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 maintenance 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.
Your app is crashing and nobody is telling you.
You think everything is fine because your customer support inbox in Edinburgh is empty.
Spoiler: that is very bad news.
The reality is that most users who encounter a bug never report it. They do not hunt for your contact form. They delete the application and move on with their lives.
Meanwhile, your competitors in Edinburgh with actively maintained apps are taking your users. The scariest part? You do not even realize it is happening.
Without monitoring tools and active maintenance, you are flying a plane completely blind.
To truly understand maintenance, let's look at exactly what happens when you decide not to invest in it for your app in Edinburgh.
Months 1 to 3: Everything seems perfect. The app is live on the App Store and downloads are coming in. You think you saved money by skipping a maintenance plan. Nobody is complaining.
Months 4 to 6: Android releases a major system update. Suddenly, your account creation screen freezes on newer phones. Users do not email you, but the first 1-star reviews appear. Your rating in Edinburgh drops from 4.8 to 4.1. You are losing future downloads every single day.
Months 7 to 12: A critical security vulnerability is found in an open-source library you use for handling payments. Without a developer to apply the patch, you are fully exposed to a customer data breach. You risk massive GDPR fines. Your crash rate climbs, and the rating drops to a toxic 3.2 stars.
Month 12 and beyond: Apple and Google change their compliance rules. You get an automated warning email. Without a compliance update within 30 days, your app is removed from the stores. Your entire initial development investment equals zero.
Let's think.
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.
Modern maintenance is not just about fixing what is broken. The ultimate goal is to prevent things from breaking before the update reaches your users in Edinburgh.
Here is the technical arsenal I deploy:
What happens when your application completely crashes on a Tuesday morning? With a proper maintenance plan, the emergency response is codified and radically efficient for your business in Edinburgh.
T+0 (The Alert): The monitoring probes detect an abnormal spike in crashes. I receive an immediate notification directly on my phone. You have not even opened your morning emails yet.
T+30min (The Diagnosis): I dive into the code. Is the problem coming from our app? From an external server that went down? From an unexpected iOS update? I isolate the root cause.
T+2h to 24h (The Fix): I write the technical solution. A bug blocking checkout payments is fixed the exact same day. A minor visual glitch will be scheduled for the next business day.
T+24h to 48h (The Deployment): The hotfix update is pushed to the stores. Google usually validates very quickly; Apple takes between 24 hours and a few days depending on review loads.
That morning, Apple pushed a major iOS system update. It is the exact event that unprepared developers fear the most.
For a highly active e-commerce client in Edinburgh, the punishment was immediate: the application's checkout flow broke completely. Not a single purchase could go through. Mobile revenue dropped to zero in a matter of minutes.
Fortunately, we had an active maintenance contract with real-time monitoring in place.
Just two hours after the issue began, Crashlytics sent me a red alert. I was able to identify the precise root cause within minutes: Apple had abruptly deprecated an older form validation API without providing full backward compatibility.
I built the fix, tested the solution thoroughly on the staging environment, and submitted the critical update to Apple, utilizing their expedited review channel for major bugs.
I do not quote maintenance without looking at the app first, because technical debt and traffic differ in every case. So I work in levels. The essential level covers monitoring, critical bug fixes, and keeping the app compatible with each new iOS and Android release. Higher levels add feature work on a predictable monthly basis.
I do not provide cookie-cutter quotes without seeing the patient first. Every app in Edinburgh is unique, has different technical debt, and handles different traffic volumes. But here is how I structure my service levels.
The Essential level: This is life support. I provide 24/7 monitoring, fix critical blocking bugs, and ensure ongoing compatibility with new iOS and Android versions. Your app stays alive, functional, and compliant with store rules. It is your basic insurance policy.
The stakes regarding uptime and precision vary wildly from one market to another. Here is how I secure critical applications for these specific sectors in Edinburgh.
Media loading speed is everything. An app becomes sluggish quickly if poorly maintained. I ensure gallery fluidity, the pinpoint accuracy of property geolocation across the Scotland map, and the absolute stability of API integrations with your existing real estate CRM. A listing that fails to load is a lost commission.
Security is the core of the contract. Frequent iOS and Android updates regularly change how Face ID and fingerprint sensors operate. I maintain these biometric authentication systems with absolute rigor. We also ensure continuous compliance with evolving banking regulations (KYC, PSD2) so the app is never blocked by authorities.
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.