I have an idea for a mobile app. How should I go about it?

In My Humble Opinion
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I recently got an idea for the concept of a mobile phone app. To make it clear right of the bat, this is something I would develop as a commercial product. Not merely for personal use. Obviously I can’t divulge its function here, but I could state the broad category: “storage and retrieval of X-type of data.”

I have the concept. Where do I take it here to make it a reality? I am a complete layman when it comes to technology, including mobile technology. I’m not an IT guy either, though here at least: 1) partly through being the son of computer programmers and partly through taking a passing interest and keeping abreast of developments, I do have some idea of what coding involves; 2) I have had a low-level IT job (SEO) though which I got an idea of HTML code. That said, should I, for example:

  1. Learn to code and design it myself? I asked around and apparently Java and C-sharp are the main programming languages to use for mobile apps, though it varies whether you make it for Android or iPhone. There are online tutorials for coding and programming languages. Realistically, if I took this route, how long might it take me before I could create an app?

  2. Use an online mobile app-creating tool. These don’t require knowledge of coding. Are any of these good enough quality that the resulting app would be commercially viable, or would the result be too “amateurish?”

  3. Getting someone to do it for me. Would obviously be hesitant here due to the risk of the idea being stolen. And I don’t know how much I’d have to pay them.

And not to get ahead of myself, but once created, which channels might I go through to market it?

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Do you have access to capital?

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The first question that comes to mind is how critical is this “X-type of data”? Because if it needs to be secure you definitely need to enjoin a development team that is experienced in mobile security. You cannot use a “mobile app-creating tool” or quickly learn to do this on your own from the starting point of being a slightly informed layperson.

You can protect your concept with a patent if it is truly a novel application.

Stranger

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Speaking as a web developer (not a mobile dev, but I’ve worked with them): Your app idea on its own probably isn’t really worth that much. I don’t mean that as a put-down, it’s just that ideas are a dime a dozen in this industry and every programmer experiments with their own all the time, but of all the hundreds of thousands of apps that get made every year, only a tiny percentage ever make any money, and of those, only a tinier handful ever become a household name. And the overwhelming majority of those are not solo-dev apps.

All that is to say: You’re a very long way away from having a vetted product with good product-market fit that would attract users and investors.

There’s no guarantee that just making an app would attract anyone. You need it to not only be useful, but have a good user experience, good marketing, customer support, testing, quality assurance, etc. It’s a whole industry for a reason, and you haven’t started at all. Ideas are the easiest part of that, and by itself isn’t going to win you anything – it’s usually more about the execution and marketing.

Patent or trademark it if you’d like, but then hire someone to help you build a minimum viable product and see how it goes, a bit at a time, without betting your entire life savings on it. Chances are, if you find someone who’s done a few apps, they can pretty quickly tell you whether your idea is at all viable, what similar ones are out there, what the barriers you might encounter are, etc. And if it’s a sane enough idea, you can launch it, beta test it with a few trusted users (colleagues, friends, family, whoever) and work out the biggest kinks before official launch.

You can find freelancers on communities like Hackernews: Seeking Freelancers Feb 2025

Or hire them from marketplaces like Upwork, with review histories and such: https://www.upwork.com/hire/mobile-app-developers/

In the US, an hourly cost might be something like $100-$200/hr for a good one, maybe $50-$100 for an adequate one. Foreign devs are more affordable but you end up having to deal with potential language, culture, legal, cultural, and time zone differences.

If you want to code it yourself, well… it’s an option. And there are AI tools that can help you learn. The thing is that if you over-rely on them without really knowing what you’re doing, you’ll end up shooting yourself in the foot without knowing it (“footguns”, we call them) and it’ll cost you more to fix it later, than if you just hired someone to do it right from the beginning. Nobody wants to reverse engineer your messy AI-generated codebase to fix beginner mistakes.

If you really want to learn how to do it on your own, it’s entirely doable (90% of what I know and use on the job was self-taught), but takes months & years, not hours and days. Personally, I’d probably learn React Native or Flutter for cross-platform mobile dev (easier to hire for), Swift if you want to focus on iOS only, and Java or the derivative Kotlin for Android. C# would be a less common choice, I think, especially in the US.

But if you’re starting from zero and not having any coding experience at all, they are all going to be quite difficult, so start with basic mobile tutorials and just try to get a basic “hello world” app going before you dive into anything involving networking and data retrieval.

I would suggest only taking that route if you actually have an interest in coding. It’s not necessarily difficult (compared to, say, law or medicine or music or writing or sports or other skill-based activities), but it does require a very high level of precision, and often involves a lot of tedium. If that doesn’t sound fun, just hire someone instead.

Decide if you’re more interested in testing your app idea as a business (in which case you should hire a professional) or you primarily want to learn to code, with the hope of maybe someday making the app on your own (then it’s ok to slowly learn, if there’s no real rush in delivering the app).

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Edit: Sorry, I forgot you need a Mac for iOS dev :frowning: If you don’t have one already, you can look for free React Native/Flutter/Kotlin tutorials instead. Don’t look for a generic “Java” one unless you find one specifically tailored toward modern Android development (Java is too widely used in other unrelated fields too). Similarly, if you decide on C# for some reason, you probably want to learn it in the context of MAUI (the cross-platform mobile framework), not just generic C# (which is also used in enterprise-y business web & desktop apps).

Original post:

Take a look at some of these tutorials… check out the first few videos to see if it’s something you can see yourself devoting a few months to:

There are many such resources, for whatever language and framework/platform you want to learn. I just picked a random popular one (Swift for iOS/iPad apps), but the concepts are largely similar between them. More to the point, those free videos and previews should give you enough of a taste to know if it’s something you can realistically see yourself learning. The hard part is starting from absolutely no experience; once you learn your first programming language, learning your 2nd, 3rd, etc. is much much easier.

