Every bank and NBFC wishes to attract customers by creating their native mobile applications nowadays.
A well-designed app not only allows the users to perform standard financial operations and view relevant content but also offers a convenient way of managing your finances while staying connected 24/7.
The topic becomes more pressing if you need to recruit app developers with specific platform knowledge to create a native financial app.
With that said, which will be your top priority if you must prioritize? Let’s talk about a major choice that every app developer encounters – should they implement the solution with iOS or Android?
Here are some things to think about to help you make your decision.
1. User Retention
The overall number of users who are still using your app after a certain amount of time is referred to as retention. Retention rates are typically measured on Day 1, Day 7, and Day 30.
The retention rate of an app is then calculated by comparing the number of users at the start of a certain period to the number of users after that period.
As the graph shows, there are also significant disparities in user retention between Android and iOS, with iOS significantly exceeding Android. Android Day 1, 3, 7, 14, and 30 retention rates fell substantially over the first three quarters of 2021.
The reduction in Android day 30 retention rates was significantly higher, falling 16%. At the same time iOS retention is increasing, but only marginally. Looking at day 30 retention, we see a good sign of customer loyalty, which increased by 1.5% to slightly over 4%.
To summarize, several aspects must be considered before reaching a decision.
As a marketer or developer, your objective isn’t to ensure that everyone who installs the app uses it. As a general norm, users will keep leaving the application over time.
Instead, you aim to provide an onboarding and overall user experience that assures a certain proportion of each month’s cohort of new users remains engaged, allowing the app to expand at a consistent and sustainable rate.
2. Development Costs
If the pace of development is critical to your project, you should know ahead of time how long it will take to provide an iOS or Android solution.
In comparison to iOS, it takes 30% to 40% longer to develop an Android-based application. This is due to the intricacy of the code and the large range of devices.
On the contrary, the App Store has a more stringent application screening and acceptance procedure that can take up to a week and is done manually. Google Play follows automatic testing that applications must pass in a shorter amount of time.
Development cost us a critical decision in favoring one platform over the other. The price of development is also determined by the characteristics of your fintech apps.
Obviously, with cutting-edge functionality and corporate-grade security, both Android and iOS apps will cost the same as feature-rich enterprise software.
With that said, Android apps can be significantly more expensive than iOS apps due to a broad device ecosystem spanning a wide range of manufacturers and device capabilities.
Stringent quality control procedures and restrictions, on the other side, make iOS development more difficult.
As a result, iOS development necessitates greater development knowledge, but Android development necessitates more complexity in terms of device-level testing.
3. App Testing
Choosing the right platform for your FinTech app can be a difficult decision. The two biggest players in the mobile market are Android and iOS. Both platforms has its advantages and disadvantages, which can make it hard for developers to decide which one is right for them.
One of the most important factors in choosing between these two platforms is how you want to test your app on real devices before releasing it to the public.
When developing an Android app, you can use emulators like Genymotion to simulate an Android device on your computer.
However, emulators aren’t quite as good as real devices because they don’t have all of the hardware features and software limitations that a real device has. This means that any bugs that show up in your testing will likely still exist when your app gets released into the wild.
On the other hand, iOS is often easier to create and test for both novice and seasoned programmers. iOS apps, on average, take less time to design and are less expensive to build and maintain than Android apps.
With iOS development, you can test your app on real iPhones and iPads using TestFlight or HockeyApp before releasing it into the App Store. This allows you to find out if there are any issues with compatibility or performance before putting out a release candidate version of your app.
4. Android’s Fragmentation
Another factor that draws a resemblance is device fragmentation.
From this perspective, hiring an iOS developer appears to be simpler because Apple releases a limited number of devices per year. However, it isn’t that simple.
Android apps should be compatible with a wide range of devices with varying screen sizes, hardware requirements, and operating system versions.
This adds to the development process’s complexity. It also lengthens the QA process since you must test your mobile solution on several devices to assure its quality and pleasant user experience.
5. Resource Availability
Google and Apple both provide various toolkits to developers who want to build and market popular apps.
Android development tools are believed to be simpler to set up and use than Apple’s. Google provides development tools like Jetpack, a popular mobile app development platform. Google also provides an Android SDK development kit that is linked to Android Studio.
Furthermore, Google provides several tools for coders of all ability levels, including beginner-friendly layouts and more complicated designs for specialists.
Instead, Apple provides an API, SwiftUI Design tools, and Storyboards in Xcode to assist developers in designing the UI of their apps. Because iOS coding is less complicated, it may be claimed that Apple does not require as many resources as Google.
Conclusion
Now, which of the two improvements comes out on top when it comes to developing financial apps?
Both are fantastic revisions with significant value increases, particularly in terms of security and privacy settings and features that are essential components of fintech apps.
Fintech applications will become the norm in financial services in the next few years. Though iOS appears to be ahead of the competition because of its high-spending user base, Android will increase the popularity of financial applications across the board.
