Building an app gives you ample investment opportunities in business, especially if you want to expand your business or want to start a new company.
According to the research conducted by Statista, in 2021 around 352 billion app downloads were recorded, which proves that there are millions of people who download apps every day. It implies that building a mobile app can be a perfect way to increase customer loyalty and increase brand recognition.
This says a lot about the importance of app building and indicates how essential it has become to helping your business grow and reach more audiences in the industry.
However, it’s very important to decide which application development you should choose for your business before proceeding with app development.
This article talks about what is low-code and custom app development, which app development you should choose for your business.
What is Low-Code Development?
Considering the increased usability of mobile apps, the traditional app development processes are not that effective.
Generally, it’s not possible to build software solutions in less time as it requires extensive planning, designing, testing, and deploying.
Hence, with the increase in digitalization, organizations look for fast and viable solutions, and that’s the point where businesses shift to low-code development.
Low code development is used to build apps and is a type of mobile app development that uses tools and powerful applications with minimum hand coding to create mobile apps using a drag and drop interface.
What is Custom App Development?
If you want to design a specific mobile app for specific users to scale up your business, then custom app development is best for you as it will create a bespoke mobile application to reach out to target audiences.
It’s used to build software for specific users or organizations with a set of features.
The reason why businesses prefer to use custom app development is when they feel that there’s a need to build an app to scale up their business and the app should be built considering the business requirements to meet the expectations of the users.
It’s your call if you want to build the mobile app by yourself or want to assign it to any professional team for developing the app. In both cases, you’re going to get a customized mobile app designed with a set of features to meet the requirements of your business.
It also offers customization options without any limit and can be built from scratch.
Low Code vs Custom App Development Should You Choose for Your Business?
You may be wondering which application you should choose for your business. Confused? Don’t worry, to make it easier, we’ve researched and listed a few factors which will help you decide the right application for your business:
1. Time for app development
Custom app development takes around 6 months to develop an app with basic features. However, there’s no precise estimation of time as it depends on the features, size, and complexity of the app and it includes various stages such as gathering requirements, designing, developing, testing, and launching.
Whereas low-code development takes comparatively less time and you can use ready-made templates such as UI Bakery and Wavemaker, which will help you reduce the time required for developing, testing, and launching apps. It can be completed within a few months or even a few days.
2. Designs and Features
Low-code applications are often designed based on pre-developed platforms or templates, which leaves less scope for customization.
If you've tried low-code development, you're probably familiar with template-based mode apps.
As the application is based on a pre-developed template and platform, enablers begin building the app quickly, which results in the final app missing the features that might become essential for your business later.
Besides this, making minor changes, including visual and graphic updates, will consume a lot of time, which makes it less preferable for businesses.
Whereas custom app development involves adding customized features and designs to meet the expectations of businesses and users, Hence, most businesses prefer custom app development to expand their business when they want to design an app with the desired features and designs.
3. Scaling and Updation
Generally, low-code apps don't support more customization options, which preferably bring more challenges at the time of updating and scaling.
Let’s say the template on which you developed the app stops future support for a particular product or it doesn't support a few updates. This template-based app will definitely restrict the purpose of your business with which you’ve designed the app and will eventually restrict the productivity and creativity of the app, thereby limiting its certain set of features and design.
Custom app development, on the other hand, allows you to easily add features and create it from scratch.
4. Security and Reliability
Over the last decade, thousands of data breaches have resulted in massive losses in records, resulting in severe damage to many businesses.
These data breaches become easier when they happen on a low-code platform due to a lack of security, as sometimes it might happen that your development partner might not have written the code or the code isn’t reliable. Also, sometimes the developers may reduce the security features, which can cause hindrance in the app and subject it to cyber attack.
It’s always recommended to hire an experienced low-code development team to ensure better security and reliability.
Unlike low-code app development, custom app development ensures full security as it’s solely developed for a specific business or company, security becomes the top priority when developing the application, making it safe, secure, and reliable.
5. Efficiency of an application
As mentioned, low-code development comes with certain limitations in features and updates due to a lack of customization. Sometimes useful features might not be added or design elements can’t be changed in the application, thereby restricting the features in the app.
This results in a lack of efficiency. When the app doesn't perform optimally, it becomes difficult and more costly to add in the features or make the changes.
Whereas custom app development is specifically designed and developed to tailor the need or requirements of the business to reach out to more target audiences. Hence, a custom developed app saves you from the hassle.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that if your business is planning to upscale or expand, then your priority might be to build a versatile app in which you can change or update the features with ease. In addition, you might also want to update designs or features based on user feedback.
If you have these preferences, then it's right to say that custom app development is perfect to achieve the desired features.
Low-code applications may appear to be less expensive and time-consuming at first, but after a few weeks, you will notice the loopholes and may decide they are not worth the investment.
