How Much It Cost to Develop a Photo-Editing App like Retrica?

We are living in the times where most people advocate natural and real beauty, instead of favoring perfection all the time, as it comes to looks. However, there are often instances when few things may make us feel insecure, like an unexpected zit that plans to visit us on occasions like when on a holiday, or due to an important event. So, what would be our usual response? Definitely, to use make-up products to conceal it, right? While makeup can be great to conceal imperfections and enhance physical appearances, photo editing mobile apps can be your best friend for all the visual appearances. In present times, there are tonnes of advanced mobile apps available for image correction. The rise in the search for the best photo editing app development company is a clear reflection of the fact how often people take assistance from such applications.

No wonder, many of them are immensely prominent among the people and have secured a permanent place in their mobile phones, so much so that despite owning a high-end mobile phone, people may still prefer clicking pictures via these camera-inbuilt apps, instead of their phone camera. But do you know what goes into the making of these apps? Here, in this article, we tell you how you can create your own photo editing mobile app, which would comprise all the basic features to create unique and bright images. On-demand photography app development can help you earn great revenues and mark your identity in the digital domain.

The Trend of the Built-in Camera App

We’d all agree that smartphones can’t replace professional cameras, but built-in modules certainly allow you to take pictures of high-quality and high-resolution.

Even statistics by phenelzine show that around 68% of all the adults across the world tend to edit their picture before it is shared online on social media platforms.

These photo-editors have been integrated with alluring features, helping people to make their pictures and selfies look amazing and resultantly, enhance the appearance of these photo sharers. The photo editing app development experts have seen the world monetize on the trend for years.

Technographics recently shared an infographic, where it discusses that the number of selfies taken every day around the whole world is more than 1 million. In fact, 34% of the males tend to edit every selfie they click. This era of selfie came around 5-7 years back, and today there are so many mobile app solutions available to people enabling them to edit pictures.

However, there are always ways to improve. And hence, here we have created this detailed tutorial that would help you to create your own photo editing mobile app and introduce it in the market to attain great success.

What about creating an App like Retrica?

As we begin with knowledge on the creation of the photo editing mobile apps, why not learn from the best in the game. Now, there are a few of them, one being Retrica, which has earned a name for itself and is found on mobile devices on every other smartphone user. So, what is Retrica, and what is it all about?

Retrica was launched in the year 2012 as a small Korean startup, which witnessed instant popularity and success in a short period thanks to the on-demand photographer app development company involved in the process. It started with iOS app development, but after its launch on Android platforms, it gained immense popularity.

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Since that time, the app has earned millions in profit, particularly in the US & Europe. Astonishing, isn’t it. The fact that Retrica is more prominent in other nations than its motherland is quite surprising and exciting after all the markets of the US and Europe are huge. In Italy, it enjoys the 14th position, while in the US, it holds 78th and in Korea, it stands at 110th.

Looking at these numbers, you think the positions are still low, but when you consider the huge competition around, Retrica has certainly managed to attain really big. Talking of the top positions, they are certainly enjoyed by the old giants such as Facetune-2, Instagram, Pic Collage, and others, which we would be discussing in the latter part of this blog.

What Features the Photo-editing app like Retrica consist of?

Retrica is an amazing app, coming with multiple features to enhance picture quality with more than 120 filters, which can be added in real-time mode. Thus, it usually rules out the requirement to upload pictures from the photo gallery. Besides, it’s an amazing tool to create GIFs, pic collages, and edit videos. To develop an app like retrica we need to understand what makes the application stand out from the crowd. Retrica’s Photo manager feature allows the users to share pictures on most social networking accounts like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Thus, users can add text, frames, stickers, and more to their pictures, before they are shared online. Below, we have brought out for you the main features of the Retrica-like App, along with the additional users that users are expecting in such apps, so here let’s find them all.

