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 are based in Vancouver 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 British Columbia.
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.
You want to launch a digital project in Vancouver. You meet with developers, and suddenly they are throwing words at you like frontend, backend, APIs, and databases.
You nod your head, but honestly, you are lost.
Forget the technical jargon. Building a mobile application is exactly like opening a restaurant in British Columbia. It is a precise mechanism where every single element plays a vital role.
Let's imagine your app as this famous restaurant.
The frontend is the dining room. It is the decor, the tables, the menu presentation, the ambiance. It is the actual app your users download to their phones. This frontend must be beautiful, welcoming, and follow strict standards, like Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. If the dining room is ugly, the customer will not enter.
Next, there is the API. The API is the waiter. The customer gives them their order. The waiter runs to the kitchen to pass on the information, then comes back with the hot plate of food. Without the waiter, the dining room and the kitchen cannot communicate.
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.
You do not need to be in the same office to build an excellent application.
Today, the digital economy in Vancouver operates without borders. But for remote work to be truly effective, you need military-grade organization. Technical chaos is incredibly expensive.
The key advantage of my approach is absolute transparency. Here is how we will collaborate, even if hundreds or thousands of miles separate us.
Let's start with the tools. There are no black boxes with me.
For design, I work code-first with visual mockups validated with you. For projects requiring specialized UX/UI work, I partner with a trusted designer. You can click through them, leave comments directly on specific buttons, and validate the interface before I ever write a single line of code.
For the code itself, I use GitHub. You have full access to the engine room. You are the sole owner of your product from A to Z.
Imagine a well-known e-commerce brand. This company had a responsive website, supposedly adapted for mobile phones.
Their mobile traffic accounted for most their total visits. It was their main digital storefront. But the mobile conversion rate was a dismal 1.a large share, compared to 3.a large 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 most mobile users abandon a page if loading exceeds 3 seconds. 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.
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 Vancouver 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 British Columbia. 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 Vancouver:
The healthcare sector leaves absolutely no room for error. Building a medical app for patients or doctors in British Columbia is not just about coding a pretty interface. It is about building a digital vault.
You have to seamlessly manage patient follow-ups, appointment bookings, medication reminders, and secure messaging. Strict compliance with data protection laws is non-negotiable. That is why we integrate heavy biometric authentication systems.
And let's not forget offline mode, which is absolutely vital for a rural doctor consulting in an area with poor signal.
If you are targeting travelers visiting Vancouver, your application must be their ultimate guide. And a guide that stops working the moment you cross a border is completely useless.
Offline mode is a matter of survival here to help your customers avoid roaming charges. They must be able to check a real-time itinerary or scan a QR code ticket even without an internet connection.
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.