App Development Company for US Businesses

A straightforward app typically takes eight to sixteen weeks from approved designs to store submission. More complex builds with user accounts, payment processing, third-party integrations or real-time features run longer. Design usually takes two to three weeks before development begins, and app store review adds a few days to a week at the end. We give you a timeline during scoping and update it if anything changes, rather than discovering a delay at the deadline.

It depends on what the app needs to do. A progressive web app installs to the home screen, works offline and updates instantly without store review — it is faster and cheaper to build, and for most content, booking and ecommerce use cases it is genuinely sufficient. Native makes sense when you need deep device integration, heavy offline processing, background location, or presence in the app stores for discovery and credibility. We will recommend the PWA where it fits, because it usually costs you less.

In many cases yes. If your site is already a well-built responsive experience, a progressive web app wrapper can give you home-screen installation, offline access and push notifications without rebuilding anything. For ecommerce we can also build a native app that syncs with your existing store, so products, stock and orders stay in one place. What we will not do is wrap a poor mobile site and call it an app, because the underlying experience is the problem.

Yes. Most projects target both, either through a cross-platform framework that shares one codebase or through separate native builds where the app needs platform-specific behavior. Cross-platform is usually the right commercial decision — one codebase costs less to build and far less to maintain. We will tell you when a project genuinely warrants going fully native, which is less often than the industry implies.

You do, outright. You get the source code, the repository and the app store listings in your own developer accounts. If we stop working together you keep everything and can hand it to another developer without renegotiating anything. Some agencies retain the code or publish under their own developer account, which means you cannot move without rebuilding. We think that is indefensible.

Yes, as part of the project. We handle the developer account setup if you do not already have one, prepare the store listings, screenshots and metadata, and manage submission and any review feedback. Store review can reject on first submission for reasons that are not always obvious, so having someone who has been through it repeatedly saves a fortnight of back and forth.

Apps need ongoing maintenance in a way websites largely do not. Operating system updates, device changes and store policy revisions all break things over time, and an app that stops working on the newest handset stops being an asset quickly. Most clients move onto a monthly retainer covering updates, monitoring, bug fixes and small feature work. It is month to month, with no long contract.

Yes. Design and development are the same in-house team, which removes the handover where most app projects lose quality. Designs account for how they will actually be built, and there is no gap between a mockup that looks good and a screen that behaves properly on a real device. You get wireframes, then high-fidelity designs, then a clickable prototype to review before development starts.

Usually, to a degree, and it is one of the strongest reasons to build an app rather than rely on a mobile site. We can cache content for offline reading, queue actions taken while disconnected and sync them when the connection returns, and store user data locally. Full offline functionality depends on what the app does — anything requiring live data has natural limits — but the common cases are well supported.

Yes. Apps are usually only useful when connected to something — a CRM, an ecommerce platform, a booking system, a payment provider or an internal database. We work with documented APIs where they exist and build integration layers where they do not. If a system you depend on has no API at all, we will tell you early, because it materially changes what is possible and what it costs.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, authentication uses established providers rather than anything we invent, and we follow platform guidance on secure credential storage. Where the app handles personal data we build to UK GDPR requirements, including consent, retention and deletion. We do not collect data the app does not need — the safest data is the data you never stored.

Yes, and the most useful thing we do at that stage is argue scope down. Early-stage apps fail more often from building too much than from building too little. We would rather ship a focused first version that proves the core assumption and then expand, than spend the budget on features nobody has validated. If you need us to push back on your feature list, we will.

Yes — our team is in London and we work with clients across the UK and the US. Meetings can be in person or remote, whichever suits you. Being in one place matters less than it used to, but it does mean you are working with a single team in one timezone rather than a coordinator in front of contractors elsewhere.