--- title: What Are the Biggest Challenges in Building an App? description: Building an app is harder than most expect. This guide covers the real challenges, from unclear goals and feature creep to budgets and launch. image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/what-are-the-biggest-challenges-in-building-an-app.webp --- [Skip to content](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-are-the-biggest-challenges-in-building-an-app#main-content) [![we\_are\_affective\_logo\_200](https://weareaffective.com/hs-fs/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_200.png?width=175&height=48&name=we_are_affective_logo_200.png "we_are_affective_logo_200")](https://weareaffective.com) - [Home](https://weareaffective.com) - About Us - [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) - [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) - Our Services - [App Planning & Strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) - [App Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) - [App UX Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) - [App UI Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) - [App Technical Architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) - [Existing App Audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit) - [Case Studies](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies) - [Pricing](https://weareaffective.com/pricing) - [Learning Centre](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre) - [Get Started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) Expert Guide Series # What Are the Biggest Challenges in Building an App? Table of Contents A dating app we worked on had its entire messaging section rewritten after it was built. The client asked us to skip discovery on messaging so the budget could go into onboarding and profile verification instead. That single decision added roughly £15,000 to the project and about two months to the timeline. None of it came from bad engineering, and it's a fair picture of the challenges in building an app. The hard parts are decisions. We saw something similar on a health and wellness genetics app we audited. The brand's packaging and website were luxurious and aspirational, all about becoming a better version of yourself. The app itself was cold and clinical. A user went from that aspirational marketing, through ordering a kit, doing a test, and then opened the product to a wall of numbers. The engineering was competent in both cases. #### The challenges in building an app in-house The third hurdle is the hardest to feel from inside. An internal team can run a flow fifty times a week and find it perfectly natural, because they already know what the labels mean and where the screen goes next. That's not a failure of care. It's what happens to anyone who uses a product daily, and it's why [in-house app development challenges](https://weareaffective.com/app-development) so often show up as a product that makes complete sense to everyone except customers. ## In-House, Freelance or Agency: Choosing Your Model There's no universally right answer here, and the honest version depends on what you already have and how long you need it for. The comparison that matters is less about cost per day and more about [what each model is good at holding together](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-tell-whether-your-digital-problem-is-a-format-problem-or-a-brief-problem). | Model | Works well when | Falls over when | | --- | --- | --- | | In-house | The app is core to the business and needs constant change | The team is part-time on it and skills are patchy | | Freelance | You have clear specs and need a defined piece of work done | Nobody owns the product thinking between specialists | | Agency | You need research, design and build joined up from the start | The brief is treated as a handover rather than a conversation | | Hybrid | In-house owns the roadmap, outside help covers depth | Ownership of decisions is left vague | The in-house versus agency question usually gets framed as cost. We'd frame it as coherence. The dating app rewrite and the football app complexity both came from decisions about scope, not from who typed the code, and both are easier to catch when one group holds research, design and build in the same conversation. If you go hybrid, name one person who owns product decisions. Shared ownership of a roadmap is how contradictions like verified onboarding with open messaging get built. ## Budget, Timelines and the Costs Nobody Quotes For Two things about budgets are worth saying plainly. First, what a given figure buys has shrunk, because user expectations of a mobile product have climbed. People compare your app to the best app on their phone, not to the other apps in your category. Second, almost nobody plans for the second year. Timelines go the same way. Agile Soft Labs, drawing on their own experience of building over 200 MVPs, reckon founders underestimate development time by two to three times, [Agile Soft Labs, 2026](https://www.agilesoftlabs.com/blog/2026/03/how-to-build-minimum-viable-product-mvp). That's a self-reported figure from a build shop, so treat it as a pattern rather than a law. It matches what we see. Here are the costs that rarely make it onto an initial quote. - Operating system updates every year, which break things you didn't touch - Customer support and moderation once real people arrive - Analytics, crash reporting and the tools you need to see what's happening - Server and storage costs that scale with usage - Rework from decisions deferred during the build That last one is the dating app. Fifteen thousand pounds of rewrite and two months, all of it generated by a scoping choice made to save money early. [Rework is the most predictable unbudgeted cost](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-most-business-apps-fail-and-how-your-digital-business-can-avoid-the-same-fat) in app development and the easiest to reduce. ## Coordinating Distributed Teams and Hardware Dependencies On a baby monitor project we worked on, the build was spread across a consortium of teams in the UK, elsewhere in Europe and further afield. Keeping everybody aligned on what the product could do and what each part required was a constant job. Capability questions that take two minutes in a room take two days across time zones. The harder problem was hardware. We had no