quick link and one of our account managers will follow up with you instantly.

If this information is helpful to you then share it with your colleagues and friends – don‘t let them find out the hard way how to create a successful mobile app!

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