What shipping a native app to both stores really costs in 2026

Someone told you launching an app costs 25 dollars. Technically, that is not wrong. It is what Google charges, once, to open a Play Console account.

But that number is a trap. It is like saying opening a restaurant costs the price of the council licence. The licence is real. It does not pay for the kitchen, the staff, or the fridge that breaks down in August.

Let us look at what it actually costs, in 2026, to put a native app in both stores and keep it alive.

Store fees are the smallest item on the list

Apple charges 99 dollars a year for the Apple Developer Program. Stop paying and the app goes dark. It is rent, not a purchase.

Google charges 25 dollars, one time, to register the developer account on the Play Console. You pay once in your life and that is done.

Add it up and your first year runs to roughly 124 dollars in official fees. Keep that number. It is the one cost everyone knows and the least important of the lot.

It is two apps, not one

Here is the part that wrecks budgets. When you say "native app for both stores", you are asking for two products with two operating systems, two base languages and two review teams with different rules.

iOS is Swift and Xcode. Android is Kotlin and Android Studio. Different tools, different build cycles, different bugs. What you break on one side you do not break on the other.

Frameworks like React Native or Flutter promise shared code. They help, and we use them. But they do not make the problem go away. You still need a Mac to compile for iOS, accounts on both sides, and real phones from both worlds to test on. The payment screen that works on the Pixel fails on the iPhone with a notch. It always fails.

The typical scenario is this. You budget for one app and get, in practice, one and a half. The second half shows up when the client opens the Android version and notices the keyboard covering the login field.

The cost that never appears on any invoice

There are expenses nobody shows you up front because they do not fit a tidy quote. These are the ones that separate a project that lives from one that dies after three months.

• A rejected review. Apple enforces the App Store Review Guidelines with a heavy hand. A poorly justified permission, a missing delete-account button, and the app bounces back. Each round is days lost.
• A Mac. There is no iOS build without Apple hardware. If you do not own one, that means buying it or paying a monthly bill for cloud CI.
• Push notifications. You need Firebase on Android and APNs certificates on Apple. Each breaks in its own way and renews itself less often than you would like.
• Yearly maintenance. Every new iOS and Android release can break something. Skip the updates and the app degrades until it stops installing on new phones.
• Privacy compliance. App Privacy on Apple, Data Safety on Google. You declare what you collect and you have to honour it, under the GDPR.

So, honest numbers

I am not going to invent a figure billed by a company that does not exist. But I can give you the cost structure we see in real projects.

Official fees: about 124 dollars in the first year. Development: it depends on scope, and this is where ninety per cent of the money sits. Maintenance: count on a recurring fraction of the build cost, every year, indefinitely.

The mental rule I give clients is simple. A launch is a marriage, not a dinner. The cost of entry is the easy part. The commitment is what weighs.

There is a cheaper path, and sometimes it is the right one

Not everything needs to be native. A Progressive Web App installs straight from the browser, runs on both systems with a single codebase, and skips the store fees and reviews. For many businesses, that is more than enough.

What you lose is the badge of being in the store, some deep access to the hardware, and the trust an App Store icon still conveys. If your app sells trust or needs reliable push notifications on iOS, you will want native.

The right question is not "how much does it cost to launch in both stores". It is "do I actually need both stores". Answer that first. It saves more than any haggling over price.

If someone hands you an app quote with no line for maintenance, they are not hiding the cost. They are pushing it six months down the road, to when you have already signed.