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 Vancouver (662,248 residents) and across British Columbia. One single point of contact, 12 years of experience, delivery from concept to publication in 8 to 16 weeks.
You have an app idea.
If your target audience in Vancouver expects premium quality, your choice of platform matters.
The most important factor is knowing where the value is.
iOS users spend 2x more in-app than Android users.
The Apple ecosystem attracts a customer base that is used to paying for quality, subscriptions, and premium services.
If you want to build an iPhone app in Vancouver that generates solid revenue, you need to target the App Store.
But be careful. You do not just walk into Apple's store easily.
You have to respect their rules. Their design standards. Their technical requirements.
I am a freelance iOS developer.
My job is not just writing lines of code.
iOS development is not just coding for a different phone.
It is adopting an entire philosophy.
Apple's philosophy.
Apple controls everything. The hardware (iPhone, iPad) and the software (iOS).
The key point is that this strict control is a massive strength for us.
Unlike Android, where we have to test on thousands of different screens, the iOS universe is much more constrained.
This allows us to achieve an exceptional level of polish for every screen of your application in Vancouver.
To code, we use the official languages: Swift and SwiftUI.
SwiftUI is Apple's modern standard. It is clean, fast, and built to create smooth interfaces.
But code is not everything.
A good iOS app must respect Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
This is the design bible at Apple.
It dictates the size of buttons, how menus should open, and the margins to respect.
Why does this matter?
Because iOS users spend 2x more in-app than Android users.
They pay more, but they demand a perfect experience.
If your app does not look like an Apple app, the user will feel it immediately.
They will be confused. They click. They quit. They forget.
My job as an iOS developer is to melt your idea into this premium mold.
We create a product that feels native, natural, and reassuring for your target audience in Vancouver.
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.
The economy in Vancouver is evolving fast. Very fast.
Local businesses can no longer settle for a basic, aging website. Digital transformation is happening everywhere across British Columbia. 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 Vancouver 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 Canada 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 Vancouver want to order, book, or find information with a single tap, whether they are on their couch or commuting.
Vancouver runs on Pacific time, which is nine hours behind me. That sounds like a problem and is usually the opposite: you send feedback at the end of your day, I work while you sleep, and there is a new build waiting when you open your laptop. It only breaks down if a project needs live conversation every day, which most do not.
Making that rhythm work is a matter of discipline rather than luck. It needs written decisions instead of remembered ones, a build you can install every week rather than a demo you watch me give, and a habit of asking questions in batches rather than one at a time. Done properly, the effective pace is a full review cycle every day, which is faster than most co-located projects manage — the gap stops being dead time and becomes the time the work happens in.
Vancouver's mix of tech, film and outdoor industries produces a recognisable split in the work. Consumer products where the design bar is high and the competition is one tap away, and field tools for people working somewhere without reliable signal. Those pull in opposite directions: the first spends its budget on polish, the second on resilience. Deciding which one you are building, out loud and at the start, prevents the most common failure — a product that is neither beautiful enough nor robust enough because the effort was split down the middle.
There is a Canadian point worth settling early too. Depending on your users and your sector, data residency may not be a preference but a requirement, and British Columbia has historically been strict about where public-sector information is stored. Choosing a hosting region on day one costs nothing. Moving a live database between countries after launch is possible, tedious and entirely avoidable.
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 Vancouver 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.
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 Vancouver.
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 Vancouver 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.
B2B does not always have to be just web-based.
An industrial company was looking for a solution to equip its sales reps in the field.
They all had iPads provided by the company.
The key point: they needed a robust app capable of working without an internet connection in warehouses.
Forget laggy hybrid web solutions.
We went with a large native iOS development.
Using Core Data allowed us to store the entire product catalog locally on the iPad.
The interface was tailor-made for the large screen, respecting Apple's strict ergonomic standards.
Deployment was done privately, bypassing the public App Store, using Apple's enterprise tools.
But the quality requirement remained the same.
We used TestFlight to have the pilot sales reps validate each step.
The app never crashes, even during massive data synchronizations.
Sales reps save time. The company increases its sales.
If your sales force in Vancouver is equipped with Apple hardware, a native app is the best possible investment.
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 Vancouver 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.
The choice of platform also depends on your industry.
The key advantage of iOS is that it offers powerful native tools for certain sectors.
This is the king domain on iPhone.
With HealthKit, the app can read steps, heart rate, or sleep recorded by the Apple Watch.
This is a level of integration impossible to replicate elsewhere.
But beware, nearly one submission in four is rejected and Apple is uncompromising on health data management.
If you sell high-end goods in Vancouver, the iPhone is essential.
Apple Pay allows the user to pay with a glance using Face ID.
Zero forms to fill out.
They click, they pay.
Not to mention integration with Apple Wallet for loyalty cards.
The main argument here is security.
The Apple ecosystem is closed. There are fewer viruses and gaping flaws than on other open systems.
For an app that handles money in Vancouver, the "Available on the App Store" badge immediately reassures the client.
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 Vancouver 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 British Columbia.
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.