How To Develop A Interior Design Mobile App? Complete Guide

Last Updated on September 20, 2022

What are your thoughts on design your home? How do you find the entire process of doing up the house, or rooms, with lighting, furniture and other alluring décor stuff? While for some, with intuitive design and décor skills, this can be a rewarding experience, for the rest with little interest in creativity, this can turn out to be a tiring process overall to remodel or decorate their homes.

Now to get over this kind of worries, one can consider going for an interior decorator, who certainly can be of great help with this entire process. But then often it happens that people fail to rightly convey their thoughts to this home specialist about their expectations on how they want their home to be decorated. And another issue is that in the present situation with pandemic affecting our lives badly, it is not that easy and safe to hire an interior decorator.

However, with latest and innovative technologies at your aid, both of these concerns can be easily taken care of. Interior Designing apps are your answer with them easily replacing the professionals. There is great craze for the interior designing apps for how they resolve people’s woes regarding home decoration.

And today people are more than ever paying a lot of attention on the décor of their homes as they are spending most of their time in it. The home has become the one-stop destination for people, as they are both living and working from there. Hence, it has become vital to work on the vibe of their place. These interior design apps help people deal with all the issues they might face in the process of designing their home. For instance, the app offer nice interior ideas as per the size and structure of your house or rooms, and today it is done with the help of Augmented Reality (AR) technology.

What Exactly Is Interior Design?

Interior designing or decorating is all about the art of working on a room, or a space, or entire house with the intention to attain desired, look and feel one wants from it. Basically, it is the science of understanding one’s psychology and beautifying the place so that it looks more appealing aesthetically, enhancing the quality of life & culture. Without a doubt, a beautifully designed interior boosts mental peace and stability.

Interior Design Market Value Worldwide 2013 – 2021

As per research, the interior design market was evaluated to be of USD 3,829 million in 2019, and it is expected to reach an estimated value of USD 6,433. 9 million in year 2025.

Why An App Works For Interior Design?

As it comes to Interior Design, it is a serious business as people probably spends huge chunk of money to enhance the look and feel of their house, so it actually becomes a “Home”. Hence, it surely can’t be like some “Do-It-Yourself” task, and require professional consultation, be it physical or virtual.

However, now there is a new wave of Interior Design apps that have revolutionized how things work. They serve as these special virtual assistants offering inspiring ideas to the users in just a few taps and makes it easier for them to convey their desires regarding house décor and accordingly offer suggestions. Hence, these apps very much works like the professional interior designers and one major advantage with them is that they are 24*7 accessible.

How Virtual Interior Design Apps Work?

These apps present some interior design ideas on the basis of the room and offers many pictures of different rooms of the house. Users can browse each one of these pictures by various categories, such as modern, ethnic, contemporary, eclectic, Mediterranean, and more. Accordingly the pictures that best suits the personal style of the users can be narrowed down. And in this manner, each of the room can be designed simply by browsing through the huge collection of pictures.

There are a number of mobile app developers who are creating some amazing interior décor apps to help businesses generate millions of leads.

Monetization Strategies For Interior Design Apps

As it comes to monetizing an Interior Design mobile app, it can be done in three ways, they are:

a. Exchange fee

In this model, the app owner can charge some commission from the product sellers for listing their offerings in the app marketplace to facilitate mortgage holders & experts.

b. Membership Revenue

In this monetization model, the home décor experts are recorded in the app database. The interior design businesses can choose to offer pre-programs by which they can receive extra benefits for annual membership expense.

c. Promoting Revenue

In this model, the app owners can choose to charge outsiders. Like, the related businesses can pay a certain sum as a fee for advertising their products or services on the interior design apps.

Popular Virtual Interior Design Apps

IKEA Store

So we all know that IKEA is a store with huge collection of basic stuff priced reasonably. It has stores all across the world, and their app is more like an extension of their physical stores. In the IKEA online store, people can view inventory, shop, create wishlist and do a lot more, like storing loyalty card for quick access, search for the nearby stores and at the same time it is easier and faster to find stuff in the app. Its augmented reality app allows to fit furniture and other décor items in your room to find what suits and buy accordingly.

Houzz – Home Design & Remodel App

This immensely popular home design app enjoys great number of people for its amazing design. It has a collection of more than 11 million images and allows to save the favorite ideas for future use. There is also a “Sketch” functionality in the app that allows the users to draw & annotate pictures with their own ideas. Few of its brilliant features consist of five million products, product reviews, and a lot more. It has a “View-in-my-room” feature that is very neat. Now the app is for free and has no in-app purchases and uses advertisements to make money.

