Mobile app development for growing businesses

First: most businesses don't need an app

We'll start with the part that costs us work. An app lives behind an icon on someone's home screen, which means it has to survive two brutal filters: they have to install it, and they have to keep it. A one-off customer will do neither. They will use your website, on their phone, once — and that is the correct outcome.

An app makes sense when there's repetition. A customer who books every six weeks. A café with a loyalty scheme people actually use. Ten engineers who need job sheets, photos and signatures from a van with one bar of signal. In those cases an app beats a website comfortably, because it can hold data offline, send notifications, and open in one tap.

If your situation isn't one of those, we'll say so on the first call and point you at a properly built mobile-first website for a fraction of the money.

What we build

• Booking and ordering apps. Repeat customers pick a slot or reorder their usual in three taps, with reminders that cut no-shows.
• Field and job-management apps. For teams working away from a desk: job lists, photos, signatures, timesheets and parts used — working offline and syncing when signal comes back.
• Customer account apps. Order history, documents, service records, invoices and support in one place, so your phone rings less for things people could look up themselves.
• Internal tools. The spreadsheet that quietly runs your business, turned into something your staff can use on a phone without breaking the formulas.
• Apps with AI built in. Photo-based quoting, automatic job notes, plain-English search over your own data — see custom AI development.

How we build it

One codebase, both platforms. We use React Native, which produces genuinely native iOS and Android apps from a single project — so a change gets made once, tested once, and shipped to both stores. Two separate native codebases would roughly double the build cost and every future change, and for the apps most businesses need there's no benefit that justifies it.

Apps are also rarely standalone. Yours will almost certainly need to read and write data where your business already keeps it, which is API and integration work — often the larger half of the project, and something we scope explicitly rather than discovering halfway through.

1. Scoping session. Free. Who opens this app, how often, and what single thing must it do brilliantly? We cut everything that isn't that.
2. Fixed proposal. Screen-by-screen scope, timeline, integrations, store costs and ongoing maintenance — all in writing before you commit.
3. Design and prototype. You get a clickable version to try on your own phone before we write the real thing. Changing your mind is cheap at this stage and expensive later.
4. Build in two-week blocks. At the end of each, you install the current app on your phone and tell us what's wrong. Nothing gets built in secret.
5. Store submission. We handle App Store and Play Store listings, screenshots, privacy declarations and review — including the rejections, which are normal and which we fix.
6. Handover and upkeep. Code, accounts and store listings in your name. Maintenance is a choice, not an assumption — but for apps it's a sensible one.

What it costs

A focused version one on both platforms starts at £6,500. Apps with user accounts, payments, live data from your existing systems and an admin side are typically £15,000 to £30,000. Store accounts are $99 a year (Apple) and a one-off $25 (Google), paid by you, in your name. Maintenance starts at £99 a month.

Those are starting points; the scoping call exists to turn them into one fixed number. If your budget and your feature list don't meet, we'll tell you at the proposal stage — not at 70% complete.