Floor planning as a topic can be extremely complex - with plenty of meticulous measurements and detailed planning to make sure the end product is at its best. A single floor plan could take days to create by hand, even if the person creating it is a trained professional in this field.

Surprisingly enough, not even the advent of CAD software was capable of changing that fact - floor plans are still extremely difficult to create due to the sheer number of details that goes into one such plan. Fortunately, this situation changed drastically with the rise of construction smartphone applications.

Smartphone applications as a whole offer an unprecedented level of mobility for a number of use cases in this industry. Most of the on-site construction work, from surveying to clash detection, can be greatly simplified with the help of a smartphone app. That's also not the full extent of a mobile app's capabilities, either, since there is an entire market of floor plan apps available for both Android and Apple devices.

It is very difficult to imagine a construction industry expert that does not carry a smartphone around with them, so this kind of development served as a massive boon to plenty of different fields of work - including floor planning.

At the same time, it is not easy to say outright what a floor plan app should be capable of. For example, most of them have either nothing or very little to offer in terms of CAD-like functionality - which is unusual for the industry that relies a lot on CAD (and BIM) software for most of its tasks. There are also plenty of other limitations that such apps can bring to the table, showing that nothing is perfect and there is no single best choice when it comes to floor plan apps.

When it comes to floor plan apps as a whole, we can go over what this kind of app should be capable of. Since a floor plan app itself is revolving around the creation of floor plans within the realms of a smartphone's user interface, there are some limitations that these apps have to work around.

Keeping all that in mind, we can present four different target purposes of a floor plan app:

Landscaping

One of the least obvious parts of a floor plan app's potential functionality is the ability to perform landscaping - planning the external part of a structure, including tree placements, flowerbeds, etc. The biggest reason for this category to exist in the first place is the fact that plenty of floor plan apps now also act as furnishing apps for regular customers or designers. With this logic in mind, it seems somewhat logical to offer limited landscaping capabilities - to be able to plan the structure of a single home both inside and outside.

Sales

As a start contrast with the previous example, this one is made solely for the businesspeople - contractors or sales experts that are trying to sell residential property. An accurate floor plan allows these people to perform much more accurate estimates due to the correct assessment of HVAC, waterproofing, foundation repairs, and other service-related topics that are often considered a part of a floor plan by default.


Inspection

Another use case delegated mostly for commercial use is inspection, and its main target audience are field auditors and site inspectors. An inspector's job is to perform an evaluation of an existing property while noting down various irregularities or other unusual elements of the structure - and this entire process would be much easier with a floor plan app that offers an easy way to attach images and notes to specific parts of a building's plan.

Drawing

Probably the most obvious purpose of a floor plan app is the ability to draw a floor plan. There are very few solutions that offer actual drawing capabilities, and it is understandable, since touch interfaces as a whole were never meant to work with accurate element placements and small details. However, there are solutions for that - some offer the ability to recreate the floor plan based on photographs, while others use the LiDAR sensor in recent iPhone devices to create floor plans.

The market of floor plan apps is quite vast and varied, and plenty of solutions are fit for a very specific use case only. It is up to the potential customer to determine what features they want to have in the first place - having an understanding of what you actually need from a floor plan app is a good first step towards figuring out what to use.

The article above could be used as a guideline of sorts, making it easier to see what is the specialization of each application. For example, a solution like Revizto is a feature-rich mobile app for the commercial audience, offering VR support, advanced clash detection, and most of the features that the standalone solution can offer.