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Indeed there is a running joke among developers these days of MBA-bros sitting in a coffee shop saying stuff like, “I’ve got a great idea for an app that’s totally going to make billions. I just need to find a coder who’ll work for stock options or exposure (and make them sign an NDA so they don’t just steal my idea)”.

Not to be overly harsh to OP, but the whole punchline of that joke is that app ideas are cheap and developing them is expensive. Unless you’re thinking about something super-niche, you are probably not the first person who has had your idea and the other people who have had the idea have deemed it not worth the effort to develop. (And if you are thinking about something super-niche, the commercial viability of end product is probably not that good.)

In other words, market analysis way cheaper than software development costs. So do that first and be very, very sure you want to move to the next step.

That being said:

  • Deploying to Android: Java (old) or Kotlin (new)
  • Deploying to iPhone: Objective C (old) or Swift (I think almost universally now).

I’ve seen projects that use cross-platform platforms based on C#, but I’ve never seen one that was successful doing that. Most eventually just give up and make separate Android and Kotlin apps rather than trying to be cross platform.

Also, have you considered an Progressive Web App instead? It’s more like a web site with a little enhanced functionality so it can work like an app. Might be a cheaper option.

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I came in to say the same thing. And it’s not just apps, it’s ideas in general. Great ideas come constantly, that’s the easy part. The hard part is actually implementing an idea and then making it work and sustaining it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I have a great idea about…” Nothing comes of it.

Not to discourage people with dreams. But the dreams are easy.

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I was immediately reminded of this thread:

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With computer programming parents, you should go to them with this idea to see what they think of it. They will likely be able to give you very good advice for how valuable the idea is as well as an idea of what it would take to implement. Even if they aren’t familiar with app programming, they will likely be able to give pretty good guesstimates about the feasibility of this idea.

One thing to keep in mind is that it’s pretty difficult to protect your idea once it’s in the market. If you’re worried it’s so good that someone will steal it before you develop it, it’s almost a certainty that someone will steal it afterwards. While you can get a software patent, enforcing that patent can be very expensive and time consuming. A company like Apple has teams of in-house lawyers to go after patent infringers. A solo programmer will not. To even get a patent in the first place will cost thousands. Unless your program is wildly profitable, you won’t really be able to afford to protect it from copycats.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue this. It can be a very fun learning experience to create an app and market it. But making a profit, even a small profit, will be quite challenging. Keep that in mind as you think about the time, effort, and expense in making the app. Realistically, producing the app will probably be more of a hobby than a business. But it can be a lot of fun, so good luck!

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Speaking of AI stuff, this just launched a few hours ago: Launch HN: A0.dev (YC W25) – React Native App Generator | Hacker News

It’s an AI-powered mobile app generator (using React Native). You describe what kind of an app you want and it’ll write some prototype code for you. It’s similar to https://replit.com/, https://bolt.new/, https://v0.dev/, etc.

If I were learning, I wouldn’t try to jump from A to Z like this, but rather go through some regular tutorials and ask ChatGPT (or another chatbot) if you get stuck along the way – they’re very good at explaining both concepts and code.

Completely AI-generated apps can be fun to play around with (and to get a quick idea of what an app could look like), but it’s still better to learn the basics the old-fashioned way, for now. They can be a very helpful prototyping tool, but they come with a lot of bugs and nuances that an experienced developer can easily address, but that won’t be obvious to a true beginner.

I have no doubt AI will replace most of us software devs in the coming years, but it’s not quite there yet. Don’t over-rely on them for the time being.

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Thank you everyone for your advice. I will give all points / options mentioned above due consideration.

My idea for the app is kind of niche. I will do some more market research before I commit to the project.

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NDAs can stop ideas from being stolen.

Cost-wise, if it’s a very simple app, you’re looking at probably somewhere between $5k and $10k. If it’s more complex and/or involves security issues and such, it’s probably more in the range of $100k to $500k.

One complaint about the U.S. patent system is that while it works reasonably well for large corporations, it doesn’t work very well at all for individuals or for very small companies.

There are no “patent police”. You have to find out on your own if someone is infringing on your patent, and then you have to take them to court to recover damages, and it’s all on your own nickel. If you have limited funding, a large corporation can basically lawyer you to death. dragging out issues in court, hitting you with counter-suits, etc. until all of your lawyer fees, court costs, etc. completely deplete your funding.

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That is very true but being the case, a large corporation can also reverse engineer a novel application, or come up any number of ways to block a patent user from exercising their IP and collecting due compensation until they give up or sell due to exhaustion. The history of the intermittent windshield wiper mechanism is a case study in this.

Stranger

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Good luck!

Also strongly second the “talk to a programmer” advice (your own parents, or a third party with a NDA if you must). Pay them for an hour of their time, just as a consultation. Even if they don’t write any code, after that talk you’ll have a much better idea of the technical feasibility/difficulty of what you want to do.

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Another thing to consider if you want to bring software to market as a business endeavor… ongoing support.

It’s one thing to hire someone(s) to build it for you, but what about next year or the year after when the graphics library or some other dependency your one-time employee used drops out of support or has a major revision?

Maybe it’s cart before the horse, but if you’re building commercial software that a business is going to depend on over years, you’ll need a business plan for ongoing software maintenance. Either you really learn to code and it’s you, or you hire/partner with someone who is committed to the business.

Because that’s really what this is- it’s not an idea for an app, it’s an idea about starting a business that sells an app. Your business plan is in many ways more important than the app idea or who’s going to build it.

What are people in this industry doing today to accomplish what this app will accomplish? What does that cost them? What are the pain points? How is your solution going to give them better return for less effort or cost?

Get your business model in place. Get your software designed/scoped. Building the thing is the easiest piece.