How to Hire Top Mobile App Developers for Your Team: Tips, Costs & More

7 min readJan 13, 2022

The integrity and quality of the entire project depends on how professional and well-coordinated your team is. It is important to take into account not only the hard skills of the developers, but also their soft skills, because they will have to work in a team. In this article, we’ll show you how to find and hire the specialist you need. And also which specialists should be preferred.

What Is an Offshore Development Team?

Offshoring development implies classic outsourcing, but aimed at foreign countries. That is, the workload of foreign companies falls on external companies and / or teams located in another country. It can be a full development cycle of an application or a part of it, or even support for a finished product.

Most often this is due to limited budgets, since there are certain countries with an optimal price-performance ratio.

For example, this can be said about Eastern Europe. Other lucrative countries include Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as India and China.

Why Should You Think About Hiring Offshore Mobile Development Team

Offshore development has several advantages over conventional outsourcing. This is true for businesses of any size that want a quality product for a reasonable price tag. Let’s consider the arguments in favor of this development format.

1. Reasonable cost

The cost of offshore development can be 2–3 times lower than what you can be charged in your home country. We will talk about specific figures further.

2. Decrease in operating costs

You don’t have to worry about organizing a workplace or buying any equipment. Also, there is no need to pay for licensed programs and spend human resources to work with employees.

3. Saving time

While the offshore company is developing the application, you will have the opportunity to focus on the design and marketing of the future product so that its launch will be even more successful.

4. Compensation for the lack of own expertise

You can choose a company with a suitable stack and advanced technologies.

5. Fewer risks

When deciding with an offshore team, you can use a specific development methodology, and all points are spelled out in contracts.

The Collaboration Models To Choose From

There are several models of cooperation between the client and the contractor. Let’s consider two of the most popular: outsourcing and outstaffing.

Outsourcing Mobile Development

Outsourced development is the practice of hiring third-party contractors to develop products and services in various fields and/or to generate ideas.

The key to success, in this case, depends on strategic planning and trusting relationships between the parties. Optimizing communication leads not only to efficient work but also to customer satisfaction.

It is important to take into account all the nuances, up to being in the same time zone for comfortable communication. It should also be remembered that small teams are often more effective than large ones since they are easier to achieve effective results with.

You can turn to both top companies and small but ambitious outsourcing companies with a portfolio that suits you.

Outstaffing In Mobile Development

Outstaffing is essentially a “hire” of a specialist from a certain company for a pool of tasks of the customer company. At the same time, he is part of the client’s team along with other team members, and his work is regulated by the management team. The payment to the specialist is made according to the contract concluded with the company by the contractor.

There can be many reasons for choosing an outstaff, for example, the growth of the company when the hiring quota for new employees is exceeded. There may also be a project needed for an employee.

Where You Can Find Mobile App Developers

Finding a developer is sometimes not easy as there are many options and specialists to hire. Consider the main sources where you can find a suitable specialist.

1. Freelance

It is much cheaper in many ways, but it is only suitable for small tasks or updates. Finding a full stack freelance developer is an almost impossible task, and with hardly predictable timing. But you can spread the list of tasks between several freelancers. You will also assume the role of a project manager to effectively supervise all employees.

There are a large number of platforms like Upwork that offer specialist profiles with stacks and portfolios.

2. Internal team or remote employees

You can hire a development team on an ongoing basis to close current and urgent tasks. You can also search for employees on Linkedin, Stack Overflow, GitHub for permanent office work or remote work.

3. Outsourcing companies and agencies

To do this, you can monitor resources like BusinessForApps, where you can find lists of top 10 mobile app development companies by specific profiles. You can see what such a page looks like here. This is considered the most optimal way to collaborate with developers.

The Stages Involved In Hiring Offshore Mobile Development Team

There are several basic steps involved in hiring and partnering with an offshore developer.

Writing a clear, detailed job description: This is where the functionality and the required technology stack are written.

Research the ranking and portfolio of a developer / outsourcing company: this can be done via Clutch or LinkedIn. You can hire professional technical specialists to check the developer’s level.

Always check access to the latest version of the code: this can be spelled out in the cooperation agreement as a mandatory clause, you can also immediately declare yourself a sweetheart or administrator of all accounts in Github, TFS, clouds and other working platforms.

Discuss the working methodology and process: Scrum, Agile — all this determines the format of interaction between the customer and the contractor. Also clearly write down the provisions of the NDA of the project, you can do this even at the interview stage.

Make sure you have a clear understanding of the agreements: feel free to ask questions about what is written in “small print” to make sure the contractor has read the contract in detail.

Find a good project management tool: this greatly increases the efficiency of collaboration, for example, Slack, Jira, Trello, etc. This will allow you to always understand the current status.

Proactivity is good: formulate your thoughts clearly and convey them to the PM for further discussion with the team, but do not forget to listen to the opinion of specialists.

Insist on frequent deployment: start with an MVP at the end of each sprint, and with clear shadow documentation.

How To Screen Mobile App Developers

First of all, you need to understand how a person is capable of communication. To do this, it is enough to conduct an interview with a professional recruiter, who will determine whether a person will be able to write an article as part of a team and share values.

After that, it is important to define the technology stack and its suitability for your project. A shadow specialist of the level of a team lead or tech lead will help you with this. In addition to theory, here it is also necessary to simulate situations and tasks from real or hypothetical cases. It is necessary to pay special attention to the moments where the specialist does not have enough knowledge, but he is looking for solutions. You can also ask about the implementation of certain features from the developer’s portfolio.

Is Mobile Tech Stack Important?

A technical stack usually summarizes all languages, technologies, frameworks, libraries, and so on that can be used in development.

In addition, based on the stack, you can understand the general level of a specialist and his ability (or inability) to think more globally, at the architecture level. Also, due to the limitations of some programming languages and frameworks, you can understand what exactly he will not be able to implement. There are also outdated technologies that are not able to meet the needs of the client.

How Much Will It Cost You To Hire Offshore Mobile App Developers?

Outsourcing costs always depend on the country you are applying to. The difference is really huge: while European mobile app developers for hire specify rates between $ 20 and $ 170 / hour, in the US these prices range from $ 50 to $ 200. The costs also depend on the complexity of the application, as a complex product will take longer.

Approximate price tags for applications:

Simple products from $ 5,000 to $ 10,000.
Social media app up to $ 100,000.
Complex functional — up to $ 1,000,000.

You can find out more specifically the cost of the application at a meeting with the contractor, after clearly defining the functionality.

TopDevs’ Experience In Offshore Development

In our practice, we have come across such a format of cooperation. This is a Qliq application designed for secure text messaging to improve communication in healthcare. The challenge was to ensure effective collaboration between medical professionals.

Technological stack of the project:

Objective-C
Swift
Automatic layout
Custom UI
Pure Sql
Push Notifications
SIP Framework
SqlCipher

The main requirement for the platform itself was to ensure the highest possible level of security for the secure exchange of health data between healthcare providers. At the same time, all operations must be fast, reliable and easy to use. You can read more about the case here.

Summing Up

Choosing a reliable professional contractor is the key to the success of the entire project. If you start from only one search parameter (price, country, or something else), most likely your expectations will not be met. You can do the search both independently and with the help of professional recruiters.

Pay attention to detail and listen to professional advice. Competent communication is of great importance, because only in this case both sides will understand expectations from each other.