Mickael Romaniello
30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.
Mickael Romaniello
30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.
12 years of experience. 15+ apps delivered. One single point of contact, from concept to App Store and Google Play publication.
In short: for your Dublin (1,173,179 residents) project in Leinster, you work directly with me, not a middleman. 12 years of experience, 15+ apps delivered, and a transparent end-to-end process.
You have a mobile app project in Dublin.
And you are asking yourself the big question. iOS or Android?
Let's look at reality.
Android holds a a large global market share.
That is massive.
Out of the 1,173,179 residents in Dublin, the vast majority have an Android smartphone in their pocket.
If your customers use Android, you have no choice. You need to be there.
But careful. Making an Android app is not just ticking a box.
It is an ecosystem with its own rules. Its own design standards.
The most important factor is creating a smooth experience, no matter the phone brand.
Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Google Pixel. Your app must run perfectly everywhere.
That is where I come in.
People often ask me whether to start with iOS or Android for a project in Dublin.
The answer depends on your target audience and your budget.
The key advantage of Android is its massive reach.
Especially in emerging markets or for the general public.
But there is a fundamental difference with Apple.
Apple controls everything. They have about twenty iPhone models in circulation. It is easy to test.
Android is the wild west.
Google reports there are more than 24,000 active Android device models.
Some have tiny screens. Others run on Android versions that are five years old.
This fragmentation makes testing much more complex and expensive.
You have to ensure the app does not crash on a cheap four-year-old phone, while still leveraging the power of the latest Samsung Galaxy.
However, Android is often the best choice to start if you are doing B2B in the Leinster area.
For example, equipping your delivery drivers or field technicians with inexpensive rugged tablets.
In that scenario, Android's open ecosystem is unbeatable.
The key point: the price depends on the technical complexity under the hood, not on the number of pages.
Are you having problems with your current app? Plummeting ratings? Unexplained slowdowns? They click. They quit. They forget.
It's the worst-case scenario. And that's exactly where I step in. Backed by 12 years of experience, I help businesses from Cannes rescue failing iOS and Android projects. I run the diagnosis, we identify the roadblocks, and we fix them to finally offer a smooth experience to your users.
In short: don't let a bad start ruin your idea. Let's correct the course together.
You are launching your project in Dublin.
And you are probably wondering who to work with to build your mobile app.
It is the first major decision you have to make. Some people think that to succeed, you absolutely need a big agency right around the corner. Others believe they should outsource to the cheapest team they can find overseas.
Both options come with serious tradeoffs.
A big agency will assign your project to a junior developer you have never met. An offshore team will deliver code you cannot read, three weeks behind schedule, with zero accountability.
The most important factor in the success of an app is not just the code. It is communication.
When you work with me, you get one dedicated expert with 12 years of experience and over 15 delivered projects. Not an account manager. Not a rotating team. One person who knows your project inside out.
Dublin is an hour behind me and full of companies whose head office is somewhere else, which usually means the app has to fit rules written in another country. Worth naming early: the constraint is rarely technical, it is which jurisdiction's data rules the product has to satisfy.
That question has a habit of arriving late and changing a lot. An app built for Irish users, then extended to a US parent company's customers, may suddenly need different consent flows, different retention rules and a different hosting region. None of those are difficult in themselves. All of them are painful once you have live users, because changing where data lives means migrating it, and changing what you collect means deciding what to do with what you already collected.
Dublin's concentration of large technology employers has a second effect worth being straight about: the local market for developers is competitive and expensive, and a lot of the enquiries I get are from people who have already tried to hire and found the timeline unacceptable. That is a legitimate reason to work with someone outside, and it also sets a fair expectation. I am one person. I can carry a product end to end and I can do it quickly, but I cannot replace a team, and if your project genuinely needs one I will tell you at the start.
The practical side is easy. One hour of difference means our working days are effectively the same, so questions get answered within the hour rather than the day, and a weekly call is enough structure for most builds. English is the working language throughout, which removes the small friction that translation adds even when everyone involved is competent in the other language.
With Invent Better you get an installable build every two weeks, even when it is incomplete. That is the difference between following a project and waiting for one. You have access to the code repository from day one, and every decision is written down rather than remembered. A disagreement surfaces after two weeks, not at final delivery.
Software development is far too often treated as a terrifying black box.
In many traditional projects, you sign a massive specification document, you pay a hefty deposit, and then you just wait. For months, you receive nothing but vague updates. A few reassuring emails. A lot of "trust us, it is coming along great."
And then the day of the final big reveal in Dublin arrives... and your heart sinks. The product looks and feels nothing like what you envisioned. But it is entirely too late, and your budget is completely gone.
The most important factor: when you work with me, that black box simply does not exist. Everything is entirely transparent.
A transparent, iterative process with zero surprises. You see the app grow every single week.
Let's take a concrete example.
A client contacted me to build a home services booking app, specifically targeting the Leinster area.
