Which agency should build your iOS and Android app?

We design and build software end to end: product strategy and design, MVP development for web and mobile, the cloud infrastructure underneath, and the growth engineering that follows once something is working. One senior team covers all four rather than handing you between specialists.

Both, deliberately. Design that ignores what is buildable produces mockups nobody ships, and engineering without product thinking builds the wrong thing efficiently. The same team does the research, the interface, and the production code.

Most often Next.js, React, React Native and Flutter on the front end, TypeScript and Node with GraphQL or REST behind them, PostgreSQL for data, and serverless AWS for infrastructure. The stack follows the problem, not our preference, and we will say when a boring choice is the right one.

Yes, it is one of the four things we do. For a startup that has already launched that means performance work on load times, bundles, database queries and caching; analytics and observability so you can see how the product is actually used; scaling infrastructure ahead of the traffic; experimentation through feature flags, A/B tests and gradual rollouts; technical SEO and structured data; and expansion to iOS and Android once the web product has earned it. Most engagements start with instrumentation, because a funnel you cannot see is a funnel you cannot fix.

When something is live, people are using it, and you can name the number you want to move. Before that it is usually MVP work under a different name, because optimising a funnel nobody is in yet is expensive guesswork. Two things are worth doing early anyway: instrumentation, which is cheaper to fit at launch than to retrofit, and page speed on anything public-facing. If you are pre-launch we will say so rather than sell you the wrong phase.

Yes, and it is common. We start with an audit of the code, infrastructure and delivery process so you get an honest picture of what is salvageable, what needs replacing, and what it would cost either way, before committing to the work. We will say plainly when building on what exists is cheaper than starting again, and when it is not.

A conversation, then usually a Discovery Sprint. Tell us the problem and where you are, and we will scope the smallest piece of work that gets you a real answer, rather than quoting a full build before either of us understands the shape of it.

If the idea is not validated yet, start with Product Strategy and Design. If it is validated and nothing is built, start with MVP Development. If you have launched and the backend is straining, start with Infrastructure and Platform. If it is working and you want to compound it, that is Growth Engineering. If you are unsure, tell us where you are and we will tell you what we would do, including if the answer is nothing yet.

Most engagements combine them. A typical path is a Discovery Sprint, then an MVP build, then platform work as usage grows. You are not locked into a bundle: each phase is scoped and priced on its own so you can stop, pause, or change direction between them.

Three shapes. A Discovery Sprint turns uncertainty into a plan. A Defined Project is fixed scope with clear milestones. An Embedded Team is ongoing senior capacity inside your workflow. Timelines are set per phase during scoping and quoted before that phase starts. Every engagement is senior-led with weekly demos.

It depends on scope, and we would rather scope honestly than quote a number that moves later. We work in fixed phases with a bill that maps to working software rather than hours, so you know the cost of each phase before it starts. Tell us what you are trying to build and we will scope it.

Entirely, from day one. Source code, infrastructure, and accounts live in repositories and cloud accounts you control. You also get the CI/CD pipeline, the test suite and the documentation, so another team could pick the work up without us. There is no lock-in, no hostage IP, and no licensing arrangement that keeps you tied to us after launch.

Go by what you have, not by how you describe yourselves. Nothing built yet and you are proving an idea: founders and startups. An established operation still running on spreadsheets and disconnected tools: businesses. Large teams, legacy systems, and a compliance bar to answer to: enterprise. If you sit between two, pick the one that matches your next six months.

No. Startups are where our published proof sits, because Autara is the build we can talk about in detail, but the same team does workflow digitisation for established businesses and embedded modernisation work for larger organisations. What stays constant is that the people who scope your work are the people who build it.

From solo founders with an idea through to engineering organisations that need senior capacity for a specific programme. We are deliberately small, so we take on fewer projects than a large agency and are candid when a piece of work needs a bigger firm than us.

Yes. We work with teams in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere, and remote delivery is the norm rather than the exception. Engagements are senior-led with weekly demos, so progress is visible regardless of timezone.

Yes. Plenty of the founders we talk to have not raised anything yet, and a Discovery Sprint is deliberately small enough to be affordable at that stage. We scope each phase on its own so an early-stage budget buys a real answer rather than the first slice of a build you cannot finish.

We scope to what ships. Fixed phases, weekly demos, and a bill that maps to working software, not hours in a spreadsheet. If something doesn't need building yet, we'll tell you.

Every project is senior-led, the person you talk to is the person architecting your product. Autara is a production marketplace across iOS, Android and web, with 90+ automated tests on the onboarding flow alone. The work is the reference.

Fair question rather than a rude one, and the honest answer is not a promise about staffing. It's what we leave behind as we go: the work lives in your repositories with the test suite, the CI pipeline and the documentation, so the project never exists only inside one person's head. Continuity comes from a codebase someone else can read, not from any one of us being irreplaceable.

