r/AppBusiness • u/StructureAny3128 • 22h ago
Building an App Hiring an app dev company for the first time
We're getting ready to build our first proper mobile app and I'm trying to narrow down a few dev companies before reaching out.
budget isn't the main concern, more worried about ending up with a team that's good at sales but weak on the actual development side.
for anyone who's hired an agency for an app before, what did you wish you'd checked first?
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u/Living-Shame5679 18h ago
I’ve used such companies in the past. I took a gamble on one early on and they mostly delivered.
They used me as a reference after that a couple times. So I guess you can ask to speak to former clients.
These days you could probably try a freelancer too as smaller teams with AI can deliver just as fast.
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u/Global-Wrap-912 11h ago
Ask to see actual projects they have worked on that you can actually interact with, and are similar to what you need in your product. If they say they can’t due to NDA…. Then pass because they are full of shit. Also make sure they use AI tools as part of their development processes if you don’t have restrictions for some reason. I would also have them work project based if you’re pretty sure what you’re looking to build. I also want to interview the main leads for the project. That’s the big stuff that I look for to get the list down to a couple firms for the project. After that then it come down to price for me.
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u/jagdeep110 6h ago
This is a very valid concern. One thing I’d definitely check is whether the people you meet during the sales process are actually the people who’ll be building the product.
I’d also ask about their development process, QA, architecture decisions, and a couple of apps they’ve taken from idea to production - not just the portfolio screenshots.
The sales conversation can tell you a lot, but the delivery team tells you much more.
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u/musabdulai 2h ago
Ask the engineer who would actually own the app, not only the salesperson, to walk you through a real failure in something they shipped: a payment retried twice, a notification sent after cancellation, a database change during an app-store rollout, or a bad release that needed rollback. Their answer will tell you more than portfolio screenshots.
Keep the GitHub organization, cloud account, App Store Connect, Play Console, domains and analytics under your ownership from day one. I would also require weekly installable builds, written acceptance checks, crash monitoring and a handover that another engineer can run.
A team can deliver a polished app and still leave you dependent on them because deployment, secrets and data recovery were never designed for transfer.
What kind of app are you building? The most important checks depend on its core workflow.
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u/ringosrule 22h ago
Dev company here. I recommend you check if they have existing customers that they still servicing. That shows they stand by their work. Another issue I see with some customers is previous company promised to give customer control of assets but don’t really. They end up trying to hold them hostage.