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.
Your app is crashing and nobody is telling you.
You think everything is fine because your customer support inbox in Toronto 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 Toronto 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 Toronto.
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 Toronto 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.
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.
To properly maintain an application in Toronto, you cannot just wait for an angry customer to email you. You need professional health sensors embedded in the code.
The most common scenario in Toronto is code takeover. You had an application built by another developer or agency, and today, you are left alone with an unstable product.
I do not judge the past; I secure the future. Here is the takeover methodology:
The Audit: It is like a doctor examining a patient for the very first time. I comb through the code, verify the architecture, analyze the crash data, and read the store reviews.
The Triage: We do not rewrite everything immediately. We prioritize. Security flaws and major crashes come first. Then performance bottlenecks. Finally, the minor interface glitches.
The Stabilization Sprint (2 to 4 weeks): This is the emergency surgery room. I fix the top 10 most critical issues. I install monitoring probes. I add automated tests to the most fragile parts of your application for your customers in Ontario.
Cruising Altitude: Once stabilized, the app enters a standard monthly rhythm. You finally stop stressing out every time your phone rings because of a complaining customer.
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 Toronto, 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 Toronto 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 long-term survival of an application depends entirely on its ability to handle the specific, heavy usages of its industry in Toronto.
Content delivery optimization is vital. Video lessons and heavy PDFs can cause the app size to bloat over time. I monitor video streaming performance and the rock-solid reliability of offline downloads for students across Ontario. The parental notification system must also remain perfectly synced through every single iOS and Android update.
The app must be an absolute rock during peak rush hours (12-2 PM and 7-9 PM). Active maintenance ensures the total reliability of the order flow under heavy server load. I track GPS API accuracy for delivery drivers, and I maintain the fragile technical bridges between the mobile app and the restaurant's Point of Sale (POS) software. A bug here destroys the dinner service.
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.