iOS & Android · New York
Launch day is the start of the bill, not the end of it. We design and build iOS and Android apps, get them through review, and tell you honestly when what you need is a good mobile website instead.
Tap through the demo. Four screens, a working tab bar, and no fake status bar pretending it's a screenshot.
First question
Roughly half the people who ask us for one would get more from a fast mobile website. An app has to be earned: it needs a reason to be installed, and a reason to be opened again next week.
Three questions. We'll tell you what we'd tell you on the call, and sometimes that answer costs us the project.
Who is it for?
How often would someone open it?
Does it need the phone itself?
Our honest answer
How it gets built
Three honest options, and the one we recommend most often is the middle one.
Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android. Two codebases.
Worth it for: heavy graphics, AR, serious hardware use, or an app that is the whole business.
React Native or Flutter. One codebase, both stores.
Worth it for: most business apps. This is what we recommend unless there's a reason not to.
Installable, no store, no review queue.
Worth it for: tools people use at a desk or on site, where nobody was going to search a store for you anyway.
Submission
App review is a real gate and a first rejection can cost you a week. These are the ones we see most; we build against them from the start rather than discovering them the week you wanted to launch.
Store rules change. We check the current guidelines at submission rather than relying on what was true last year.
After launch
This is the part that surprises people, so we put it in the proposal rather than in a difficult conversation nine months later.
Apple and Google both ship a major OS release every year, and each one can break something. An app nobody maintains stops working in about eighteen months, and usually gets pulled from the store before that.
See the full picture →| What it is | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Apple Developer Program | $99 / year |
| Google Play developer account | $25 once |
| Backend hosting & database | [$ — ] / mo |
| Push notifications & analytics | Often free at your size |
| Care plan: OS updates, fixes, monitoring | [$ — ] / mo |
| New features, once it's live | Quoted per release |
Store fees are current at the time of writing; both platforms change them occasionally, and we confirm the numbers in your proposal. The bracketed lines depend on your usage and get quoted with the build.
How it goes
You'll have the app on your own phone long before it reaches a store, because opinions about an app change the moment you can actually tap it.
FAQ
Ten to sixteen weeks for a focused first version, longer once payments, a backend and an admin panel are involved. Store review usually adds a few days, occasionally a week if something needs changing.
With a cross-platform build, both come nearly free, so usually yes. If budget is tight, look at your own analytics: whichever platform your customers already use is where you start, and in a lot of New York businesses that's iOS by a distance.
You do. The developer accounts are registered to your company, not ours, and we're added as developers. The code lives in your repository from the first commit. If we part ways, nothing about your app is hostage.
It applies to digital goods and subscriptions sold inside the app, and small-business programmes can reduce it. Physical goods and real-world services are generally outside it. This matters enormously to your margins, so we work it out before design starts rather than after.
Often. We start with a code and account audit: what state the codebase is in, whether the store accounts are actually yours, and what it would cost to bring it up to date. Sometimes the honest answer is that rebuilding is cheaper, and we'll show you the maths either way.
Not on their own. Nobody browses app stores looking for a business like yours. Downloads come from the customers you already have: in your emails, on your receipts, on a sign at the counter. If there's no plan to put it in front of people, that's worth solving before you build it.
We test against the betas each summer and ship any fixes before the public release. That's part of the care plan. Without one, a major OS release is the usual reason an app suddenly stops working for half its users.
Start a project
Not the roadmap. The single thing it has to do well for someone to keep it on their phone. We'll come back with a shape, a phase one, and a number, or a good argument for building something else.
Prefer to talk it through? 929-619-7339, weekdays 9–6 ET.
Tell us what you’re building. We design and build high-quality digital products globally.
