StartUp Assistant
AI product
An all in one AI platform for founders, consolidating tools that would otherwise be a subscription stack into a single product experience.
- AI product
- Tools consolidated
- Time saved
Mobile App Development Services
Native and cross platform apps for iOS and Android, built to be opened daily rather than installed once and forgotten.
App development for iOS and Android platforms
iOS and Android look interchangeable on a requirements document and behave very differently in practice. They disagree on navigation, background work, and what a reviewer will accept. Planning for both in the first week costs far less than discovering the differences during store submission.
iOS app development
Builds that follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, reach your testers before they reach the store, and carry the privacy and tracking declarations App Store review now enforces.
Android app development
Builds tested across a spread of screen sizes, manufacturer skins, and older OS versions rather than only the newest flagship handset, and checked against Google's published Android app quality guidelines.
Shared product, native feel
One design language across both stores, with per platform navigation, typography, and gestures, so neither version feels like a port of the other.
Device and OS support matrix
Which OS versions, which handsets, phone only or tablet too. Agreed up front, it sets the testing effort and stops scope drifting later.
Who mobile app development is for
An app is a serious commitment: two platforms, two store review processes, and an annual cycle of OS changes that will not wait for you. It earns that cost in a few specific situations.
- Your customers come back regularly. Apps reward frequency. If someone interacts with you weekly, an icon on the home screen is worth more than another browser tab.
- You need the device itself. Camera, location, offline storage, biometrics, push notifications, or background work. A website cannot reach these reliably.
- Your team works away from a desk. Field engineers, drivers, and warehouse staff need something that survives a bad signal and a gloved hand.
- The app is the product. If people pay for access to the thing itself, the experience is the business rather than a channel to it. For a founding team building that first product, this usually runs through our startup acceleration solution rather than as a standalone app build.
If none of those apply, a fast mobile website is usually the better investment, and we will say so. Not every business needs an app, and building one that nobody opens helps nobody. In that case start with custom web development instead.
Native or cross platform app development
This decision shapes the budget, the timeline, and who can maintain the result, so it is worth making deliberately.
| Decision factor | Native | Cross platform |
|---|---|---|
| Codebases to maintain | One for each platform | One shared codebase with small platform specific parts |
| Hardware and sensor access | Direct, on the day the platform ships it | Through a plugin layer, sometimes a release behind |
| Sustained background work | Full control of the platform background APIs | Workable for most cases, awkward for the heaviest |
| Heavy graphics and animation | Best performance available on the device | Fine for ordinary interfaces, weaker under load |
| Time to reach both stores | Two builds and two test cycles | One build feeding both submissions |
| Who maintains it afterwards | Two specialist skill sets | One team, usually easier to hire for |
Most business apps land on cross platform. We say this openly because the opposite recommendation is more profitable for us, which is why it deserves suspicion when you hear it elsewhere. If you are still deciding what to build at all, our build a product solution is the wider view.
Mobile app development services we deliver
Native iOS and Android app development
Separate iOS and Android builds for when performance, offline behaviour, or deep platform integration matter, with camera, biometrics, sync, and hardware access treated as first class.
Cross platform app development
One codebase shipping to both stores when speed to market and maintenance cost matter more than the final frame of performance.
App strategy and product scoping
Deciding what the first version is and what it is not. Most app briefs shrink by a third here, which is the point, not a setback.
Mobile UI and UX design
Interface design built to platform conventions, so the app feels native to the device rather than like a website in a frame. Prototyped and clickable before code begins.
Backend, APIs, and integrations
Authentication, payments, notifications, and the services your app depends on, designed alongside it rather than bolted on once the screens are finished.
App Store and Google Play submission
Listings, screenshots, privacy declarations, review guidelines, and the rejection round trips that catch most first time publishers by surprise.
Analytics, crash reporting, and retention tracking
Instrumented from the first build, so activation, retention cohorts, and drop off points are visible from launch instead of being guessed at afterwards.
