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 dedicated point of contact.
In short: android app development for Edinburgh (524,930 residents) means a project driven by a senior expert — not an agency. Direct communication, ownership of the code, published on App Store and Google Play within weeks.
Look around you on the streets of Edinburgh.
What do you see in people's hands?
Samsung, Xiaomi, Google Pixel phones.
Android is everywhere. It is the most used operating system in the world.
Your future clients spend an average of 4.8 hours per day on their phones.
The key point is that your business needs to be where the attention is.
In their pocket.
But launching an app on the Play Store is not a walk in the park.
Many companies in United Kingdom think having a good idea is enough.
Spoiler: a good idea with bad execution is worthless.
He clicks. He leaves. He forgets.
That is what happens if the app is slow, crashes, or ignores Android guidelines.
People often ask me whether to start with iOS or Android for a project in Edinburgh.
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 Scotland area.
For example, equipping your delivery drivers or field technicians with inexpensive rugged tablets.
In that scenario, Android's open ecosystem is unbeatable.
My primary role is to protect your budget. Did you know that most an app's features are never used?
From Cannes, I help my clients avoid this massive waste. With 12 years of experience on iOS and Android, I know exactly where the money should go. We cut the fluff to focus on what brings actual value to your audience.
The key advantage: an app that launches fast, tests the market, and costs the right price. It's a matter of logic. Let's build the essentials first.
Edinburgh has a strong finance and public-sector presence, and both mean a review process before anything ships. Knowing that at the start changes the hosting decision, the way data is stored, and the timeline. Finding out at launch costs a quarter.
The questions a review asks are predictable, which is the good news. Where is the data physically held, who can reach it, is it encrypted in transit and at rest, how is access removed when someone leaves, and what happens if a device is lost. None of that is hard to satisfy when the app was designed with those answers in mind. All of it is expensive when the app was built first and audited afterwards, because the fixes touch the foundations rather than the surface.
A review process also changes how a project should be paced. If sign-off takes weeks and involves several people, a build delivered as one large release at the end accumulates misunderstandings invisibly until the day it all surfaces. Shipping something installable every two or three weeks turns that risk into a series of small corrections, each cheap because the work is still fresh in everyone's mind — including mine.
Edinburgh's other characteristic is a strong university and research presence, which produces a distinct kind of project: the technical core is already solved, sometimes impressively, and what is missing is everything around it. On those, the most useful thing I can do is usually not to build the full application but to build the three screens that prove the idea holds up in front of twenty real people. That teaches more in a month than half a year of development, and it costs a fraction of it.
You are launching your project in Edinburgh.
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.
Invent Better starts by removing, not adding. An app that does one thing properly ships in two months; one that does five things halfway never ships at all. Given that a large share of features planned in advance are never actually used, the useful question is not whether a feature would be nice, but whether anyone still uses the app without it.
An app that crashes is a user lost forever.
It is a question of logic. The user does not have time to suffer through your bugs.
In fact, most users uninstall an app following a technical problem.
The most important factor in my process is technical quality.
How do we ensure the app will hold up on the thousands of different Android phones in Edinburgh?
You have a massive idea to disrupt your market in Edinburgh.
That is great. Now, we are going to cut that idea right down.
Why?
Because most app features are never used.
In short, we are going to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
We will focus on the single feature that truly brings value to the user in United Kingdom.
We build this V1 quickly.
Then, we send it to the 20 testers mandated by Google Play rules for new accounts.
Those 14 days of mandatory testing are not a constraint. They are an opportunity.
It is a chance to see how the app behaves in real conditions on the streets of Edinburgh.
To see where people click. Where they get stuck.
We adjust, we fix the silent bugs.
Then we publish.
Once on the market, your real users will dictate the next steps of the project.
If they scream for a new feature, we add it. Otherwise, we save your budget.
It is a question of financial and product logic.
Sometimes, the Android app is not meant for the general public.
I worked for a technical intervention company whose teams travel all over the Scotland area.
