An app you open from your phone screen

The useful question is whether people come back. An app earns its place when someone opens it more than once: repeat orders, bookings, an account, notifications that are genuinely useful. For something people look at once, a well-built website is enough — and we will say so, because an app nobody reopens is money spent on an icon.

We build cross-platform, with React Native or Flutter: one codebase instead of two means less to build and, more to the point, less to maintain every year. Some projects do need native, though — heavy graphics, video processing, deep ties into the operating system. If yours is one of them, we say so at the first conversation, not halfway through the project.

It is a website built to behave like an app: added to the phone screen from a browser menu, opening without an address bar, able to work without a signal. What it cannot do: appear in the App Store or Google Play, and on iPhone its notifications and access to phone features are more limited than on Android. Where exactly those are the point of the app, we go cross-platform.

We prepare and upload it, but the Apple Developer and Google Play accounts stay in your company name. That matters more than it sounds: if you work with someone else a year from now, the app stays yours, reviews and version history included.

It depends on how many screens it has and which systems it has to talk to. We give the estimate once the flows are drawn, because that is when it is clear what is being built. Before that, any deadline would be a number pulled out of the air.

Apple and Google periodically require builds made with newer tools, and phone operating systems change every year. An app left entirely alone eventually becomes an app that will not start. Updates run on a retainer or on request, whichever suits you.