Legacy app modernisation and rescue
Taking over an app that has stalled, auditing what is salvageable, and telling you plainly whether continuing or rebuilding is the better use of your budget.
Mobile security and compliance
Secure storage, certificate pinning, sensible authentication, and the platform privacy requirements that now block submissions when they are missing.
Maintenance and post launch support
OS upgrades, dependency patching, store policy changes, and a real route to reach us. An app is a living thing, and an unmaintained one degrades quickly.
What goes into a custom mobile app development project
Screens are the part everyone sees and roughly half the work. These pieces decide whether the app stays reliable on real networks. Where a product needs recommendations, classification, or an assistant inside the app, that is scoped as AI automation, and it is worth reading the checklist we run before an AI feature reaches production.
The app front end
Screens, navigation, state, and gestures. Built to platform conventions so the app feels native in the hand rather than like a website inside a frame.
API layer and services
The contract between app and server, versioned so an older release on someone's phone keeps working after you ship a new one. Hosting and scaling sit with devops and infrastructure, and a server side large enough to be a system in its own right sits with custom software development.
Data model and storage
What lives on the device, what lives on the server, and what is cached in between. Getting this wrong shows up later as slow screens and stale records.
Accounts and authentication
Sign in, social and single sign on, Face ID and fingerprint sign in, password recovery, roles, and session expiry. Usually the first thing a user meets and the easiest place to lose them.
Push notifications and messaging
Permission prompts asked at the right moment, deep links that open the correct screen, and quiet defaults. Notification abuse is the fastest route to being uninstalled.
Offline mode and sync
Queued actions, background sync, and a defined answer for what happens when two people edit the same record on a bad signal. Decided early, because it shapes the architecture.
How we measure a successful app launch
Downloads are the least useful number in mobile. They measure curiosity, not value. We agree the real measures before development starts and instrument them during the build.
- Activation rate. The share of installs that reach the moment the app becomes useful. A weak number here usually means onboarding, not the product.
- Retention at day seven and day thirty. Whether people come back once the novelty has gone, which is the only honest test of whether an app was worth building.
- Crash free sessions. Tracked per release, per platform, and per OS version, because a crash rate that looks fine in aggregate often hides one broken device family.
- Time to complete the core task. Measured on real devices rather than a simulator, because the difference is frequently substantial.
Industries we build mobile apps for
The technology varies less between sectors than people expect. What changes is the environment the app is used in.
Field services and trades
Job dispatch, photo evidence, parts used, and customer sign off, working in a basement with no signal and syncing when the van reaches a network.
Logistics and transport
Route lists, barcode scanning, proof of delivery, and location updates, built for battery life across a full shift rather than a demo lasting ten minutes.
Healthcare and clinical
Appointments, secure messaging, and record access where consent, audit trails, and data residency are requirements rather than preferences, agreed with your compliance lead before build.
Retail and ecommerce
Browsing, saved payment, order history, loyalty, and click and collect, kept honest against the same stock and pricing your website and shop floor use.
Hospitality and events
Bookings, ordering, ticketing, and scannable passes that open on a dying battery inside a venue whose wifi has given up.
Professional services
Client portals, document upload and signature, timesheets, and approvals, giving a firm a mobile front door to work that now happens over email.
Signs your existing app needs rebuilding
Not every struggling app needs replacing. Some need a focused rescue. These are the signals that usually point to a rebuild rather than another round of patches.
- Small changes take weeks, and every release breaks something unrelated.
- The app is stuck on an old framework version that blocks current OS support.
- Store submissions now fail on privacy or policy requirements the codebase cannot satisfy.
- Crash rates climbed after an OS update and nobody can locate the cause.
- The original developers are gone and nothing was documented or handed over.
- Users describe it as slow, and profiling shows the problem is architectural rather than cosmetic.
