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: mobile 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.
524,930 people live in Edinburgh.
And if you look around you on the streets, in the coffee shops, or on public transit across Scotland, you will notice a very simple fact. Everyone is glued to their smartphone.
This is no longer just a trend. It is the absolute standard of our United Kingdom.
Today, most global web traffic comes from mobile devices. And that number is only going up. Yet, many businesses in Edinburgh continue to operate with basic websites, often slow and poorly adapted to small screens.
Spoiler: if loading exceeds three seconds, the user is gone. They click. They quit. They forget. 📱
The vocabulary hides a simple reality. Native means an app written with Apple's and Google's own tools. Hybrid means one codebase adapted to both. The back-end is the server, and the API is how the app talks to it. What matters to you is not the word but the consequence: cost, speed, and what you will be able to change later.
Three ways to build, three consequences:
My job is to point you to the one that fits your ambitions in Edinburgh, without charging you for a Ferrari when a reliable city car will do.
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.
In Edinburgh, many developers love to show off long lists of complicated tools. They talk about languages, servers, and databases.
But a programming language is just a paintbrush. What truly matters is how you use it to paint.
Spoiler: a beautiful mobile app without a solid technical architecture is like a sports car without brakes. It is going to crash straight into a wall very fast. 🏎️
The most important factor in my work is reliability. Here is how I build applications that are made to last across Scotland.
If you want your project to succeed in Edinburgh, you have to accept a very counter-intuitive reality: we never build everything you initially imagined.
We always, without exception, start with a Minimum Viable Product. The famous MVP.
What exactly is an MVP?
It is the smallest, simplest, and most direct version of your idea. It is the very essence of your solution. Why do this for your business in Scotland? Because the statistics are brutal. Currently, most app features are absolutely never used by the public.
Why spend your hard-earned budget developing ghost options?
Imagine you want to open a restaurant in Edinburgh. Are you going to borrow millions to build a two-hundred-seat palace with a forty-page menu without knowing if people actually like your cooking? No.
You open a cozy thirty-seat bistro. You cook five dishes to absolute perfection. You see if the customers across your United Kingdom walk through the door. If they love it, then you expand.
Sometimes, the worst enemy of a project is a deal that seems too good to be true. The following case comes up often enough to be worth describing: a tech company in total panic.
They had inherited a mobile app developed by a very cheap offshore team. The result? The application was crashing several times a day.
The store rating had plummeted. Users were leaving disastrous one-star reviews on a daily basis. The CEO was ready to throw the entire thing in the trash.
This is a critical situation, because we know that most users read reviews before downloading an application. The company's reputation was collapsing.
The technical challenge was heavy. The codebase was pure spaghetti code. There was no documentation, no automated testing, and no monitoring tools. Fixing a simple color bug would create three new crashes somewhere else.
There is no single price for a mobile app. What sets the amount is the scope: the number of screens, whether it needs a server and user accounts, and whether it targets one platform or two. A scoping call gives a real range.
Three factors set the budget, plus two fixed costs:
The real estate market in Edinburgh is fiercely competitive. If a potential buyer misses a great deal because your mobile site was lagging, they will simply go to your competitor.
A great real estate app is the tool that alerts the buyer before anyone else. We set up geolocated push alerts the very second a new property matches their criteria in Scotland.
We add virtual tours using 360-degree photos that are perfectly fluid, with zero endless loading screens. We even integrate real-time mortgage calculators directly linked to your CRM. The key point: we put the entire real estate agency right in the client's pocket.
In the banking world, security comes way before design. But one does not prevent the other.
Building a financial app for United Kingdom means respecting heavy regulations like PSD2 in Europe. It means integrating end-to-end encryption to protect every single transaction. It is the digital equivalent of building an armored cash transport vehicle.
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.