Mickael Romaniello, the developer who builds the apps Mickael Romaniello 30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.

Mobile App Development in London

12 years of experience. 15+ apps delivered. One dedicated point of contact.

📱 iOS & Android🚀 12 years🇫🇷 France
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In short: I build iOS and Android apps for clients in London (8,982,000 residents) and across England. One single point of contact, 12 years of experience, delivery from concept to publication in 8 to 16 weeks.

Mickael
Mickael Romaniello
Mobile Product Engineer — Bordeaux, France

Some of my clients have been working with me for years. Why? Because I don't vanish into thin air once the iOS or Android app is published.

Based in Bordeaux, I support my clients over the long haul. During my 12-year career, I've learned that launching an app is just the beginning of the story. You have to improve it, maintain it, and listen to the users.

The most important factor is this rigorous follow-up. I am here to stand by you for the long term, like a true partner. It's a matter of trust.

12+years exp.
15+projects
5industries
4.8★ rating

You are based in London and you have a mobile app idea.

It is the classic scenario. Enthusiasm is at its peak. You are already picturing your logo on everyone's home screen across England.

The journey between an idea on a napkin and a published app on the stores is long. Very long.

Spoiler: the vast majority of app projects never reach profitability. Not because the initial idea was bad, but because the execution was a mess.

What is mobile app development?

How do we actually build an application in London? It is not just a developer locked in a basement typing random code. It is an industrial, creative, and highly rigorous process.

If you want your project to survive in England, you must follow four major manufacturing steps.

Here is how it really happens.

The first step is concept validation. What precise problem does your application solve? For whom? You must be able to answer in a single sentence. If it is too vague, that is a bad sign. Spoiler: trying to build a Swiss Army knife is a fatal mistake. Knowing that 80% of app features are never actually used (Pendo, 2025), we are going to prune your idea to keep only the pure value.

The second step is technical architecture and design. Before building a house in London, you draw blueprints. It is exactly the same here. We choose the right engine for your app, whether that is native code like Swift or Kotlin, or hybrid tech like Flutter. We design the screens following strict ergonomic rules, taking inspiration from standards like Google's Material Design. We build solid foundations before we start painting the walls.

Working with London

London is one hour behind me, which in practice means we work the same day — a question at ten is answered by eleven. It is the closest thing to working with someone in the same office that remote work allows, and it is why most of my English-language projects have been British ones.

That overlap is worth more than it sounds. On a project spread across a real timezone gap, a single misunderstanding costs a day: you ask, you wait, you get an answer that reveals a second question, you wait again. With London, the same exchange happens over a coffee break. Over a three-month build, that difference is not a convenience, it is several weeks of calendar time that never get lost to waiting.

London projects tend to arrive further along than most. People have usually done market research, sometimes have a designer already engaged, and often have a clear view of who the app is for. That makes my job narrower and more useful: not deciding what to build, but saying honestly what each part costs, which pieces can wait, and where the design as drawn will fight the platform rather than work with it.

The one thing worth settling early on any UK project is where the data lives and which rules apply to it. Since the UK left the EU it maintains its own data protection regime alongside GDPR, and if your users are spread across both, you are working under both. I am not your lawyer and will not pretend to be, but the practical consequences land in the architecture — where the database sits, what gets logged, how long records are kept — and those are decisions that are cheap on day one and expensive after launch.

Why choose an expert in London?

You are launching your project in London.

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.

Why Invent Better?

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 London 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.

How does a project work?

You have made the decision to build your app for your audience in London. What happens next?

Many agencies will send you a fifty-page estimate, ask for a deposit, and then disappear for six months. That is the best way to crash straight into a wall.

Here is my step-by-step method for your business in England.

Case study

Imagine a well-known e-commerce brand. This company had a responsive website, supposedly adapted for mobile phones.

Their mobile traffic accounted for 65% of their total visits. It was their main digital storefront. But the mobile conversion rate was a dismal 1.2%, compared to 3.8% on desktop. They were literally losing money every single day.

The problem was obvious. The checkout flow was an absolute nightmare of friction.

There were too many steps to pay. The buttons were tiny. The page loading was slow. And customers had to manually enter their credit card numbers for every single order.

We know that 53% of mobile users abandon a page if loading exceeds 3 seconds (Google, 2025). The penalty was immediate.

The solution was to build a true native application. We completely redesigned the experience, leveraging standards like Google's Material Design for Android to ensure flawless navigation.

How much does a mobile app cost?

There is no single price for a mobile app, for the same reason there is no single price for a house. What sets the figure is scope: how many screens, whether it needs a server and user accounts, and whether it ships on one platform or two. A short scoping call is enough to put a real range on your project rather than a brochure number.

