White-Label Applications
White-Label Applications: How to Sell More With the Same Effort
White-labeling your mobile app can be beneficial in certain cases. We share what it means and how it can help your business to lower costs, eliminate risks and attract more clients.
What’s a White-Label App?
As a result, OEM arranges the sales process without any marketing costs and vendors come up with their own branded goods or services without a need to produce them. A good example is the Great Value groceries in Walmart stores, that are manufactured by third-party companies exclusively for this retail chain.
This holds true for mobile apps, as well. There are hordes of different apps already developed worldwide. And often there’s no need to develop one from scratch. All it takes is to find the vendor owns the appropriate one. And sell that vendor on an idea to slightly customize, reassemble, and give it a new brand.
Benefits of White Label Apps Approach for Different Parties
For Vendors
In contrast, a white-label app already has proven and clearly defined features and functionalities. You don’t need to take on many risks since they’ve already been dealt with by the developer. The process of app customization gets much faster. And, of course, your costs go down too.
iOS+Android Native Apps from Scratch vs. White Label
The team with Geek-Solutions has delivered the full-cycle development services for the app operating with both iOS and Android featuring the complex back-end architecture. Subsequently, this app was reassembled and branded for different vendors several times. Our team sees huge savings in terms of costs and time comparing full-cycle and white-label development pipelines.
Back-end development - 2 devs for 6 months; iOS app - 2 devs for 2 months; Android app - 2 devs for 2.5 months; QA - 1 engineer for 1.5 months; bug-fixing - 1 back-end for 0.5 months, 1 iOS for 1 week, 1 Android for 2 weeks; delivery and UAT - 1 DevOps engineer for 1 week. 24 man-months approx. Total: 9 months duration.
Application clone deployment - 1 dev for 1 day, business rules reconfiguration - 1 dev for 1 day, iOS app rebranding - 1 dev for 3 days, Android app rebranding - 1 dev for 3 days, QA - 1 engineer for 4 days, deployment - 1 DevOps engineer for 1 week. 0.75 man-months approx. Total: 2 weeks duration.
This was a pretty unique case. It included a long and complex back-end development process, as well as a fast and easy reconfiguration. As a rule, we see the difference of no more than seven times between the two pipelines.
For OEM Developers
The global custom software development market changes at a fast pace. More and more niches are becoming fully covered by ready-made software solutions. That’s why the custom development slightly evolves into enterprise-only service, where efficiency is essential and price concerns are secondary.
For those companies who work with SME, it’s important to keep their offerings competitively priced continuously. As you can see, selling ready-made apps under different brands is a path to competitiveness.
Another situation where white-labeling is rather acceptable is an unwillingness to cover escalating marketing costs. Selling apps under the partner’s brand is a way to undertake marketing duties on the partner’s shoulders.
White Label Apps: Potential Bottlenecks You Should Consider
- The first one is the fact that neither Play Market nor App Store like app clones. To avoid the refusal of your app, the team that brands your app must follow some know-how and hacks. It is like SEO: each and every expert has their own opinions, but no one knows exactly.
- The next one is possible traces of the original OEM design. It might pop up in notifications, rarely used UI elements, documentation and similar components. It’s paramount for the development team to check the overall architecture in order to eliminate any trace of the OEM brand.
- Another major point the vendor should keep in mind is that it’s the vendor who will be responsible for the support and maintenance of any apps sold under its brand. This requires vendors to hire full-time developer teams or liaison with reliable outsourcing partners.
What’s Our Role in White-Label App Dev?
Leveraging the extensive experience in OEM apps customization, we can provide these services with the high quality guarantees in place. We know how to do it fast and with fewer possible issues. Moreover, if the vendor looks for a contractor who’s ready to cover its support questions, we are able to help with it, as well.
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