Mobile app development in Bengaluru
An app built for Indian users has to work on the phone they actually carry, which is usually a mid-range Android device with limited storage, aggressive battery management and a connection that drops in lifts and on the Outer Ring Road. Apps tested only on the founders' flagship phones fail there quietly: uploads that vanish, sessions that expire mid-form, push notifications the operating system has decided to kill.
We build React Native apps for both stores and test them on the cheap end of the market, not only the expensive one. That means offline-tolerant forms that keep the user's work, background uploads that resume, payment hand-offs that survive the user switching to a UPI app and back, and a release process more than one person can run. Our own dating app, Amour, is live on Android and is where most of these habits were learned.
Bengaluru is where we live and work, so this page is less a pitch than a description of the market we see every week. The defining fact about it is that startups and global capability centres, the in-house engineering offices of foreign companies, are competing for the same engineers. A GCC can offer a larger salary, a guaranteed bonus and a stable employer. A Series A startup offers equity and a harder job. The engineer you want usually has more than one offer, a notice period to serve, and a counter-offer waiting. So the roadmap slips while the hiring plan catches up.
The companies that call us here come in a few recognisable shapes. Startups whose first backend was written by an engineer who has since left, often for one of those GCCs. SaaS companies built in Bengaluru and sold to customers in the US and Europe from the first year, now closing their first enterprise account and the feature list that comes with it. Deep tech teams in space, robotics, semiconductors and applied AI, where the core work is research or hardware and the software around it, the dashboards, device APIs and data pipelines, is nobody's job. And GCC leaders who need a working proof of concept before headquarters will approve the headcount to build the real thing.
What they need built is usually a defined piece rather than a whole product. A backend mapped, documented and made safe to change. Single sign-on, custom roles and tenant isolation for the enterprise deal. A device API and a dashboard for a robotics team whose engineers would rather be working on the robot. A proof of concept a GCC can demo to its parent company. We build those in your repository, in increments that ship, and write the architecture notes and runbooks as we go, so whoever you hire next can read them in their first week.
We share your time zone, so the working day is the same on both sides and a question asked in the morning is answered in the morning. Because we are in the same city, a kickoff or an architecture session can happen at your office rather than on a call. Most of the work still happens in writing, in your repository and your chat, because a decision written down survives the people who made it.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want a senior engineer on it this month rather than after a hiring round. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. We also cover the months before your next hire joins, and work white-label for Bengaluru agencies under your 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 Bengaluru teams.
Can we meet in person?+
Yes. We are in Bengaluru, so a kickoff, a design review or a whiteboard session at your office is easy to arrange. We share your time zone, so calls happen inside your normal working day. Day to day we work in your tools, Slack, GitHub and Linear or whatever you already use, and you talk directly to the engineer writing the code. In-person time is best spent on the first architecture discussion and the handover.
Do you build for Bengaluru SaaS companies selling abroad?+
Yes, and it is one of the most common pieces of work we see here. We build what the first overseas enterprise customer asks for: single sign-on, custom roles, tenant isolation that holds under a missing filter, a log of who changed what, and billing through Stripe that copes with several currencies. The work happens inside your product, in increments that ship, so the deal keeps moving while the list gets shorter.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Bengaluru?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Bengaluru at about ₹18 lakh a year. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. For that you get a senior engineer who writes the code, works in your Slack, GitHub and Linear, and starts within days, with no recruiting round, notice period or employment overhead. Begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on what ships.
We keep losing engineers to GCCs. How can you help?+
We add senior capacity while you rebuild the team. An engagement starts within days, so the roadmap keeps moving through the notice periods and counter-offers. We take a defined piece of work, ship it in your repository, and write the architecture notes and runbooks your next hire reads in their first week. The code belongs to you from the first commit, so picking it up later is a conversation, not a project.
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.