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.
You want to launch your app.
Spoiler: Apple is not waiting for you.
Apple processes 100,000+ app submissions per week.
And behind this review process, there are real humans clicking, testing, and judging your work.
The key advantage of this strict process is credibility.
When your application is live on the App Store, it is a massive quality guarantee for your clients in Toronto.
It proves that you respect privacy, that your interface is clean, and that the experience is smooth.
But nearly one submission in four is rejected.
A hidden crash. A misplaced icon. A button that does nothing.
The iPhone user is unforgiving. They click. They quit. They forget.
And Apple is even stricter.
Launching an app costs money and time.
Should you launch on iOS and Android at the same time? Or start with iOS?
If you have a tight budget in Toronto, starting with iOS is often the best choice.
The most important factor is profitability.
iOS users spend 2x more in-app than Android users.
They are more likely to pay for subscriptions, premium services, and in-app purchases.
By developing for iPhone first, we validate your business model faster.
Furthermore, the hardware ecosystem is controlled.
There are only a handful of recent iPhone models.
This significantly reduces development and testing time compared to Android and its thousands of models.
We can focus on what matters: value for the user.
A clear interface, optimal performance, zero bugs.
Once the iOS app is a hit in Toronto and revenue is flowing, we use that budget to confidently fund the Android version.
Spoiler: this is the strategy Instagram and Clubhouse followed in their early days.
iOS development is about designing the perfect product for the most demanding clientele, before adapting it for the rest of the world.
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.
You do not just hack together an iOS app.
To provide a smooth experience for your users in Toronto, you must use the right tools.
In short, here is what happens under the hood.
I develop primarily in Swift.
It is the modern language created by Apple to replace the old Objective-C.
It is fast, secure, and prevents many crashes.
To build your screens, I use SwiftUI.
This is the future of design at Apple.
It allows us to create animated and responsive interfaces that adapt perfectly to all iPhone and iPad sizes.
For storing the data of your users in Toronto, I integrate Core Data or CloudKit.
CloudKit is Apple's vault in the cloud.
Publishing an app with Apple requires anticipating their strict rules.
Spoiler: we do not discover the constraints at the end of the project.
The key point is to prepare the groundwork from the start.
First, the design.
We validate together that your idea respects Apple's guidelines for your target audience in Toronto.
Then, the administrative steps.
You need an Apple Developer account. And a DUNS number to open it under your company name.
While the paperwork processes, I develop.
This is the intensive coding phase in Swift and SwiftUI.
Very quickly, we move onto TestFlight.
This is Apple's app that allows you to install test versions on your own phone.
We can even invite your first testers in Toronto to gather their feedback before release.
Next comes the App Store Connect stage.
This is the dashboard where we configure your App Store listing.
We must fill out the privacy labels (what the app tracks or not) with surgical precision.
Finally, the submission.
Know that nearly one submission in four is rejected.
If this happens, do not panic.
We analyze the Apple reviewer's feedback, fix the blocking issue, and resubmit.
We move forward step by step until the official publication.
Take a common case: a fitness app sold on subscription.
Their business model relied entirely on converting free users into paying ones.
In short, the Apple ecosystem was the perfect target.
Why? Because iOS users spend 2x more in-app than Android users.
We built the application around a seamless integration of Apple Pay and StoreKit.
If the payment screen looks scary, the user leaves.
They click. They quit. They forget.
We made subscribing as simple as a double-click on the iPhone's side button with Face ID.
However, Apple scrutinizes subscriptions closely during review.
Apple processes 100,000+ app submissions per week and mercilessly rejects apps with unclear pricing terms.
I designed the paywall screens in strict compliance with App Store rules to avoid any rejection.
The launch was an immediate success.
The conversion rate exceeded expectations, proving that in Toronto as elsewhere, a well-designed iOS app is a highly profitable machine.
A native iOS app generally costs noticeably more than a web or hybrid equivalent. The reason is Apple's standards: its design rules demand care on every screen, button and animation, and App Store review rejects what does not meet them. That extra cost mostly buys a smaller chance of being rejected.
This is the question everyone in Toronto asks.
Let's be clear: a native iOS application generally costs noticeably more than a web or hybrid app.
Why?
The most important factor is Apple's high standards.
Apple's design rules require special care for every screen, every button, every animation.
We cannot cut corners.
Then, there is the preparation for the Store.
nearly one submission in four is rejected.
To avoid this, I spend time ensuring the code is perfect, privacy policies are clear, and all crashes are resolved on TestFlight before publishing.
This preparation and quality time comes at a cost.
Excellence requires work.
There are also Apple's fixed fees.
Certain business models naturally align with the Apple universe.
In short, here is why these sectors prioritize the iPhone.
A clientele traveling with a significant budget often owns an iPhone.
The native iOS interface allows for a smooth booking experience, rich notifications with images, and ultra-precise geolocation.
Apple processes 100,000+ app submissions per week, and smooth travel apps are always highlighted.
The continuity between the Mac, iPad, and iPhone is Apple's great strength.
If you create a productivity tool for businesses in Toronto, the iOS app is the gateway.
Executives run their companies from their iPhones.
Ordering a car, a meal, a cleaning service.
Apple Pay integration reduces payment friction to zero.
The user does not type their credit card. They validate with Face ID, and the service is ordered.
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.