What it costs to ship an AI mobile app to the App Store.

Mobile is where AI project budgets most often go wrong, because two apps that look identical in a mockup can differ tenfold in cost. The variable is almost never the AI — it is how much native platform work sits underneath it.

The real cost driver: how native does it need to be?

If your app is fundamentally a well-designed interface over your own data and an assistant, a cross-platform build covers both iOS and Android from one codebase, and the cost stays modest. The moment you need deep device features — background location, offline-first sync, health data, complex camera work, push at scale — you are into platform-specific engineering, and the number moves accordingly.

Be honest about which one you are building. Most business apps are the first kind described as though they were the second.

What App Store review actually demands

Shipping to the App Store is its own work item, and it catches teams out. Apple reviews for genuine functionality — an app that is a thin wrapper around a website gets rejected. AI features need clear disclosure of what data leaves the device. You need a privacy policy, a support URL, and account deletion if you have accounts at all. None of this is difficult; all of it takes time, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a surprise invoice.

Whose account does it ship under?

This is the question that separates a build you own from a build you rent. If the app lives under your developer account, you control the listing, the updates, the reviews and the relationship with your users forever. If it ships under the agency's account, they do — and your leverage in every future negotiation is gone.

Insist on your own Apple Developer and Google Play accounts before a line of code is written. It costs $99 a year and it is the cheapest insurance in software.

The maintenance nobody budgets for

Mobile has a floor of ongoing work that web does not: iOS and Android ship major versions annually, and apps that ignore them eventually break or get delisted. Budget for it. Industry guidance puts maintenance at 15–20% of build cost per year, and for mobile that is realistic rather than padding.