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 publication.
In short: for your Sydney (5,312,163 residents) project in New South Wales, 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 Sydney.
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 5,312,163 residents in Sydney, 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.
Building an app is not just writing lines of code in a basement.
It is a complete lifecycle.
We start with design. We do not draw randomly. We apply Android guidelines so the user in Sydney feels right at home.
Then comes the code. We connect the app to your servers. We handle offline modes.
But the biggest part of the work comes after. Testing and publishing.
In short, publishing on the Google Play Store has become a real obstacle course.
Google has toughened its rules to clean up its store.
Today, for a new developer account, Google requires you to test the app with 20 different testers for 14 consecutive days.
No testers? No publication.
Then, you have to fill out the tedious data safety form.
Explaining exactly what you do with the user's location, photos, or contacts.
It is a question of trust.
All of this happens in the Google Play Console. It is the dashboard for your application.
I manage all this administrative and technical complexity for you. So your project launches smoothly in Sydney.
Over 15 applications delivered. Startups that found their market fit. SMBs that streamlined their workflow.
In 12 years, I've seen what works and what crashes on iOS and Android. From Cannes, I won't promise you the moon. I promise you results. My job is to build solid tools that your users will actually adopt.
The key advantage is the real-world impact of your application. Shall we look together at how to grow your project in a smart and profitable way?
You are launching your project in Sydney.
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.
Sydney is eight to ten hours ahead of me depending on which side of the daylight-saving switch we are on — and since Australia and Europe change clocks in opposite directions, the gap moves twice a year. Either way our working days barely touch. That suits a build with clear milestones and badly suits one that needs daily conversation. I will say which of the two your project is before we start rather than after, because the wrong answer wastes a month for both of us.
When it does suit, it works well. You finish your day and send comments; I pick them up as my day starts and work while you sleep; there is a new version waiting when you sit down. The requirement is that each week has a deliverable you can actually review on your own device, not a demonstration you have to watch me give. If a project cannot be broken into pieces like that, the timezone will fight it every week.
There is a practical Australian point that catches people from Europe: the App Store and Play Store treat Australia as its own storefront, with its own pricing, its own tax handling and its own review of anything region-specific. If you plan to sell beyond Australia, deciding that early matters, because pricing tiers and currency handling are easier to design in than to add. Storing amounts with an explicit currency instead of assuming one costs nothing at the start.
The last thing is scheduling the few conversations that do need to be live. Late afternoon for you is early morning for me, or the reverse, and both are workable if fixed in advance rather than arranged ad hoc each time. One reliable weekly slot beats four improvised attempts, and it removes the quiet drift that kills long-distance projects — the week where nobody quite got around to asking the question that was blocking everything.
An app can be built fast and cheap. What costs money is what comes next: code written without structure becomes impossible to change, and the smallest new feature means starting over. Invent Better charges for the work that makes a second version possible — tests, a readable architecture, and code another developer can pick up.
It is entirely possible to build a mobile application extremely fast and for very little money.
All you have to do is ignore every best practice, copy and paste random blocks of code from the internet, and cross your fingers hoping it holds together. On the day of your big presentation in Sydney, the app will probably look fine.
But that thin layer of paint will crack almost immediately.
The second you get more than ten users trying to log in at the same time, the system will crawl to a halt. On mobile devices, user patience is brutally short. And slowness is always perceived as a broken product.
You have a massive idea to disrupt your market in Sydney.
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 Australia.
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 Sydney.
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.
Let's take a concrete example.
A client contacted me to build a home services booking app, specifically targeting the New South Wales 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 Sydney 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.
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.
I do not have a reserved domain. I adapt to your market in Sydney.
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.
While you hesitate, your competitors in Sydney are moving forward.
The mobile world moves fast. Very fast. Today, most global web traffic comes from mobile devices. If you keep pushing back the creation of your app, someone else will happily take your spot in New South Wales.
But be careful, do not confuse speed with haste. Launching an unstable application is the worst possible strategy.
In short: you have to act fast, but above all, you have to do it right. ⏳
In 30 minutes, you will know exactly where to start. No commitment. No technical jargon.
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.