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: android 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.
You have a mobile app project in Edinburgh.
And you are asking yourself the big question. iOS or Android?
Let's look at reality.
Android holds a a large global market share.
That is massive.
Out of the 524,930 residents in Edinburgh, the vast majority have an Android smartphone in their pocket.
If your customers use Android, you have no choice. You need to be there.
But careful. Making an Android app is not just ticking a box.
It is an ecosystem with its own rules. Its own design standards.
The most important factor is creating a smooth experience, no matter the phone brand.
Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Google Pixel. Your app must run perfectly everywhere.
That is where I come in.
Many people think an app is just a website put inside a box.
That is wrong.
Developing for Android means using Google's native tools to create a flawless experience.
Today, Google's recommended programming language is Kotlin. It replaced Java.
It is a modern, fast, and safe language.
For the interface, we use Jetpack Compose. And we follow the strict visual rules dictated by Google's Material Design.
The most important factor is understanding that the Android world is an open ecosystem.
Unlike Apple's walled garden, Android offers immense freedom.
You have access to endless hardware options. You can deeply customize the system behaviors.
You can even distribute your app outside the official Google store if needed.
This is perfect for internal enterprise tools in Edinburgh.
But this freedom comes at a price.
There are over 24,000 active Android device models worldwide.
Small screens, large screens, foldable phones.
The app must adapt to every single one of them, without ever breaking the user experience.
That is the real job of an Android developer. Turning this technical chaos into a simple, smooth interface for your end user in United Kingdom.
No agency. No sales rep. No project manager standing between us.
When you work with me, you talk directly to the person building your app. For 12 years, I have managed the creation of iOS and Android applications from A to Z from my office in Cannes. That means faster responses, less talk, and zero bad surprises on the invoice.
The key point: we save an incredible amount of time. I advise you, I design, and I develop with total transparency. It really is that simple.
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.
The economy in Edinburgh is evolving fast. Very fast.
Local businesses can no longer settle for a basic, aging website. Digital transformation is happening everywhere across Scotland. And mobile devices have become the absolute center of this shift. 🚀
In short: your clients live with their phones in their hands.
It is an unavoidable reality that most global web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your business in Edinburgh is not easily accessible on their home screen, it is practically invisible to a massive chunk of your audience.
I help companies build this vital digital presence. Governments across United Kingdom are pushing small and medium businesses to adapt to these new consumer habits, and funding digital growth.
The observation is the same everywhere. The residents of Edinburgh want to order, book, or find information with a single tap, whether they are on their couch or commuting.
With Invent Better you get an installable build every two weeks, even when it is incomplete. That is the difference between following a project and waiting for one. You have access to the code repository from day one, and every decision is written down rather than remembered. A disagreement surfaces after two weeks, not at final delivery.
Software development is far too often treated as a terrifying black box.
In many traditional projects, you sign a massive specification document, you pay a hefty deposit, and then you just wait. For months, you receive nothing but vague updates. A few reassuring emails. A lot of "trust us, it is coming along great."
And then the day of the final big reveal in Edinburgh arrives... and your heart sinks. The product looks and feels nothing like what you envisioned. But it is entirely too late, and your budget is completely gone.
The most important factor: when you work with me, that black box simply does not exist. Everything is entirely transparent.
I work with clients everywhere, from France to Canada.
It does not matter if you are based in Edinburgh 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 Edinburgh.
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.
Recently, I helped an e-commerce company that wanted to boost its local sales in Edinburgh.
Their website worked fine. But on mobile, it was a disaster.
Most users abandon a journey if loading exceeds 3 seconds.
They needed a native Android app to build loyalty among their customer base in the Scotland area.
In short, the goal was simple: make buying ultra-fast.
We developed the app in Kotlin.
For checkout, we integrated Google Pay directly and leveraged the NFC chip of Android phones to scan loyalty cards in-store.
That is the real power of a native app. Using the phone's hardware.
During the launch, we were very cautious.
Most users who encounter a bug never report it. They delete the app silently.
So, I set up strict alerts on Crashlytics.
On the very first day in Edinburgh, we spotted a checkout bug on a specific version of Android 11.
Immediate fix. Update pushed to the store.
Zero lost sales. The app now generates one-third of the company's total revenue.
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.
I do not have a reserved domain. I adapt to your market in Edinburgh.
The key advantage of Android is its technical flexibility.
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 a large share 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 Edinburgh 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 Scotland.
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'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.