Mobile app development in Austin
Consumer fintech in Austin is mostly mobile, and a money app is judged on things a user never notices until they fail. A balance that briefly shows the wrong figure. A transfer that looks sent twice after a tap on a slow connection. A card freeze that takes effect after the fraud, not before. Every release also goes through app store review, while some of your users stay on a version from months ago.
We build React Native apps for both stores with that in mind. Every write that moves money carries an idempotency key, so a retry cannot become a second payment. Balances come from the ledger, not from arithmetic on the phone. The backend can tell an old client it must update before it does something unsafe. Biometric sign-in, push notifications and secure storage use each platform's own mechanisms, and where no library covers what you need, we write the native module by hand.
The city's centre of gravity is enterprise SaaS and consumer fintech, and both bring the same backend problem early: multi-tenancy that was bolted on after the first enterprise deal, and a permissions model that started as a role column. Then the large customer asks for custom roles and SSO, the board asks for usage-based pricing, and the schema was built for neither. Unpicking that while the product keeps selling is most of what an Austin engagement looks like in the first month. On the fintech side the same pressure lands on the mobile app and the ledger: transfers that must never send twice, and balances that have to match what finance sees.
Austin has also been a hardware and semiconductor town for decades. The fabs and equipment suppliers produce tool telemetry, inspection images and test results in volumes most software companies never see, and the hardware start-ups around them reach the point where a board works on the bench and a pilot customer wants to see its data. Their engineers are process, yield and firmware specialists. The software around the hardware, from the device API and the dashboard to the pipeline that turns readings into something a customer can open, is a defined piece of work that suits an outside team.
Then there is timing. Austin has an unusual density of Series A and B product companies, and they tend to raise, hire aggressively for two quarters, then freeze. A mid-level engineer costs around $145,000 base before equity and benefits, and the platform or infrastructure hire is usually the one that waits longest. We are frequently the answer to "we have the roadmap and the budget, but the req is frozen until next quarter", because an engagement is an invoice rather than a headcount. It starts with a fixed-price two-week piece, and it can grow into an embedded engineer for as long as the roadmap needs one.
We move our working day for Texas. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time, so stand-up, code review and the design conversation happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The code lives in your repositories from the first commit, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so whoever you hire next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when the roadmap is ready and the req is frozen. A defined piece of work, such as a permissions model, a device backend or a cloud setup brought under control, starts with a fixed-price two-week piece. Senior capacity arrives within days, and agencies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
And crashes on the ones your users own. We add crash reporting with readable stack traces, find the handful of devices and OS versions causing most of the crashes, and fix those before anyone touches a feature.
Signing keys on a laptop, a manual build, store notes written at midnight. We move builds and signing into CI, add over-the-air updates for JavaScript-only fixes, and write down exactly how a release goes out.
A Bluetooth device, a vendor SDK, a camera pipeline, a background task the OS keeps killing. We write the native module in Swift and Kotlin, expose a small typed interface to React Native, and keep it isolated so upgrades stay possible.
Forms that vanish, actions that send twice. We decide what must work offline, keep it on the device, queue writes with idempotency keys the backend understands, and show the user plainly what is still waiting to sync.
Our own React Native app on Android, with retraction built into the client because moderation can pull a message after it has been sent.
Read the write-up →Asked by Austin teams.
How do you work with teams in Austin?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Texas, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in that window. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Why do Austin product companies come to you?+
Austin has an unusual density of Series A and B product companies with a strong front-end team and no infrastructure hire yet. That is precisely the seat we fill: the multi-tenant backend, the permissions model, the cloud setup and the deploys that nobody senior owns. It is why more of our US enquiries come from Texas than from the coasts. We build it in your codebase, alongside the team you already have.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Austin?+
A mid-level software engineer in Austin earns around $145,000 base before equity and benefits. Our published rate is $35/hour, or $5,400 a month for an embedded engineer, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Our req is frozen until next quarter. Can you cover the gap?+
Yes. It is a common Austin situation, and a good fit for an engagement, because an invoice is not a headcount. The roadmap keeps moving while the req waits. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or embed an engineer at $5,400 a month. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so when your hire does start, they inherit work they can read and extend.
React Native or fully native?+
React Native for most products: one codebase, one team, both stores. Fully native makes sense when the app is mostly the hard native part, such as heavy camera or audio processing, complex background work, or a platform feature React Native does not support yet. We will tell you which side of that line you are on, and write the native parts by hand either way.
Expo or bare React Native?+
Expo, in almost every case now. Development builds and config plugins removed most of the old reasons to eject, and EAS handles builds and signing. We go bare only when a native dependency genuinely cannot live inside a config plugin, and we will explain why before doing it, because it makes every future upgrade more work.
Can you take over an app someone else built?+
Yes. We start by getting it to build on a clean machine, which is often the hardest step, then bring React Native and its dependencies up to a supported version before adding features. We tell you what state the app is in, including where the store listings, signing keys and accounts actually live, before quoting anything larger.
Who handles App Store and Play Store submission?+
We do, from your developer accounts, not ours. We prepare the builds, the privacy disclosures and the notes for the reviewer, and deal with rejections when they come. The accounts, signing keys and listings stay in your name, so you can change developers later without asking anyone's permission.
Does our backend need to change for a mobile app?+
Often, a little. A mobile client stays on old versions for months, retries on bad networks, and cannot be fixed by a server deploy. That means versioned endpoints, idempotent writes, and a way to tell an old client it must update. We check the backend for those before the first screen is built, because retrofitting them after launch is slower.