Custom Apps....

[Millgate]

Hi guys,

 

Random one for you this morning. I had a meeting with one of our partners yesterday who design and build custom apps. They work on any kind of device, any OS and look very good.

 

They were good guys & I know one of them from working at Insight so we got chatting about their customer base and who they deal with etc. I was surprised to heat that 60-70% of his client base were schools! These apps range in price depending on what they do but some can cost £100k!

 

So I was just wondering, with BYOD getting more popular all the time, have you had your own app developed or are you thinking about it?

 

Luke

[Duranis]

The biggest issue with getting your own app's developed, especially multiplatform, high use stuff, is that of ongoing support. I used to be the technical director for a company that developed hardware and software for mobile devices (and some embedded stuff as well). With the speed that mobile OS's update and the sometimes vast (and oft undocumented) changes to available API's (I'm looking at you Apple) you may be having to do some major patch work every 6 months or so to keep things running. This isn't as bad as it used to be but still adds an ongoing cost to an already expensive solution.

 

In a school I don't really see any need that justifies a completely custom solution given the costs involved and availability of off the shelf solutions for most school requirements where their on going development costs are spread among all their customers and there is a wider range of support available. Of course there is always the exception (some school with a special requirement where it would be easier/cheaper to develop their own solution) and maybe in larger educational environments, such as a uni, it may be worthwhile.

 

Edit: I'm not surprised a lot of schools get their own custom app's written. This is mostly due to good sales teams in the software houses and poor technical knowledge on the people making the decisions in schools (just look at previous posts on here regarding costs paid for web sites as a similar example). Person in charge gets shown some shiny "solution" which they can say is built unique for their school and are blind or unaware of the fact they could get a better/cheaper solution off the shelf.

Edited June 11, 2015 by Duranis