Choosing a Shopify Mobile App Builder: the three routes, and who each one suits
There are three ways a Shopify store ends up with an app, they cost very different amounts, and two of them are better than us for some stores. This is which.
The three routes
Every Shopify store that ends up with an app took one of these. They are not tiers of the same product — they are different arrangements with different risks.
A template app on a subscription
You configure a ready-made app yourself and pay monthly, usually a few hundred dollars. Fastest and cheapest to start.
Suits: a store testing whether an app changes anything, with a straightforward catalogue and no unusual requirements.
Costs you: the subscription never ends, the app looks like the template, and what you can change is what the template allows. Leaving means starting again.
A built app
Designed for your catalogue and built once. A project cost rather than a subscription, with maintenance after it.
Suits: a store with a real repeat customer base, an opinion about how its category should be shopped, or a requirement a template does not cover.
Costs you: more up front, and a longer wait than configuring a template. This is what TicApp does.
Your own developers
A team building and maintaining it in-house. The most control and by far the most expensive.
Suits: a business where the app is the business, or one already running a mobile team.
Costs you: hiring, and the fact that an app is never finished — somebody has to be there for the next iOS release whether or not anything else is happening.
When a subscription builder is the better answer
We say this on sales calls and it belongs in writing.
- You are not sure an app will change anything. Find out for a few hundred a month before spending a project budget.
- Your catalogue is straightforward and your requirements are ordinary. A template will serve it and the difference will not repay the cost.
- You need it in two weeks and cannot wait for a design round.
- The budget genuinely is not there yet. A subscription app running is worth more than a built app being planned.
When it is worth having one built
- A meaningful share of revenue already comes from returning customers, so the channel has something to do on the day it opens.
- Your category shops in a particular way — high-value slow decisions, heavy reordering, live selling — and a template forces it into a shape that fights it.
- You are already paying a subscription large enough that the arithmetic has turned. Past a certain monthly figure, a built app pays for itself inside two years and then costs maintenance only.
- You need Arabic done properly, or an integration a template does not have.
Switching from a subscription builder
The commonest reason people ask, and there are three things worth knowing before you start.
1. Find out whose account it is on
Before anything else. If the listing is under your own Apple and Google accounts, migrating a Shopify mobile app is an update and you keep your installs and reviews. If it is under the builder’s, it is a new listing from zero — and that is usually a larger number than the build itself. It is also the one nobody quotes.
2. Export what is yours
Push notification subscribers rarely transfer, so plan to rebuild that list — usually by asking inside the old app before it retires. Customers and orders live in Shopify and are unaffected.
3. Overlap, then retire
Run both for a few weeks rather than switching in a night. A hard cutover is how stores lose the customers who had the old app open.
On the word “best”
People search for the best Shopify mobile app builder, and no honest page can answer that as written, because it is several different questions wearing one phrase.
- The fastest route from nothing to an app in a store — that is a subscription platform, and it is not us.
- The best Shopify mobile app development company — judge any of them on three things: apps you can install today, whose developer account the listings sit in, and whether they will tell you not to build one. The third separates a supplier from a partner.
- The best value for the money — depends entirely on your monthly subscription and how long you plan to run the app. Past roughly two years a built app is usually cheaper than renting one, and below one year it usually is not.
Questions people ask
Should I build a Shopify app myself or have one built?
Configure a template yourself if you are still finding out whether an app helps; have one built when you know it does and the template is in the way. The mistake in both directions is committing before the repeat-purchase number is known.
What does it cost to switch app builders?
The build, plus the install base if the current listing is under somebody else’s developer account. Check that first.
Is a built app always better than a template?
No. It is better when the store has an opinion the template cannot express, or a repeat customer base large enough to justify the difference. For plenty of stores a template is the right answer and staying on it is the right decision.
Can you take over an app somebody else built?
Sometimes, and it depends on what it was built with and whether the code is yours. The answer is genuinely sometimes “take it over” and sometimes “replace it”.