Decide whether it needs to be an app
Push notifications, offline use, camera, location, or a home-screen icon people tap daily. Without at least one, a responsive web app is usually cheaper and easier to change.
guest@make-directory:~$ cat ./capabilities/mobile-app-development.md
make-directory:~/capabilities/mobile
Mobile App Development
For the work that happens away from a desk.
iOS and Android products for customers, field teams, and internal workflows — planned, built, released through the store process, and maintained afterwards.
guest@make-directory:~$ ls ./how-we-do-it
how we approach it
What the work involves.
Design for the actual conditions
One hand, bad signal, gloves, sunlight, a van. Field software fails on context far more often than on features.
Cross-platform where it fits
React Native covers most business apps well. Where a platform capability genuinely needs native, we say so rather than working around it.
Offline and sync
What happens with no connection, and what happens when two people changed the same thing. Decided deliberately, not discovered in the field.
The backend that comes with it
An app is a client. The API, the data model, and the admin side are usually the larger half of the work.
Release and review
Store listings, review cycles, staged rollout, crash reporting, and the update cadence afterwards. We publish and maintain our own apps, so this is routine.
guest@make-directory:~$ cat ./what-we-think.md
so you know how we decide
Where we will push back.
Most business ideas do not need an app
Store review, two codebases, and forced upgrade cycles are real ongoing costs. They are worth paying when the app earns them and not otherwise.
Shipping is not the hard part; the second year is
OS releases, dependency upgrades, and store policy changes arrive whether or not you are building features. Plan for maintenance from the start.
guest@make-directory:~$ cat ./what-this-is-for.md
where this gets used
What we get called in to solve with it.
If one of these describes your situation more closely than the technology does, start there instead.
guest@make-directory:~$ mkdir ./what-needs-to-change
next step
Tell us what you are trying to change.
Describe it however makes sense to you. If this turns out not to be what you need, we will point you at whatever is.
Would you rather look at code?
We build and operate our own software in the open — infrastructure tooling, a modernization toolchain, and a research arm. All of it is public, so you can see how we work before you talk to us.
What we build