Running A Risk Or Saving Time And Effort? Developing An Educational App...
Developing an educational app can be a lengthy and often expensive process, which, however, necessarily pays off as students get more engaged and motivated. Generation Z children were born with smartphones in their hands and letting them keep these smartphones while studying is the best way to boost their learning performance.
Well, why you should incorporate an educational app into your learning process is not in question. The question is how to incorporate an educational app into your learning process. Should you build your own app or buy a ready-made one? Here, we will consider the pros and cons of both options.
Buying A Ready-Made Educational App
1. Do Not Reinvent The Wheel
Whatever your idea is, most likely, a similar software product has already been developed. Why would you do an unnecessary job and create something that already exists? Instead, you can buy a ready-made app and focus on the content you are going to incorporate into it.
2. Save Time And Effort
Developing an educational app from scratch is a time-consuming process. You need to find a team of professionals, conduct a discovery stage, design UI and UX, write code and test it, fix bugs, and only then, deploy your app. Buying a ready-made solution is faster, cheaper, and simpler as you skip most educational app development stages.
3. Use Someone Else’s Tech Expertise
There are ready-made apps with a variety of functions implemented, including kinetic interaction (touching, moving, scaling, and swiping), audial interaction (talking, repeating, singing, and listening), or cognitive interaction (dealing with exercises, images, videos, or symbolic systems). There are solutions for implementing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, AR and VR, so you don’t need to hire a team of different specialists to implement all these functions. In other words, you do not need to worry about how to create your own educational app. Instead, you simply rely on the proven technical expertise of other people and focus on what you can do best.
4. Know The Price Beforehand
When you are buying a ready-made app, you know the final price of it in advance. When you are building your own app, in most cases, you follow “Time and Material” approach, which means that the final price may vary. Surely, if you are on a limited budget, you may discuss a fixed price approach with your development team. However, buying an educational app is still more secure.
5. Expect No Surprises
When buying a ready-made app, you can look and click through the final product. If you choose to build an educational app, regardless of how precise your requirements are, the final product always comes with a bit of surprise. To compare, if you buy a ready-made apartment, you can go through the rooms, check the furniture, and get the actual feeling of your new home. But when you buy an apartment with bare walls, you cannot know what to expect at the end however nice the design looked on paper.
Note: The price of a ready-made app will depend on the product type, platform, and functionality.
Building Your Own Educational App
1. Keep Up With The Trends
The software market is extending at a rapid pace, and the number of technologies, functions, solutions is growing rapidly. Are you willing to implement one of those newest decisions? Most probably, there are no ready-made software solutions yet, but you can create your own education app. Later, you might even sell it to other people. So hurry up and enter this niche while it is still vacant!
2. Implement Exactly The Features That You Need
If you buy a ready-made solution, you will be provided a variety of functions, most of which you will not even need. If you want to focus on your needs without dispersing your attention, build your own app.
3. Think Of Your Particular User
Before developing an app, clearly define your purpose and study the preferences of your target user. Do you create your app for teachers, students, pupils, librarians, drivers, language learners or people with special needs? Building a custom app will let you take into account all these specific features, design the optimal UI/UX, and incorporate the best content. More than that, by creating your own app from scratch, you will have an opportunity to incorporate your application with social networks that are most popular in your country or area, to make your app culture-specific, to develop it in any language and make sure it is error-free. In particular, while building an educational app, think of the most relevant and catchy motivational messages to retain your target audience.
4. Spare Yourself Unnecessary Problems
If you decide to buy a ready-made solution, you cannot be a hundred percent sure that the code is clean, that the app is bug-free, and that nothing is going to break when you start scaling your product. Instead, if you decide to build an educational app, you start from scratch. You will have full control over the quality, and it will depend solely on the technical expertise of your team.
5. Test Your Idea
If you are not sure if your idea is going to work, build a minimum viable product first. It will let you try out your idea and analyze its performance. According to the findings, you will be able to adjust it to the needs of your user and be sure that the project is going to succeed.
Note: The price of building your own app will depend on the product type, platform, functionality, and salaries for IT specialists in a certain region.