Their technicians needed a tool to record field data. Often in basements in Edinburgh, where there is no cellular network.
The key advantage of Android here is hardware choice.
Instead of buying overpriced iPads, the company bought low-cost rugged Android tablets. Perfect for construction sites.
The technical challenge was making it work entirely offline.
I used Room DB, Android's local database.
The technician fills out the report, takes photos, and the app stores everything locally.
As soon as the tablet catches a network signal again, the app silently syncs the data with the company server in the background.
Furthermore, we used "Kiosk Mode".
The tablet is locked down. The technician can only launch the company app. Impossible to go on YouTube or change settings.
No need to go through the tedious public Google Play Store validation. The app is distributed privately, directly to the company fleet.
Maximum efficiency.
An Android app generally costs noticeably less than its iOS equivalent. The reason is practical rather than technical: Google's development tools are free and more flexible, and the Play developer account is a one-off fee rather than an annual one. The scope of your app still sets the figure — the platform only shifts it at the margin.
Certain industries have everything to gain by favoring a native Android strategy in Edinburgh.
It is the question nobody asks a freelancer and the one worth asking first. My answer is three concrete things: the code sits in a repository in your name from day one, decisions are written down rather than kept in my head, and the store accounts are yours. Another developer can pick it up without me. That is not a promise, it is an arrangement — and you can check it in the first week.
You do, entirely, and from the start rather than at the end. The repository is opened in your name, you have access during development, and there is nothing to claim at delivery. The same goes for the designs and the store accounts. The only thing worth discussing is if you want to reuse a component I wrote elsewhere — I say so before using it, not after.
We fix it and resubmit, and that is part of the project. A rejection is not a rare accident: Apple checks dozens of points, and the common reasons are predictable — a test account that does not work, a permission requested with no explanation, an advertised feature that is not there yet. I deal with those before submitting, which guarantees nothing but avoids most of it. You never have to handle the exchange with the reviewer.
Yes, and you should know that before building on one. Apple and Google can remove an app that breaks their rules, and they change those rules regularly. Abrupt removals mostly hit apps that collect data without saying so, copy a brand, or have not been updated in a long time. It is also why a web presence stays useful alongside: nobody can take that one away from you.
It keeps running, and you keep everything needed to keep it alive: the code, the accesses, the signing keys, the documentation. I do a written handover rather than a file transfer — what was built, why, and where the traps are. It is half a day of work that saves whoever comes next several weeks of reverse engineering, and I would rather we parted that way.
Before any quote, there is a list to gather: the code repository, the App Store Connect and Google Play accounts — in your name, not the provider's — the Android signing key, and access to the hosting and database. The signing key is the critical piece: without it, the app can no longer be updated, it has to be republished under a new identifier, and you start again from zero installs.
Wherever you decide, and it is a decision to take early because it is expensive to undo. For most projects a European host is enough and keeps GDPR simple. For health data the hosting has to be certified, which narrows the choice and weighs on the budget — better learned on the first call than on launch day. In every case, the accounts are in your name.
I know before you see the review. A crash reporting tool sends the error with the device, the OS version and the exact place in the code — with no personal data. Without it, you discover bugs through store reviews, which is to say too late and in public. It is one of the few things I set up on every project, however small, because it costs almost nothing and changes everything.
On the code side, yes: every released version is tagged and we can return to the exact state of a delivery. On the store side it is more nuanced — Google lets you halt a rollout, Apple expects a fix to be published. The real protection is upstream: a staged rollout on Android, a real testing phase, and updates small enough that you know what broke.
It works, then it degrades slowly, and one day it stops launching. iOS ships a major version every September, Android every year, and each one breaks something. An app left alone for eighteen months usually costs more to bring back than the maintenance would have. You can stop — it is your call and I will not bill you a subscription for nothing — but decide it knowingly.
Ready to launch your app in Edinburgh?
You have the idea. You know your market in Scotland. 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'll know where to start. No commitment.
Book a free call →30 minutes to start
Book →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.