• User-Registration: This is one important feature with most apps developed nowadays. So, your photo editing app is going to work with user data, hence the integration signup and login feature would allow you access to their data. You can use your email, social media, or phone number to log in with the application.
• Sync with Social Media: Users often get turned off when they are required to input their personal info each time they log in. Hence, integrating this social sync feature is essential as it synchronizes the user data from Google or their Facebook account, thus saving their precious time.
• Image Uploading: Such an app will be requiring access to your smartphone’s camera, in order to work with the photos in real-time. However, to edit the picture later (when it is clicked from the phone’s camera), you would require an integrated way to upload a photo from the phone gallery.Edit Existing Photos: With wide-ranging camera filters available to users, they can try and include as many appealing and innovative camera filters as they desire. Besides, don’t miss out on usual ones, such as adding stickers or/and text, blur/vignette, draw on photos, rotate the image, edit image size, etc.
• Settings: Setting options as auto-update, auto-save, photo-quality, a place for storing edited images should be offered to the users to make the process easy and exciting for users. When you make a photo editing app, it is important that it is ladened with features that keep the user engaged with the application.
• Save Photos: Allow an option for users to save edited pictures in the phone gallery, and also share them on various social media platforms with your family & friends. Sometimes people don’t like to share photos on social media but they want to save them in their gallery. The application lets them save pictures and further share when they wish to.
• Collage Loading: Here, the user can upload images from the gallery in real-time. They can select numerous photos and pick them from the proposed cell types. There are various layouts that make it quite easier for the people to set up the pictures on the same screen.

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Apart from these, there are many other features as well, which users can keen to see in their photo-editing app.

• Eliminate red-eye, Whiten teeth
• Rotate/crop/Align images
• Flashlight
• Options like Adjusting Brightness, Focus, Color, Contrast, Exposure & Image-saturation
• Built-in Photo Timer
• Creating short videos (usually seen in Boomerang or Snapchat)
• Additional features, frames, fonts, effects, etc.
• Crop a part of a picture and save it as a sticker (usually seen in Snapchat)
• Making a personal account available to the users where they can store their personal pictures
• The VSCO-like social network where users can share the pictures

In this list, we have provided the features found in Retrica apps for Android/iPhone, as well as of its competitors. Besides, the list of additional features mentions the features which users desire in such an app. Hence, it is advised that as you indulge in the app creation process, brainstorm with your photo-editing mobile app development team for a while, in order to come up with new, innovative, and amazing ideas.

How to create a Photo Editing App?

So, it would be great to overview apps like Retrica, as you work to develop your own app, but there is definitely no point in creating another Retrica clone, as it would neither benefit your organization nor the potential clients. How to make a photo editing app that becomes quite popular for the audience? Principles can be certainly similar but the realization must bring positive experience and consist of effective tools to edit photos. Hence, you must have a look at these basic aspects that we have mentioned below.

Marketing Goals

You can divide your marketing tasks into basically two parts: the first is marketing research and second is a marketing strategy. They are both equally essential to ensure the future success of your app project.

Marketing Research

As you are about to launch a commercial product, ensure that you have researched the market you will be placing your product on. It is vital that you know your competitors well, the current demand, and what is being offered by your competitors. It would help to create a list of similar apps like yours and their features. Accordingly, you can then highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each of these photo editing apps on the market.

Marketing Strategy

Next, it is time to create a comprehensive strategy that defines how you will be promoting the entire project. Ensure that your budget from both the development and the promotion has been planned in advance. Next, consider how your potential customers will get to know about your product and how they will be able to get it.

Unique Concept

Features to be included in your future app will definitely be an integral aspect and needs to be planned well, however it is not the key concept. Thus, it is vital for you to find a kind that would set your app solution apart from the rest of the market participants and offer many noteworthy advantages when compared to other photo editing apps. Come up with something useful and fresh, thus making your app idea bring awesome and evident benefits for the potential customers.

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Feature-list

Once the key app concept has been defined, next it is time to focus on the functionalities and features that need to be fully implemented in your photo editor app. Consider ways how your app can be more user-oriented as compared to your competition. Pick the best of what other similar apps have & then enhance it further by adding something that they are missing (just as we mentioned in the feature list above). Considering the intensity of the competition out there, it is vital that you focus on adding some unique features in your mobile app that would be helpful in standing out.

These are a few things that you need to focus on if you want to create apps like B612 or Retrica. It is important that when you reach the experts for photo editing apps they study the market well and help you stay in the market for longer than others. Over the years, the app development team has worked well on the feature list and helped us earn the best results.

What Should Be the Business Model to Create a Photo-editing Mobile App?

Taking Retrica for instance, this app comes in two versions: Free & Paid. Obviously, in the paid version, users are offered to enhance settings, additional filters, photo retouch options & more. So, how exactly to make money with such an app. Well, there are numerous ways to do that, though the best is directly charging the users. Its reason is that there are several photo editing apps out there in app stores, hence users won’t face any trouble finding something which might be less functional but is absolutely free. Thus, go for a freemium monetization strategy.