Homify – Home Design

This app offers plethora of idea to improve homes. It has over 1.5 million images of interior & architectural designs and allows the users to save favorites and view latest trends in home design. The app also recommends the interior designers and home decorators. Users can also save stuff to refer later. It is a free app with no in-app purchases.

Floor Plan Creator

This app enables the users to create houses, hallways, rooms, with exact measurements, where the users can easily work on their living space. Few of is exciting features comprise of cloud syncing, exporting as image files or PDF, supports metric & imperial units, etc. The app costs $6.99 in the app store for premium version, or else if using Google Play Pass, then it works for free.

Build.com – Home Improvement

This home improvement app works a lot like Amazon, however it is for the construction stuff, having different tools, supplies and lot more products for sale. It mainly is a basic shopping app, where the users can buy stuff, create wishlists, track orders and do a lot more. The users can get in touch with the project advisers for their queries. This app is entirely online and is available for free in the app store.

How Augmented Reality Can Be Greatly Helpful In Home Interior Design Apps?

Augmented Reality allows the app users to virtually try on different home décor ideas. This is possible when the décor apps are powered with the AR technology. This way, the users can try virtually rearranging furniture pieces or decorative stuff using the AR-powered mobile apps. An example of its implementation is the Myty app which lets you do home decoration through augmented reality.

Advanced Features In Interior Design Apps

Ideas Allocation

As the app development work begins, the business can consider allowing their family & friends to share their décor idea on the app platform. Enable them save their ideas on the app and craft a store book. In this store book, not just the decorating ideas are shared, but it may also have solutions to the challenges faced. At the same time, one can allow people to share home remodeling ideas on mobile app.

Find Professional

This functionality in the app enables the users to get in touch with professional home designer, architectures, either online or physically. Meanwhile, the app can reflect ratings and reviews given by the other app users to these professionals and designers, so that it becomes easier to pick one.

Shop feature

This again can be a helpful functionality and for this one needs to make the app compatible to work across various platforms. This feature will allow your users to shop the desired product or add in the cart their favorite products.

Discount

Often it happens that people want to but a product but end up dropping the idea due to high price. Hence, it is helpful that the app offers solution to this problem by offering discounts on selected products, so that visitors would be compelled for making a purchase.

View Gallery

The virtual-cum-real images of designs and décor can add appeal to the app, as it allows the audience to easily view the gallery of products. They should be able to shortlist their favorite products or items and choose to shop them later.

Ideabooks

This is a great feature that the one of the popular interior décor app “Houzz” offers. When this feature is integrated to the app, the professionals would be able to post stories, suggestions, solutions and save them on the app. This way they can save the ideas and refer to them later.

Social Signup/Login

The users should be able to create a profile using their personal id or social media accounts. With social signup, a lot of information on the social accounts of the users, allows the app to offer personalized experience to them.

Upload Pictures

It should be easier for the users of Interior décor app to upload pictures in the app, however, it is vital to take care of a few things when integrating this functionality, like, the photograph must have a width of 1000 pixels as an image has to be high-quality. Allow the upload of only authentic & licensed photos. And then most important is ensuring that the visitors use relevant keywords as to sell products it is important that the keywords are rich and searchable.

Ratings & Reviews

The app users should be allowed to rate their experience with the app and write a review. This makes them feel heard and at the same time works in the favor of the app, as this way they would know what their audience desires from the app and where they have a scope to provide better service.

Push Notifications

This functionality allows the app to send instant alerts to the app users, so to encourage their engagement with the app.

These were some of the advanced features that can add a lot to value to the app.

Technology Stack For Interior Design App Development

Next, lets discuss the estimated cost.

Estimated Cost To develop Interior Design Mobile App

Determining the development cost of an Interior Design app is a tricky process, as there are a number of factors that affects the cost of an interior design app, such as:

App Development Platform

The development cost of an app differs as per the platform, whether it is iOS or Android. For each platform, different development teams are required, such as for iOS platform, an iOS app developers are needed, while for Android version, Android app developers are needed. So the cost differs depending on them. And in case the app is being developed for both the platforms, then the cost would accordingly be double.

App Development team

Two development teams are needed, one for the front-end development and another for the back-end development. Hence the cost will be different for both. Meanwhile the entire development team would consist of:

• Project Manager
• iOS/Android Developers
• Back-end Developers
• UI/UX Designers
• Quality Analysts

App Design (UI/UX)

When the app has simple design, it tends to cost less, as compared to app with complex design.

Features & Functionalities

When the app is crafted with basic features, it costs less, whereas the app with advanced features and third-party integrations, costs a lot more.

As it comes to the estimated development cost of an Interior Design app, when the app is designed with basic features and for single platform it costs around $25000-$35000, and an app designed for multiple platforms and with advanced features costs double, around $50000-$70000.