Mickael Romaniello
30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.
Mickael Romaniello
30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.
One single point of contact, from concept to publication. 12 years of experience. 15+ apps delivered.
In short: I build iOS and Android apps for clients in Toronto (2,794,356 residents) and across Ontario. One single point of contact, 12 years of experience, delivery from concept to publication in 8 to 16 weeks.
Look around you on the streets of Toronto.
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 Canada 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 Toronto.
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 Ontario area.
For example, equipping your delivery drivers or field technicians with inexpensive rugged tablets.
In that scenario, Android's open ecosystem is unbeatable.
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 Toronto.
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.
Toronto is the one Canadian market where you will be compared against agencies with account managers before anyone looks at the work. That changes the conversation: the question stops being whether it can be built and becomes who you will actually be talking to. With me it is the person writing the code, which on a first product is worth several weeks.
The reason it is worth weeks is loss of signal. In an agency, what you say in a meeting is restated by an account manager, passed to a technical lead, and cut into tickets for developers who have never heard you speak. Each step loses a little intent. When you explain why a screen has to behave a certain way, the person who will write it is listening, and can tell you in the same breath that it will cost three extra days or that it will fight the platform.
The honest limit is the other side of that. One person is not a team of thirty. I will not take a project that needs four developers in parallel to hit a fixed date, I do not do interface design at the level of a specialist studio, and if the product has to launch on iOS, Android, web and a connected TV at once, you need something other than me. I say that in the first conversation rather than the third month.
Practically, Toronto is six hours behind me, so your morning is my afternoon and we get about three hours of real overlap a day. That is enough to answer a blocking question the same day and to hold a weekly call, and it is not enough for a project that needs continuous discussion. Ontario also has its own privacy rules, and if your users include health information the requirements tighten considerably — worth settling at the start, because it determines where the data is allowed to live.
With Invent Better, the person who understands your project is the person who writes it. No sales representative, no account manager in between, no handover between three teams. You talk to the developer from the first call through to launch. On a first product, where most of the decisions are made in the first six weeks, that proximity is worth weeks of calendar time.
I do not use obscure technologies that will be abandoned in two years.
I use the industry standard, dictated by developer.android.com.
The key point is the longevity of your code.
Here is what I use under the hood of your app in Toronto:
I work with clients everywhere, from France to Canada.
It does not matter if you are based in Toronto or elsewhere, the method is the same.
The key advantage is asynchronous and transparent communication.
No need for three-hour meetings that lead nowhere.
We use tools like Slack, Trello, or Jira. You see exactly where I am.
Every week, you receive an update on your Android phone.
You test the new feature directly from your office in Toronto.
If there is weird behavior on a specific Samsung model, you report it to me and I fix it.
I manage the entire Google Play Console.
Signing certificates, store descriptions, translation management, store listings.
You do not have to dive into this administrative complexity. You stay focused on your business. I handle the technical side.
It is a partnership. I am here to advise you, not just execute.
If I have to say no to a feature because it will slow down the project, I will tell you. That is my role as an expert.
Sometimes, the Android app is not meant for the general public.
I worked for a technical intervention company whose teams travel all over the Ontario area.
Their technicians needed a tool to record field data. Often in basements in Toronto, 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.
Every domain has its problems. Android often has the appropriate technical answer for your business in Toronto.
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 Toronto 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 Ontario.
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.
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.