You see progress from the first sprint: shared boards, staging builds, working features. We will not quote you a launch date before we understand the scope, because that number is the one most likely to be wrong.

Launch is the midpoint, not the end. We stay for iteration, support, and scaling, or hand over cleanly to your in-house team with documentation that actually documents.

Both, in most cases, because on a shared codebase the second platform is a fraction of the first rather than a second full build. Sequencing only makes sense when the two audiences are genuinely different, and then you pick by where your users already are rather than by which store is said to spend more. Autara went to iOS and Android together for exactly that reason.

Yes: the store listings, the builds, the review submissions, and the fixes when a review comes back asking for something. The developer accounts are registered to you and stay that way, which matters more than it sounds. An app published under an agency's account is an app you cannot fully take with you.

Almost always, and it is usually the larger half of the work. Anything with accounts, payments, bookings, notifications or content that changes needs a server of its own; the app is the part users see, not the part doing most of the work. Autara's two apps sit on one shared API rather than two, which is why one team can maintain both.

Yes, and we will tell you where they will not survive contact with a real device before we start rather than halfway through. The usual gap is states: empty, loading, error, and offline. On mobile the offline case is not optional, and a design set that has not been through it is a set of screens rather than a product.

Line up what each one includes before you compare the totals. The usual reasons one quote is half the other are that it excludes the backend, excludes store submission and post-launch fixes, assumes you supply final designs, or prices a prototype where the other prices something you can put in front of paying users. Ask both studios which of those four they have assumed.

A short, fixed-length engagement of one to two weeks that answers whether an idea is worth building before anyone commits to building it. Ours combines research, technical scoping and rapid prototyping. You come out with a clear picture of what to build first, what to leave out, an architecture direction, and a prototype you can put in front of users or investors. It is scoped and priced on its own, so a sprint that ends in a decision not to build has still done its job.

Judge three things you can check before you sign: whether research happens before interface work, whether you leave with a design system your engineers can build from rather than flat mockups, and whether the firm is willing to tell you not to build. A portfolio of good-looking screens is the easiest thing to compare and the weakest signal, because it shows the output without the reasoning that produced it. Where we stand: the people who research your problem are the people who design it, engagements are senior-led with weekly demos, and hiring us starts with a one-to-two-week Discovery Sprint priced on its own rather than a full build.

Then we tell you, and that is a good outcome. It is far cheaper to kill or reshape an idea in week one than in month six. We would rather lose a build than take budget for something we do not believe will land.

Yes. You get a design system, not a set of flat mockups: components, states, spacing and type scales, and the rules that hold them together. Whether we build it or your team does, the handover is meant to be buildable without us in the room.

Both, and the research comes first. Interface work that is not grounded in how people actually behave is decoration. We research the problem, prototype against it, and design the interface that follows from what we learn.

A prototype, within the sprint. Something you can click through and put in front of people is the point of the engagement, not a document describing one.

A studio is the better buy while the question is what to build; an in-house designer is the better buy once the question is how to keep building it. A first design hire spends months finding the shape of the product alone, without research and engineering sitting beside them. We do that first stretch and hand over a design system a first designer can inherit rather than reverse-engineer. If you already have a designer and a roadmap you believe in, you probably do not need us.

It depends on scope, and any studio quoting a flat number before understanding your problem is guessing. What actually moves the figure is how many distinct types of user you are serving, whether you need native mobile as well as web, how much of the product touches payments or compliance, and how much of it has to talk to systems you already run. Tell us which of those apply and we can scope it properly rather than guess at it.

Freelancers are cheaper and are the right call for small, well-defined tasks. A company or studio earns its cost when the scope is still uncertain and someone has to decide what to build, not just build it. The real split is not rate per hour. It is who owns the architecture, the integration between the pieces, and the call about what gets cut. Hire freelancers when you already have the spec. Hire a company when the spec is the thing you are missing.

Per hour, almost always. Per shipped product, often not: the coordination a studio absorbs (architecture, integration, review, deciding what gets cut) becomes your job, and it is unpaid founder time rather than a line on an invoice. Published market guides put a simple single-loop MVP at roughly $15,000–$40,000 in 2026 and a marketplace at $35,000–$70,000; those are industry ranges rather than our quote. A price far under the market range usually means that coordination cost moved to you.

When the scope is written down, the architecture is already settled, and the work is one well-defined slice: a landing page, an integration, a single feature on a codebase that exists. What you accept in exchange is a bus factor of one: nobody else who can read the code when that person moves on. That is a fine trade for a two-week task and an expensive one for a build that runs sixteen months. We will tell you when yours is the first kind.

We do not quote a standard timeline, because scope is what decides it and we would rather be accurate than reassuring. We scope each phase during discovery and quote it before it starts, and you see working features from the first sprint. For a sense of scale: Autara is a production marketplace across iOS, Android and web, built over sixteen months.

By working out what the first real user needs in order to finish their first real task, and cutting everything that is not on that path. Anything that can be handled manually behind the scenes at launch usually should be. We write the cut list down with you, so the things we are not building are a decision you made rather than a surprise you discover later.