access to the physical monitor or test devices, so we built our own version of it to work against. Everything we made was tested against that internal prototype, and then handed over to the hardware team. #### When software waits on something physical Anything that pairs with a device inherits the device's schedule. Firmware slips, a sensor changes, and suddenly the app flow you designed around a two-second connection has to handle eight. The software team finds out late because the hardware team is solving a different problem. Building our own stand-in monitor bought us independence. We stopped waiting for a device to be free and started testing continuously, which meant the handover was about integration rather than discovery. If your app depends on hardware you don't control, [build something to test against early](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-scope-a-pre-build-research-phase-when-the-budget-is-already-signed-off-fo). The cost of that prototype is small next to the cost of a team sitting idle. ## Designing Interactions That Shape Behaviour We worked on a football social app built specifically to reduce online hate. It replaced likes and dislikes with a favourites mechanic and limited what people could do in comments, deliberately removing any way to publicly dislike something. That one decision changed the whole feel of the product. The design problem was keeping it social. Strip out the counters and the approval signals and you risk ending up with a passive content feed that nobody talks in. We needed genuine interaction and community without the pressure, point-scoring and pile-ons that visible like counts amplify. > Every counter you put on a screen teaches people what to chase, so choose what you're willing to reward. That's the part teams underestimate. Interaction design isn't decoration on top of features. The mechanics you pick tell users what the product values, and they adjust their behaviour to match within about a week. #### Small moments, big effects [Micro-interactions do a lot of this quietly](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/10-micro-interactions-that-will-transform-your-apps-user-experience). A confirmation that feels warm rather than transactional, a progress indicator that acknowledges effort, a pause before a destructive action. None of these show up on a feature list, and together they decide whether the product feels like somewhere people want to be. ## Security, Compliance and App Store Approval The bar moves with what you handle. A genetics wellness app showing someone how their body is ageing carries a different weight of responsibility than a product showing someone their shopping basket, and that shapes design as much as infrastructure. Where results are sensitive, [how and when you reveal them is a product decision](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/is-dirty-data-ruining-your-mobile-apps-purpose-what-app-developers-need-to-know) with a duty of care attached. Verification sits in the same place. On the dating app, identity checking was the product promise, which meant the security work and the experience work were the same work. Make verification too heavy and nobody signs up. Make it too light and the promise is empty. #### Store review is a product test App store approval catches things late and publicly. Account deletion, data and privacy declarations, permission requests that explain themselves, subscription and payment rules, age ratings. Each of these has a design answer as well as a legal one, and teams that leave them to the final sprint end up bolting screens onto a finished flow. Put store requirements into your design work at wireframe stage, not at submission. A rejection two days before launch costs more in rescheduling than the feature ever did to build. Plan for a rejection anyway. Build a week of slack into the launch date and you turn a crisis into an admin task. ## Life After Launch: Retention, Feedback and Maintenance We worked on an auction game where engagement was sliding. The client's instinct was to keep adding new features to pull people back in, and we watched the engagement rate keep dropping while that happened. Every new feature added surface area to a core experience that was already struggling. So we stopped and focused on the core user journey, [the actual experience of someone arriving](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/when-users-blame-themselves-for-your-confusing-app-youve-already-lost-them) and playing the game, rather than all the ancillary features around it. Fixing the middle of the product did what bolting things onto the edges hadn't. Early friction compounds too. AppsFlyer's mobile onboarding work suggests users who hit friction in their first session are 2.7 times less likely to come back by day seven, [AppsFlyer](https://sparklin.com/blog/why-users-abandon-apps-during-onboarding). The first few minutes keep paying out, or keep costing, for weeks afterwards. #### Maintenance is product work An app is never finished. Operating systems update, devices change, and the thing you launched slowly stops matching the phones people carry. Budget for that as ongoing product work with research attached, rather than as a patching rota, and you get to [keep learning from the users you already have](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/going-mobile-7-ways-that-a-mobile-app-will-help-your-business). ## Conclusion Looking back at the projects in this piece, almost none of the expensive problems were technical. The dating app rewrite came from skipping discovery on one component. The football app's complexity came from comparing single features against single-purpose competitors. The genetics app lost people because the storytelling had been stripped out of a perfectly working build. The founder who wouldn't act on research launched a year later and got the outcome the research predicted. The concierge app for the property developer went the other way, and it's the useful counterweight. Discovery made the product smaller, cheaper and better, because the client agreed to find out before committing. So if you're weighing up whether to build in-house, hire freelancers or bring in an agency, the question underneath it is who holds the product thinking together. The challenges in building an app are mostly challenges of coherence, and coherence has to be somebody's job. If you're planning