Mobile App Development

A Webtales mobile app project covers strategy, UI and UX design, development, backend and APIs, quality assurance, store launch and maintenance. Development is native in Swift and Kotlin, or cross-platform in React Native or Flutter. Design is led by the in-house creative team, testing by a dedicated QA team, and app store optimisation by the SEO team.

The cost of a mobile app depends mainly on whether you build one cross-platform codebase or two native apps, and on the features it needs. Payments, real-time updates, offline use, third-party integrations and the size of the backend each add work, as do regulatory requirements. Webtales estimates after a discovery phase and bills against agreed milestones.

Choose native development when performance, device hardware or platform-specific behaviour matters most, and cross-platform when the interface is standard and budget matters. Native means separate Swift and Kotlin codebases to build and maintain for iOS and Android. React Native or Flutter uses one codebase for both, which suits most business apps. Webtales recommends based on your requirements.

Webtales builds mobile app backends on Ruby on Rails, hosted on AWS, with REST or GraphQL APIs for the app to call. The backend handles user authentication, push notifications, payments and third-party integrations. The apps themselves use Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android, or React Native or Flutter for a shared codebase, depending on the platform decision made in discovery.

The time to build a mobile app depends on the feature set, the platforms and the backend, so Webtales sets a milestone plan after discovery rather than quoting a standard duration. Development runs in fortnightly sprints, and each sprint ends with a working build you can install on your own phone. You review real progress throughout, not a single release at the end.

Webtales validates an app idea through a discovery and prototyping stage before any code is written. Discovery covers user research, competitor analysis, feature prioritisation and a product roadmap. The design team then builds an interactive prototype and tests it with real users, so you commit to the features customers actually need rather than the longest possible feature list.

Every Webtales app is tested by a dedicated QA team before release, not only by the developers who built it. Testing covers functional, regression and performance checks on the Android and iOS versions your users run, including mid-range Android phones, slow networks and edge cases. Issues found are fixed within the same sprint cycle before the build goes forward.

App store optimisation is search optimisation for the Apple App Store and Google Play, and Webtales includes it in every app launch. The SEO team prepares the store listing, keywords and screenshots so the app can be found in store search. The development team handles submission and responds to Apple and Google review feedback until the app is approved.

Webtales measures an app after launch with analytics and crash monitoring set up before release, tracked against the goals agreed in discovery. Typical measures include sign-ups, active users, retention and crash-free sessions. Findings feed an analytics-led plan for the next development cycle, and retainer clients receive a monthly report in plain language.

App maintenance at Webtales covers updates for new iOS and Android versions, security patches, crash monitoring, analytics and continued feature development. Operating system releases can break older apps, so maintenance keeps the app installable and stable for current users. The code, store listings and data stay in accounts you own, so you can move maintenance elsewhere at any time.