Capability 04 · Code
An app gets a few days to earn its place on someone's phone. From our studio in Mumbai we design and build iOS, Android and cross platform apps, with designers and engineers on one team from the first sketch to the store listing, and we stay for every release after it.
45+
apps launched
38%
higher conversion for a Dubai skincare brand after its store and app relaunch
3x
faster page loads for Ekeeda learners
Where it usually starts
Most app briefs arrive with one of these attached. Some arrive with all four.
Downloads look healthy in the first month, then the retention curve drops away. The app copies the website instead of doing the one job that deserves a home screen icon.
Separate iOS and Android apps drift apart. A fix ships on one platform and waits a month on the other, and every new feature is paid for twice.
It flies on the latest iPhone and stutters on a three year old Android over patchy 4G, which is much closer to the phone most of your customers carry.
Store rejections, expired certificates, a previous agency that still holds the signing keys. The app exists, but nobody can confidently ship the next version.
What we do
One team designs and engineers the app, the backend it talks to and the release process that keeps it healthy.
One codebase for iOS and Android, built to feel at home on both. Our starting point for most consumer, commerce and service apps, because it halves the cost of every future feature.
Swift and Kotlin when the product lives on the hardware: heavy camera or AR work, Bluetooth devices, background location, or an in-house team that already works native.
Apps for repeat customers: saved routines, quick reorders, notifications people do not mute, and a cart shared with your web store.
Apps people use every day for study or work: quick to sign in to, useful offline, and kind to phones with little storage left.
The part nobody sees: sign-in, APIs, notifications, analytics and the admin tools your team uses to run the app without calling a developer.
For apps that exist and have stopped moving. We audit the code, recover the store accounts and keys, work through the crash list and set up releases you can trust.
The Ampersand Method, applied
The same six phases as every D&C project. On mobile, each one picks up a few habits of its own.
How the method worksWe find the one job the app must do better than your website, and the moment in a customer's week when they will reach for it.
Features ranked against effort, the Flutter, React Native or native decision written down with its reasons, and a costed first release small enough to ship and big enough to matter.
Clickable prototypes on real phones in real hands, with the engineers drawing the API and offline model next to every screen.
Two week sprints and a fresh build on your phone every Friday through TestFlight and Google Play testing. Our testers try to break it on slow networks and old devices.
Store listings, screenshots, privacy labels and review notes handled for you, then a staged rollout so any problem reaches a small share of users, not all of them.
Crash monitoring, the new iOS and Android versions every autumn, store policy changes, and a quarterly look at retention to decide what earns the next release.
Proof
A Dubai skincare brand whose store and app now feel like one product, and a learning platform whose learner apps and portal got faster for everyone at once.
All workThey moved us to the cloud over a weekend and nobody on the learner side noticed, which is the best compliment I can give.
Tools we trust
How we engage
Most app projects open with a three week Discovery Sprint that ends in a tested prototype and a fixed price for the first release. The build follows in two week sprints, and a Care & Grow plan keeps the app current with every OS update after launch.
An app is a small promise to be useful again next week. The download is the easy part. The real test is the second open, then the fifth, then whether the icon survives the next time someone clears space for photos. Everything below is how we design for that moment.
Every project begins in Listen & Learn with one question: what will this app do better than your website? For a D2C skincare brand in Dubai, the answer was letting regular customers reorder their routine in two taps. For Ekeeda, it was getting learners to the right lecture quickly, on whatever phone and connection they had. The feature list comes afterwards, ranked against that job, and most apps ship stronger for what we leave out of version one.
We build in all three and gain nothing from picking one, so the decision is written down with its reasons during Map & Measure.
The question that settles most of these debates is not speed. It is who will maintain the app in year two, and what they already know.
There is a drawer in the Mumbai studio full of test phones. The one that matters most is a three year old Android that cost under ₹10,000 when it was new. Nothing ships until it feels quick on that phone over a throttled connection, because it is far closer to your typical customer than the flagship on the founder’s desk. Prem, one of our founders, asks the same thing in every review: would this still work for a million people on a cheap phone and a patchy connection?
We also test with VoiceOver and TalkBack, with larger text sizes and with one thumb, because accessibility belongs in the build, not in an audit six months later.
We prepare the store listings, privacy labels and review notes, release to a small share of users first and watch the crash rate before opening the doors wider. As Suraj likes to say, if launch day is exciting, we did something wrong in the weeks before it.
Apple and Google change the rules every year, and a new OS version lands every autumn. Our Care & Grow plans absorb that: OS updates, policy changes, crash monitoring and a quarterly look at retention with you. Apps rarely fail on launch day. They fail slowly, when nobody is looking after them. We started life keeping websites online, and we bring the same habit to every app we ship.
See how it played out for Ekeeda and the Dubai skincare brand, read our guide to app development costs, or tell us what you are building.
FAQ
Most first releases we build, for iOS and Android together, cost between ₹12 and 33 lakh: roughly US$15,000 to 40,000, £12,000 to 31,000 or AED 55,000 to 147,000. The price moves with the number of screens, integrations, payments and offline needs, and adding an app to a platform that already has a backend costs less. Our app development cost guide breaks it down.
A focused first release usually takes 12 to 20 weeks after a three week Discovery Sprint, for iOS and Android together. Apps on an existing backend can ship sooner; apps with payments, offline sync and an admin panel sit at the longer end. You get a working build on your own phone every Friday, so you never wait months to see progress.
Both are mature and both ship excellent apps. We lean to Flutter when the design is highly custom and rich in animation, and to React Native when your team already writes React or TypeScript for the web and wants to share code and people across both. The deciding question is usually who maintains the app in year two, not raw speed.
Native means two separate apps, Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. Cross platform means one codebase for both. For most commerce, content and service apps, cross platform works well and typically costs 30 to 40% less over two years. Choose native when the app depends on the camera, AR, Bluetooth hardware or heavy background work.
Often a fast mobile website or a progressive web app is the right first step, and we will say so. An app earns its cost when customers return every week, when notifications or offline access matter, or when you need the camera, wallet payments or device sensors. If most visits are one-off, put the budget into your website first.
Plan for about 15 to 20% of the build cost each year. That covers updates for new iOS and Android versions, store policy changes, security patches, crash fixes and small improvements. Hosting, notifications and third party services come on top and stay modest until you have tens of thousands of active users. A Care & Grow plan puts all of it into one monthly fee.
Apple charges US$99 a year for its Developer Program, and Google charges a one time US$25 to register a Play Console account. Both stores take a commission on digital goods sold inside an app, but not on physical products such as a skincare order. We open both accounts in your company's name, so they always belong to you.
Tell us who it is for and what it should do better than your website. A partner replies within one working day, usually with a few sharp questions.