You are launching your project in London and the very first question that comes to mind is inevitably about the budget.

That is perfectly normal. But asking how much a mobile app costs is exactly like asking how much a house costs in England. A small, functional studio apartment and a forty-room castle are simply not the same project.

Here is what actually determines the budget for a mobile application. 💶

Three main factors influence the cost of your project in London:

Industries we serve

Real Estate

The real estate market in London 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 England.

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.

Finance and Fintech

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.

Frequently asked questions about mobile app development in London

Do you travel for meetings in London?

Our collaboration is 95% remote via high-quality video calls. Remote work has become the absolute standard for peak efficiency. No more wasting hours in transit. For very large-scale projects exceeding a certain budget threshold, I can travel to London to lead in-person kickoff workshops. But on a daily basis, we communicate instantly via your preferred channel (WhatsApp, Slack, or email), we validate design mockups together, and we do our project reviews over Google Meet, WhatsApp, or Telegram. It is faster, much more direct, and significantly more cost-effective for everyone involved.

Do I need to write technical specifications before starting in London?

It is absolutely not mandatory. In reality, I greatly prefer to start with a simple fifteen-minute video call. Many clients waste months writing fifty-page specification documents that become entirely obsolete by the second week of development. The most important factor is defining the core problem you are trying to solve in England. Then, we build those exact specifications together, using an agile approach, basing our decisions on actual user needs rather than wild, untested theories.

What is your experience in my specific industry in London?

I have delivered over fifteen major projects across highly varied sectors: healthcare, tourism, e-commerce, logistics, and education. Even if I have not yet worked in your highly specific micro-niche, the fundamental principles of building a robust mobile application are totally universal. The high-quality standards remain exactly the same. What changes is your local business logic. My role is to deeply understand that business logic during our discovery call and translate it into an unstoppable technical solution for your customers.

How does payment work for a mobile project in London?

Payment is broken down into three clear milestones, with absolutely zero surprises. Typically, it is a 30% upfront deposit to lock the schedule, 40% midway through development when I deliver a testable working version, and the remaining 30% upon final delivery to the app stores. For very large, multi-month projects, I smooth the payments out monthly. Everything is detailed in writing within the initial estimate, and I never bill hidden hours for last-minute tweaks.

What happens if I am not satisfied with the result in London?

My weekly demonstrations make this situation practically impossible. You do not just discover the finished product six months after signing the contract. Every two weeks, I show you a fully functional version. You provide your direct feedback from London, and I adjust our aim immediately. If we start heading in the wrong direction, we know it after seven days, not at the end of the year. Plus, if during our first call I feel your expectations are technically unfeasible, I will tell you honestly. Better to decline than disappoint.

Can you take over and improve an existing application in London?

Yes, I do take over rescue projects developed by other freelancers or cheap offshore teams. The mandatory first step is a one-week technical audit. We look under the hood. Then, I draw up a strict action plan: first, we fix the critical bugs that are driving your users away, we consolidate the technical architecture, and only then do we add your new features. This is often much more cost-effective for your business across United Kingdom than tearing it all down to start from scratch.

How do we communicate during the development process from London?

We use direct, asynchronous, and frictionless channels. For quick daily questions, we use Slack. You can drop me a message whenever a brilliant idea hits you. To validate the visual interface, we review mockups together: you leave your comments directly on the drawn screens. For the codebase, everything is hosted transparently on GitHub. Finally, we do a live thirty-minute video checkpoint every single week. I happily adapt to whatever tools your teams in London are already comfortable using. The ultimate goal is absolute efficiency.

What are your availability hours for clients in London?

I am based on Central European Time (CET) in Bordeaux, France. For my European clients, I am fully available during standard business hours, between 10 AM and 6 PM. If you are located on another continent, I adapt with high flexibility. For clients in nearby timezones, we work in full real-time overlap. For clients further afield, I adapt with flexible scheduling and recorded video updates to stay fully in sync. My average response time during the workweek is always under four hours, no matter where you are.

Do you offer a maintenance contract after delivery in London?

Ready to launch your app in London?

You have the idea. You know your market in England. 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.

Ready to start?

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About the author

Mickael Romaniello — Mobile product engineer based in the South of France. 12 years building iOS, Android and desktop apps. 15+ projects delivered for startups, mid-market companies and enterprise clients. LinkedIn.

Last updated:

Standards & references

Apple Human Interface Guidelines · Google Material Design · web.dev (Google) · MDN Web Docs · OWASP Mobile Top 10