an app, or you've got one that works perfectly and nobody loves, we're happy to talk it through. [Start a conversation about your app project](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) and we'll tell you honestly what we'd look at first. ## Frequently Asked Questions What is usually the biggest challenge when building an app? It is rarely the engineering. The hardest parts are the decisions about scope, sequencing and what gets researched properly, as shown by a dating app where skipping discovery on messaging added around £15,000 and two months to the project. Why does skipping discovery on one feature cost so much later? Discovery is where contradictions get spotted before they are built, such as verified onboarding sitting alongside open messaging. When that thinking is skipped, the feature often has to be rewritten after launch, which costs far more in time and money than the research would have. What happens when the app does not match the brand? Users feel the gap immediately, even if the code is flawless. A genetics app we audited had luxurious, aspirational marketing but opened to a wall of clinical numbers, so the product undercut everything the brand had promised. Why do in-house teams struggle to spot usability problems? Familiarity makes a flow feel obvious when it is not. An internal team may run the same journey fifty times a week and already know what every label means, so the product ends up making sense to everyone except customers. Should I build in-house, hire freelancers or use an agency? It depends on what you already have and how long you need it for. In-house suits apps that are core to the business and change constantly, freelancers suit clearly specified pieces of work, and an agency suits projects where research, design and build need joining up from the start. What makes a hybrid model work? Name one person who owns product decisions. Shared ownership of a roadmap is how contradictions get built, because nobody has the authority to resolve conflicting requirements before they reach development. Why does my budget seem to buy less than it used to? User expectations of mobile products have climbed sharply, and people compare your app to the best app on their phone rather than to others in your category. That raises the baseline quality you need to hit before an app feels acceptable at all. Which costs are most often left out of an initial quote? The second year is the big one, as most plans stop at launch. Ongoing items such as operating system updates, maintenance and continued improvement rarely appear on an initial quote but are unavoidable once the app is live. ## Related Articles [![](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-property-app-like-rightmove.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-property-app-like-rightmove) ### [How Much Does It Cost To Build A Property App Like Rightmove?](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-property-app-like-rightmove) Every minute, over 2,000 property searches happen on Rightmove—that's more than 3 million searches... by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee) [![Which financial risks should you consider before app launch](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/which-financial-risks-should-you-consider-before-app-launch.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/which-financial-risks-should-you-consider-before-app-launch) ### [Which financial risks should you consider before app launch](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/which-financial-risks-should-you-consider-before-app-launch) [Building an app costs more than most founders expect](https://weareaffective.com/app-development-cost), and the gap between what was budgeted and... by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee) [![](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-an-event-management-app-like-eventbrite.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-an-event-management-app-like-eventbrite) ### [How Much Does It Cost To Build An Event Management App Like Eventbrite?](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-an-event-management-app-like-eventbrite) Building an event management app like Eventbrite isn't just about creating another booking... by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee) [![We Are Affective](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_mark.svg)](https://weareaffective.com) 20-22 Wenlock Road London, N1 7GU United Kingdom +44 20 4572 8062 [hello@weareaffective.com](mailto:hello@weareaffective.com) Services [App planning & strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) [App design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) [App UX design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) [App UI design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) [App technical architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) [Existing app audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit) Legal [Privacy policy](https://app.termly.io/policy-viewer/policy.html?policyUUID=b8fa9921-7518-4fb5-8ddd-9dc7f5977ed2) [Terms](https://app.termly.io/policy-viewer/policy.html?policyUUID=8b6a6ad5-91bd-4176-a5f7-6d36b0398f70) Case studies [TravAI](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/travai) [Meditech](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/harley) [WorkingWeight](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/workingweight) [SkinSync](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/skinsync) [Three Lochs](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/three-lochs) [Drift](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/drift) About us [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) Guides [Creating an app](https://weareaffective.com/how-to-create-an-app) [Building an MVP](https://weareaffective.com/building-an-mvp) [Cost and budgeting](https://weareaffective.com/app-development-cost) [App technology](https://weareaffective.com/app-development) [Planning and strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) [User research](https://weareaffective.com/app-user-research) [Onboarding design](https://weareaffective.com/app-onboarding-design) [User psychology](https://weareaffective.com/user-psychology-app-design) [Launch and growth](https://weareaffective.com/app-launch-growth) Copyright © 2026, weareaffective.com. All rights reserved.