That is what we optimise for. Clean module boundaries, typed contracts, and a migration path mean you scale the product you have instead of rewriting it at Series A. An MVP built to be thrown away costs you the whole build again at the worst possible moment.

One codebase wherever it earns its place. Autara runs on iOS, Android and web from a shared backbone, which is how two products, the customer app and the merchant app, are built and maintained by a single team rather than three. Where something genuinely needs to be native, we say so instead of forcing the pattern.

The person who scopes your build should be the one who architects it. With us they are the same person. We are deliberately small, take fewer projects than a large agency, and say so when a build needs a bigger firm than us.

Working software, not a plan for it. A Discovery Sprint runs one to two weeks and ends in a prototype you can click through; from there you get weekly demos and a staging build from the first sprint onward.

The code, the infrastructure and the accounts, from day one and in writing. Ask any studio for that in the contract before you sign, not after launch.

Ask for one build you can examine in depth rather than a wall of logos. Ours is Autara: two apps across iOS, Android and web, sixteen months of sustained delivery, 90+ automated tests on the onboarding flow alone.

The usual signals are deploys that people are afraid of, incidents that repeat, costs that grow faster than usage, and features that take longer each time. If shipping is getting slower rather than faster, the platform underneath is usually why.

Yes, and it is the only responsible way to do it. We migrate incrementally with the old path running alongside the new one, cover the change with tests, and cut over in controlled steps once the data reconciles. No big-bang rewrite weekend.

Mostly cost before scale, and operational time after it. Autara ran at close to zero infrastructure cost before launch because nothing sat idle, and it scales automatically when traffic arrives. It is not right for every workload, and we will say so when it is not.

It is designed in rather than bolted on: access control, secrets handling, audit trails, and least-privilege infrastructure from the start. We work to the bar you answer to, and we are candid about where a specialist audit is needed instead of pretending to be one.

Yes. We work inside your accounts, your tooling, and your review process, and we document as we go so your team owns the result. The goal is capability in your team, not dependency on ours.

Whether one team carries the product from research through to the infrastructure it runs on. Design studios hand over a system and leave; engineering shops build what they are handed. Three things to check on any shortlist: who architects the backend, whether you see a staging build in the first sprint, and whether the cloud accounts are in your name from day one. Ours are, in writing.

Different tier, different job. Those are enterprise design consultancies (frog sits inside Capgemini, Continuum inside EPAM) and they are the right call for strategy across a large organisation. They set direction, and the engineering usually goes to a separate vendor afterwards. We are the other shape: a deliberately small senior team that researches the problem, designs it, writes the production code, and runs the platform underneath. We say so when a programme needs a firm bigger than us.

Not one worth deciding on. The 2026 top-studio lists are mostly directories where placement is self-submitted, sponsored, or ordered by review volume, so they rank marketing effort rather than shipped software. A better test is one build you can examine in depth. Ours is Autara: two apps across iOS, Android and web, sixteen months of sustained delivery, 90+ automated tests on the onboarding flow alone, on serverless infrastructure that cost close to nothing before launch.

Engineering work aimed at the metrics that compound rather than at new features. Performance, instrumentation, funnel and retention work, experimentation, and disciplined iteration on the parts of the product that already work. It is growth pursued through the product rather than through ad spend.

Judge on three things you can verify before signing, none of them on a rankings list: whether the people who scope the work also write the code, whether they agree the metric with you before shipping, and whether the practice stays in your team when the engagement ends. Then ask for one build you can inspect in depth rather than a wall of logos. Ours is Autara, a production marketplace across iOS, Android and web with 90+ automated tests on the onboarding flow alone.

A marketing agency drives traffic to the product. Growth engineering changes the product so that traffic converts and stays. The two work together, but if the product leaks users, more traffic just leaks faster.

Because growth engineering is senior work, and headcount is not an advantage in it. We are deliberately small, take on fewer projects than a large agency, and the person who scopes your funnel work is the one who instruments and ships it. The trade-off is real: if you need several embedded squads across multiple products at once, we are the wrong size and will say so rather than staff up to take the work.

When there is nothing to compound yet. If the product has not found its first real usage, the next honest step is product work, not optimisation. If it converts but buckles under load, that is infrastructure work. If nobody has heard of you, paid media will move the number faster than we will.

The metrics that map to your business, agreed before the work starts: activation, retention, conversion at the steps that matter, and Core Web Vitals where speed affects revenue. If we cannot measure whether a change worked, we do not ship it as a growth change.

Performance and instrumentation work usually shows within the first weeks because the effect is direct. Retention and funnel changes take longer, because they need enough traffic to reach a real conclusion. We will tell you honestly which bucket a piece of work sits in.

Usually, yes. Growth work lands best embedded in the team that owns the product, using your tools, your standups, and your release process, so the practice stays after the engagement ends.