Once a loyal customer base has been secured by you, this user base won’t mind paying a little extra to enjoy the advanced features. Hence, it tends to be the most successful monetization plan for virtually all of the apps that integrate a social component. Besides, you can also go for advertising to earn that handsome amount of money from your Android or iOS app. Herein, targeted ads are presented to your app users, and thus sponsors will be paying you for the space that you allot to them to showcase their ads. The iOS and Android app development services providers take care of your monetization model when creating your app. However, to carry this aforementioned strategy you would require a huge customer base.

Which Are the Top Photo-editing Apps?

If you want to understand how to create a photo editing app you need to study and analyze the best applications available in the market.

Here, we have provided a list of the most prominent photo-editing apps that offer a rich user experience and a high level of quality. As you think of photo editing app development, it is vital to match this level or even exceed it, to create a successful photo-correction app.

Camera 360: This image-editing app allows its users to apply dozens of unique effects to their favorite images. These effects can even be integrated directly into pictures as they are taken. Camera 360 app has a very unique, easy & intuitive interface from which all its features can be accessed, with just a few swipes on your device’s screen. Like you can tilt, rotate, frame, blur, apply a filter, add texture, and do a lot with just a touch on your mobile screen. Once the editing is finished, you can also share the image on social media platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or may choose to save it directly to your phone’s memory.

BeautyPlus: This photo-editor app offers simple yet powerful tools to edit photos, cute & fun filters, augmented reality (AR) filters, artistic effects, and a lot more to please the selfie lovers. In fact, figures go by that 800 million selfies have been edited by BeautyPlus while 300 million users have BeautyPlus on their smartphones to edit their selfies. This app allows creating beautiful & natural-looking photos & video selfies, where users can erase the acne marks, brighten eyes, smoothen skin, whiten teeth, edit eye color, add special effects & filters and do a lot more.

The app was created with the help of renowned makeup artists, photographers, and real people like us and it is easy to use and offers flawless pictures. The effects are so subtle that anyone can hardly make out that an app has been used, thus allows to flaunt your natural beauty sans any harsh filters.

Facetune: This is one classic image editor available for iOS mobile app. In fact, it can be called Photoshop for mobile devices. It offers a wide-ranging feature to edit photos, along with the possibility to enhance small picture areas, reshape faces, remove grey hair or wrinkles, white teeth, remove the red-eye effect, etc.

Aviary: This app is available to all the prominent platforms, like iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and even the Web. Its best benefit is aimed at the developers as it provides an SDK to customize a photo editor. Besides, the SDK allows built-in functionality into other apps.

Instagram: This popular medium to share a photo, is an ideal example to provide an augmented value in an image editing app. Instagram is a combination of a photo editor and a social media platform. This is one feature that you can use as you develop your own app. Like, if it is a photo editor, then it should be the best photo editor ever. In case it is not, then it must provide users with some additional value.

These are a few applications that make it really clear what features that you want to include in your applications. The development team has made it quite easier to enter the market with an application that stays for longer with cutting-edge technology.

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Cost to develop an Image Editing Apps for iOS or Android

Well, the cost to create an image editing mobile app greatly depends on the complexity of the project, like how many filters need to be implemented, how skilled and experienced are your programmers and developers‘ team, and what location you choose for the development service. Like, if you choose to get your photo-editing app developed in India, then it is certain to cost somewhere between $8000 to $30000, while in the U.S., the amount will double. Apart from this we also offer to develop TikTok like app.

Considering 850 hours of development time required to create an app like Aviary, Camera 360, or Retrica, the total cost would be $42000 minimum if you have hired app development specialists in Western Europe or the U.S. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the programming work usually costs $30/hour, which means you would require to spend around $25,000 on the photo editing app development cost to get an advanced photo editor app with the basic features. Hence, the most profitable would be to approach the developers in India to create a Photo-editing app with great functionalities.

Wrapping It All!

When it comes to talking about the photo editing application, it becomes quite important to bring on the table something that your users can easily connect with. When you reach the experts, it is significant that you come with features that make it easier for you to earn better results. The technology we use and the development methodology can help you earn great results in a limited time.