We start these conversations with a technical review rather than a proposal, because sometimes the honest answer is that the app is fine and the problem sits somewhere else entirely. A broader estate review is IT consulting and technology audit work.
Mobile app security and compliance
An app carries your data around in a pocket, on a device you do not control, over networks you cannot vouch for. Both stores now refuse releases that handle that carelessly, so security belongs in the build rather than in a hardening pass at the end. We work to the OWASP Mobile Application Security Verification Standard, which sets out testable requirements for storage, authentication, network communication and platform interaction.
Secure storage on the device
Credentials and tokens in the platform keychain or keystore, sensitive records encrypted at rest, and nothing important left sitting in plain text or in logs.
Authentication and sessions
Short lived tokens, refresh handled properly, Face ID or fingerprint sign in where it helps, and a remote sign out that works when a phone is lost.
App store privacy requirements
Privacy nutrition labels, the Google Play Data safety form, tracking prompts, and permissions requested because a feature needs them rather than by habit.
Data handling and retention
Collecting only what the feature needs, transporting it over pinned and encrypted connections, and offering in app account deletion, which Apple has required of apps supporting account creation since June 2022.
Recent app and product work
Mobile apps we designed and shipped, and the problem each one took off someone's hands.
Our app development process, idea to store
- 1
Scope & shape
We pin down the core journey and cut everything that isn't v1. Most app briefs shrink by a third at this stage, which is the point rather than a setback.
- 2
Design & prototype
Clickable flows before code, so you feel the app in your hand and change your mind while changing it is still cheap.
- 3
Build & test
Two-week increments on real devices, with TestFlight and Play internal builds in your hands throughout.
- 4
Launch & iterate
Store submission, launch monitoring, then iteration driven by what real users actually do in the first weeks.
Mobile technologies we build with
Platform choice follows the product. These are the tools we work in regularly, grouped by where they sit in a mobile build.
iOS
SwiftSwiftUIUIKitObjective-CCore DataTestFlightXcode
Android
KotlinJetpack ComposeJavaRoomGradlePlay Console
Cross platform
React NativeFlutterDartExpoIonicCapacitorPWA
Backend and APIs
Node.jsPythonGo.NETRESTGraphQLWebSocketsFirebaseSupabase
Data and storage
PostgreSQLMongoDBRedisSQLiteRealmS3
Delivery and monitoring
FastlaneGitHub ActionsBitriseSentryFirebase AnalyticsAWSAzure
Mobile app development FAQs
Cost tracks scope rather than screen count, so we quote after a short discovery conversation instead of from a price list. Integrations, offline behaviour, and account systems move the number far more than visual design does. We would rather give you an accurate figure than an appealing one.
A focused first version usually runs ten to sixteen weeks from kickoff to store submission. Apps with payments, real time features, or complex backends take longer. We work in phases so something real is in your hands early rather than everything arriving at the end.
Cross platform suits most business apps: one codebase, both stores, lower cost to build and maintain. Native is the right answer when you need heavy graphics, deep hardware access, sustained background work, or the last measure of performance. We recommend based on what your app does, not on what we would rather build.
Yes. Store listings, screenshots, review guidelines, privacy declarations, and any rejection round trips. First submissions are often rejected for reasons unrelated to the quality of the app, and dealing with that is part of the work rather than an extra.
Often, yes. We start with a short technical review of the codebase, dependencies, and store accounts, then tell you honestly whether it is better to continue the existing app or rebuild. Both answers happen, and we will say which one we believe.
Entirely. You own the repository, the store developer accounts, the signing keys, and the intellectual property from day one. We add no proprietary layer, and nothing is locked to our infrastructure unless you ask us to run it for you.
Ready to build a mobile app people open every day?
Tell us what the app has to do, who will be carrying it, and where it has to work. We'll come back with an honest view of the first version, the two store submissions, and what it takes to keep an iOS and Android product healthy after launch.
Contact Us
Lahore, Pakistan · London, U.K · Austin TX, U.S · Toronto, Canada