The initial problem? The app had to target the general public.
And the general public uses Android. From all brands. At all price points.
The most important factor was managing Android's terrible fragmentation.
The app had to be as smooth on a five-year-old cheap Xiaomi as on the latest Samsung Galaxy S.
I rebuilt the interface using Jetpack Compose, Google's new design tool.
The result? Much lighter and more robust code.
We launched the app in Dublin via a Staged Rollout on the Google Play Console.
A large first. We detected a strange crash that only happened on old Oppo phones using Crashlytics.
We fixed it the exact same day. Without the majority of users ever noticing.
Then we opened it to everyone.
The app maintained a 4.8-star rating on the Play Store. And the client was able to expand their service without fearing their servers would melt.
In short: we do not build everything. We build what your users actually need.
Treat an Android budget as a growth line rather than an expense, because that is how it behaves. Someone online will code something for almost nothing, and it will be slow, insecure and impossible to extend. The useful comparison is not one quote against another, but the cost of building it twice against building it once.
When talking budget for an Android app in Dublin, you have to change your perspective.
It is not an expense. It is a growth tool.
You can find someone on the internet who will code you something for almost nothing.
Spoiler: it will be a technical disaster. Termites in a house.
The app will be slow on half of your Ireland customers' phones. Bugs will pile up. You will lose credibility.
In short, redoing a poorly coded app always costs more than doing it right the first time.
With me, you are not buying lines of code. You are buying a solution.
I do not have a reserved domain. I adapt to your market in Dublin.
The key advantage of Android is its technical flexibility.
Not always, which is good news for the budget. An app that only handles its own user's data — a list, a tracker, a calculation — can keep everything on the phone and cost nothing to run. As soon as data has to be shared between people, synced across two devices, or seen by you on your side, a server is needed, and that is a cost that comes back every month.
It depends entirely on what was decided at the start, and it is one of the few choices that cannot be postponed. An app can keep its data on the device, let people work, then sync as soon as the network returns — with nobody pressing anything. It is essential the moment work happens in a warehouse, a basement, or on the road. Added afterwards, it often means rewriting half the app.
We pick a floor, and that choice has a price. Supporting older OS versions means more testing and giving up some capabilities. We look at who your users are: a consumer app and an internal tool deployed on a known fleet do not get the same answer. The floor can be raised later, when usage data shows nobody is left behind it.
It matters more than people think, because a heavy app is the first uninstalled when storage runs short. The weight rarely comes from the code: it is the bundled images and fonts. Loading images from the server rather than shipping them, and serving them at the right size, often halves it. That is invisible work, and it is the work that keeps the app installed.
Technically, sending costs almost nothing. What costs is everything around it: a server to decide what to send to whom and when, and enough care not to become intrusive. It is also the easiest mechanism to waste — a useless notification is the first cause of uninstalls, and an uninstalled app does not come back. Send few and make them useful, or send none.
Yes, with the user's permission, and how you ask matters as much as the feature. A permission demanded on first launch, with no context, is refused most of the time — and once refused it is painful to recover. Asked at the moment the person understands why, it is granted. Apple also requires a written explanation for every permission, and a vague one gets the app rejected.
Through the stores, and not instantly: Apple and Google review every version before it is published, and phones update at the pace of their own settings. So expect a share of your users to stay on an older version for weeks. That is why the server has to keep talking to previous versions, and why we avoid changes that break everything at once.
Often yes, and it all hangs on one thing: does your vendor provide a documented API. If they do, it is ordinary work. If they do not, or bill it per module, or refuse to open it to a third party, no app will work around that cleanly — workarounds exist and break at the vendor's next update. It is a question to put to your supplier before you put yours to me.
A website can be installed on the home screen, work offline and launch full-screen, with no store involved. It is a real third answer, and it is under-recommended because it earns less for whoever recommends it. Its limits: notifications stay restricted on iPhone, sensor access is partial, and you are not present in the stores — which matters if your customers look for you there.
Only if you have an audience in another language — and then it has to be designed in, not added on. Translation is not what costs; room is. German makes labels half again as long and overflows buttons drawn for English. Leaving room from the start costs nothing; redoing the screens afterwards costs days. The legal texts and the store listing count too.
Ready to launch your app in Dublin?
You have the idea. You know your market in Leinster. Now, it is time to take action.
But not just in any random way. The key advantage of working together is absolute clarity. I will not sell you useless features. I will not make empty promises that I cannot keep.
In 30 minutes, you will know exactly where to start. No commitment. No technical jargon.
Book a free call →
30 minutes to start your project
Book a free call →Most of my projects run remotely, and in practice that changes very little. We talk over video whenever you need to, not only at major milestones, and you can reach me with questions at any point during the project — I always answer.
Once we are working together, travelling to meet you on site can absolutely be arranged if your project calls for it. Travel costs are quoted separately, upfront and with no surprises.