Social Media App Development: What Are The Development Stages?

Social media applications are at the peak of popularity, bringing together people who share common interests, places of residence, schools, higher education, etc. Today, social media applications are a space for socializing, sharing opinions, dating, business negotiations, and many other things. Active social media users have passed the 4.55 billion mark, while the average daily usage of social media is 2 hours and 27 minutes. Nearly 60% of the world’s population uses social media now. This article discusses social media app development stages and average cost.

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Social Media App Development Stages

Social media application is a platform for communication between people with the same interests and goals. It is also one of the most powerful tools of digital marketing. Let`s look at the five stages of social media app development.

Stage 1: Analytics

Before developing a social media app, the target audience should be defined, including its profile, features, characteristics, key objectives, and goals. Once the information about the target audience is collected, the development company will prioritize the features which should be in the MVP and give you a preliminary estimate of the budget and terms.

Stage 2: Engineering

At this stage, the development company creates the social media app infrastructure and prototypes for the iOS and Android versions of the app. Next, the development company thinks through the UX design in the social media app and how it relates to its screens, functionality, and each other. This will help to see the logic of how the social media app works before they start to implement it. The development company works on the overall system architecture: what the services will be, what they will be responsible for, whether there are integrations with other systems, and how they interact.

Also, the development company chooses the technological stack. For social media app development, they can use:

Swift
Node.js
Flutter
React Native
Kotlin
FCM
Alamofire
Express 4
Twilio
PubNub

The choice of tech stack depends on the development company’s specialization, time for development, and required functionality.

Stage 3: Design

Next, the development company defines the style of the social media app: color palette, fonts, graphics, icons, etc. Developers overlay this on a prototype and receive a design concept. This gives you a 100% clear understanding of how the social media application will look and work. Along with the corresponding specification, developers receive a design layout of the app.

Stage 4: Development

Mobile app developers receive the design and refine the estimate of the project. Their task is to lay out each screen and write the code that connects them logically and allows the approved functionality to work. They also use the code to establish the interaction between the visible part of the application (the front end) and its invisible part, where the data is stored (the back end).

Stage 5: Maintainance

After the social media app development is over and the app is released, the team tracks the application`s performance. Developers fix bugs, provide technical support, and develop new functions for the social media application.

Social Media Application Development Cost

Social media app development is a fairly complex and time-consuming process that requires the efforts of dozens of professionals. As a rule, Voypost attracts full-time and remote employees for social media app development. This allows us to simultaneously move in several directions, which reduces the time required to develop the social media app. By the way, our founder is Nikita Sviridenko, with 12 years of experience as a Solution Architect.

The approximate cost of social media app development is $100.000-$200.000. It depends on the complexity of the project. Feel free to contact us to discuss your social media app development.