Your customers keep asking whether there is an app. Or your engineers still fill in paper job sheets in the van and photograph them for the office. Either way you have started looking at app developers, found quotes that are hard to compare, and noticed that some of the companies are not in the UK at all. Before you compare them, settle the points below. They matter more than where the developers sit.
First, does it need to be an app?
A website that works well on a phone needs no download and no store review, and it can be found on Google. If people will use the thing once a month, build the website. An app earns its place when people open it often, when it must keep working without signal, or when it depends on the camera, location or notifications. A field team recording jobs on site is a clear case. A catalogue that customers browse twice a year is not.
iPhone and Android: build both
You cannot assume which phone a UK customer carries. An app released for one platform leaves the rest of the audience asking when theirs will arrive. For most business apps the practical answer is a cross-platform build: one codebase that produces both apps, so features and fixes reach both on the same day. Separate native builds, one for each platform, justify their extra effort for a narrow group of apps, which native versus cross-platform apps describes.
Store accounts in your name
An app is published through an Apple Developer account and a Google Play developer account. Whoever holds those accounts controls the app: its listing, its reviews, its updates and its users. Open both in your company's name with a company email address, then invite the developer as a team member. Some developers offer to publish under their own account to save time. Decline. Moving an app between accounts later is possible, but it is slow and depends on the goodwill of the party you are leaving.
| Asset | Why it matters | The developer's access |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Developer account | Controls the iPhone app, its listing and its test builds | Invited as a team member |
| Google Play developer account | Controls the Android app and its reviews | Invited as a user |
| Code repository | Without it nobody else can continue the work | A collaborator you can remove |
| Server and database hosting | Holds your customers' data | Named logins you can switch off |
| Payment provider account | Money lands in your bank account, not theirs | Developer keys only |
| Notification and map service keys | The app stops working if these lapse | Set up on your accounts |
Privacy and consent
An app usually collects more than a website does: location, photos, contacts, a device identifier. In the UK that data is governed by UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act, and the regulator is the ICO. Both app stores also ask the publisher to declare what the app collects, and they show that declaration on the listing. Four design choices keep an app on the right side of its users:
- Ask for each permission at the moment it is needed, with a sentence saying why, not all at once on first launch.
- Keep marketing consent apart from the terms of use, unticked by default, and store when it was given.
- Let users delete their account and their data from inside the app.
- Collect only what a feature uses. Data you never hold cannot leak.
These are design decisions, which is why they belong in the UI/UX design stage and not in a patch the week before launch. The wording of the privacy notice, and how the rules apply when your developer is outside the UK, should be checked by your lawyer.
Weekly builds, reviewed in the UK working day
The surest sign of a healthy app project is a fresh build landing on your phone each week. Apple and Google both provide testing channels that deliver an unfinished app to named testers before it is public. You install it, use it as a customer or an engineer would, and send your notes.
Agree the week's screens
On a call in your morning, choose what will be built from the designs you have approved.
Receive the build
It arrives through the store's testing channel on your own iPhone or Android phone.
Test on real tasks
Place an order, complete a job sheet, try it with poor signal, and note what confuses you.
Review together
Go through the notes on the next call; the fixes join the following week's work.
Accept the milestone
When a set of features works on both phones, that milestone is signed off and invoiced.
Karachi is four hours ahead of the UK in summer and five in winter. A call at ten in the morning in the UK falls in the Karachi afternoon, so the review happens while both teams are at their desks, and the next Karachi morning can start on what you raised.
Choosing a mobile app development company outside the UK
Ask any developer, local or offshore, to show an app running on a phone during the first call, to name who will write the code, and to explain what happens to the app if you part company. The first release should be small enough to describe on one page; which features belong in a first release helps you cut the list. A developer who agrees to everything you ask for in the first meeting has not thought about your project yet.
Where Operix stands
Operix builds mobile apps for UK businesses from Karachi, remotely. We have no UK office and no published UK client. Most of our portfolio is in Pakistan and the UAE, with some international work, and the case studies in it are websites, online stores and ERP, CRM and POS systems: the kind of system a business app has to connect to. Cheesy Bite, for example, is an online ordering website, a staff dashboard and a POS for a pizza restaurant. Ask us to show app work on a call before you decide.
How we work with UK clients is described on the UK solutions page. To talk through an app idea, book a demo and pick a slot before your lunch.
Questions people ask
Should a UK business build for iPhone or Android first?
Both together, in most cases. A cross-platform build produces the two apps from one codebase, so neither group of customers is left waiting.
Whose name should the App Store and Google Play accounts be in?
Your company. Open them with a company email address and invite the developer as a team member, so that access can be removed without losing the app.
Can an offshore team publish an app for UK users?
Yes. Publishing is done online through your own developer accounts, and you choose the countries in which the listing appears. Where the developers sit makes no difference to the stores.
How is user privacy handled in the app?
Permissions are requested when they are needed, marketing consent is recorded separately, and the stores' privacy declarations are completed from what the app really collects. Have your lawyer approve the privacy notice under UK GDPR.
How much does a mobile app cost?
The screens, the integrations and whether a back-office system has to be built as well all move the figure, so we publish none. You get a written quote once a discovery call has pinned those down.
