Suppose you're a startup owner looking to challenge Uber and Bolt in an emerging market like Brazil, Poland, or Saudi Arabia. Although 2020 was unkind to the taxi industry, ride-hailing companies managed to pull through thanks to delivery services; UberEats' net revenue, for example, increased from $885 million in Q1 2020 to $1.135 billion in Q3.
You need a mobile app — at least one, but preferably multiple, since you're targeting both iOS and Android users — to connect taxi drivers and passengers.
You have two options for making that happen: hire an IT company or use a low-code app builder to create the apps yourself.
Low-Code vs. Traditional App Development
Both of these options have benefits and drawbacks. It's important to think about your priorities, business needs, application performance requirements, and user experience when choosing which route to take.
Going the Traditional Route
Custom applications are traditionally written from scratch using iOS and Android-specific programming languages, SDKs, and frameworks or cross-platform app development solutions like Flutter, Xamarin, and Apache Cordova.
There are several benefits to taking the traditional path:
- Bespoke apps are specifically designed to address your business needs, meaning you can decide how many active users they are going to support and what features they will contain
- Native apps — or cross-platform apps wrapped in native containers — tend to load faster and look better on target devices
To develop a custom taxi booking application, you need to hire four different types of specialists:
- A UX/UI guru who creates wireframes to better plan the app layout, determines how users will interact with the UI components, and designs app screens
- A back end developer who sets up the entire infrastructure behind your app, such as databases, push notifications, and integration with third-party services, and creates an admin panel allowing you to manage your apps and business activities
- An iOS, Android, or cross-platform app developer who bridges the front end and back end
- A QA specialist who ensures that your application is free of bugs and runs smoothly on target devices. With iOS, testing is usually not a big issue. The Android smartphone market, where every consumer electronics company has its own version of the operating system, is a different story and requires more leg work.
The next thing to consider is the minimum viable feature set that your app requires. We’ll use the taxi app as an example:
- Geolocation. To calculate the exact position of a user's device, developers utilize tools like Core Location (iOS) and Geolocation API (Android). MapKit and Google Maps are also necessary to help pinpoint cabs on an online map.
- SMS and push notifications. To confirm bookings and notify users about taxi location and expected arrival time, developers may apply iOS and Android built-in messaging services (either SMS or push notifications).
- Integration with payment services. To go cashless (as most taxi businesses do nowadays), you need to interface your application with third-party payment processing services like PayPal, Stripe, or Braintree. Be aware that your application must comply with payment processing regulations in your target countries.
- User accounts. To help passengers and drivers place and accept orders, as well as manage personal and financial data, taxi booking applications provide two types of user accounts, and in Uber’s case, two types of client applications.
Additional features might include driver and user ratings, a customer loyalty and/or referral program, the option to split ride fares, live chat, and cashless tipping. You'll need to develop some of these modules from the ground up.
How long does it take to build a custom app, and how much will it cost you?
We turned to experts across the industry to answer these incredibly important questions. The insights we've gleaned allow us to make the following assumptions:
- If you need an MVP version of your app containing just the basic four features specified in the bulleted list above, the total development process for both platforms could take around 2,000 hours. A full-fledged Uber-like application with fancy features, such as adding multiple drop-off points or allowing other users to track your drive, may take around 5,000 hours to build.
- You can opt for a cross-platform framework like React Native, Xamarin, or Flutter so that your development team can reuse 80% of the codebase for the Android and iOS versions of your application. This approach helps reduce the time needed to fix back-end logic issues and speed up application releases by up to 20%.
Either way, we're talking about a 1,600-2,000 hour project over the course of three to six months. To calculate the price of building your app, you can multiply the time estimates by the average developer hourly rate in the country where development will take place. Check out our map below to get an idea of what that will be for you.
Verdict
With traditional application development tools and frameworks, you'll be able to create a high-performance app that meets your unique business needs, does not contain bugs, and is likely to get rave reviews from both drivers and commuters.
However, you need a substantial budget to finance the project. It is also crucial to monitor your competitors' activity; in emerging markets, the market window for innovative products and services can be extremely tight.
When Low-Code May Be a Better Option
Low-code app development platforms allow users with little-to-no coding experience to create full-featured mobile applications that run on Android and iOS devices and in browsers. You’ll find lots of self-hosted low-code app builders, although cloud-based app builders offer greater collaboration options.
The whole low-code paradigm revolves around giving businesses and citizen developers an opportunity to create full-fledged mobile applications faster and at a lower price.
Unlike custom applications, low-code apps are not designed for impeccable performance; they consist of pre-configured back-end modules and standard UI elements, meaning you’ll have to go the extra mile to give your application a custom look and feel and enable advanced back-end logic.
Essentially, low-code app builders are software as a service (SaaS) solutions, so you pay a fixed amount per month or annually to use the platform. Prices usually depend on the number of citizen developers on your team and the number of server calls your application makes per month.
All of this makes low-code the preferred approach for applications that have a small user base and do not require extensive customization.
Currently, there are two types of low-code mobile app builders available on the market:
- No-code tools like AppSheet and BuildFire, which target citizen developers and business users and require no development experience
- True low-code app builders, such as Appery.io, which require at least basic training and are widely used by professional app developers
Although no-code platforms clearly win the usability contest, they often lack customization options, as well as the modules essential for our taxi app example.
If you go the low-code route, the are several features you should look for in an app builder to create an Uber-like application:
- Back end as a service (BaaS). In traditional mobile apps, back-end developers turn to .Net, PHP, or any other web development language to write custom business logic. A low-code platform's vendor, on the other hand, provides users with an "all-set" back-end architecture. All you need to do is add the desired functionality, like push notifications and a database to your app.
- Drag-and-drop UI builder. Instead of hiring a designer to sketch and draw the mobile app interface, you'll be able to drag and drop ready-made UI elements on the development board the way you design infographics with Piktochart or Canva.
- Excellent choice of plug-ins. Features that would otherwise need to be developed from scratch in traditional apps can be added as plug-ins in a low-code approach. You should choose a platform with a payment service, messaging plug-ins, and some kind of customizable booking module to save you time and effort.
- Easy integration with third-party systems. A low-code platform should incorporate APIs and SDKs to interface your application with services like Google Maps, as well as back-office systems.
Building a Low-Code Taxi App: Project Time and Cost Estimation
According to Eldar Chernitsky, Head of Product at Appery.io, the final price depends on your choice of a low-code platform, as well as plug-in availability and customization efforts. On average, you can build a low-code app in one-third the time it takes to create iOS and Android applications using traditional tools.
Some studies suggest that low-code app builders can even help create full-featured apps six to ten times faster compared to traditional development tools (that would be for a simpler application, however, not a complex undertaking like our taxi service example).
Verdict
When it comes to speed and app development costs, low-code app builders outperform traditional tools by leaps and bounds. However, not all low-code platforms are created equal.
Some tools have a steep learning curve; no-code solutions are better suited for prototyping a mobile app (as opposed to creating a customer-facing app that will handle thousands of users). You should also consider the possible lack of customization and performance constraints when choosing between low-code and traditional app development.
Low-Code vs. Traditional Development: And the Winner Is...
There's no clear winner, as both approaches have their pros and cons. This summary of low-code and traditional development strengths and limitations might help you make the best decision for your development needs:
- By going low-code, you'll be able to put up a mobile app (and go to market) faster. This could be an ideal scenario for startups who want to test the waters or plan a soft launch.
- Low-code promises significant time savings, as you do the coding yourself and only pay a monthly fee to access the platform's functionality.
- When it comes to app performance, scalability, and the ability to handle traffic spikes, low-code apps are starting to show their limitations.
- Traditional application development tools cannot be mastered overnight. Unless you have an in-house IT department, you'll have to outsource your project to a software vendor.
- In addition to significant development costs, there are also ongoing application maintenance and new feature implementation expenses to consider.
- Compared to cross-platform low-code apps, bespoke applications are specifically designed to suit your business needs — and scale flexibly along with your business.
By 2024, low-code app builders could be responsible for 65% of all application development activity.
But it doesn’t mean traditional apps are dying out. In cases when mobile apps become the cornerstone of a thriving business (think a taxi service or restaurant chain operating in a megapolis), building custom iOS and Android apps might be the only way to ensure a smooth user experience.
When we’re talking about mobile apps used internally (e.g., conference booking solutions) or applications targeting a relatively small user base, low-code could be the better option. The number of options for application development is going up, and with it, the importance of making a conscientious decision of which route to take.