Mobile app development in Chennai
Hospital groups and diagnostic chains in Chennai increasingly put a patient's appointments, lab reports and bills on their phone. The users are unusually varied: an elderly patient more comfortable in Tamil than English, a family member managing someone else's care, a visitor from abroad on a roaming connection. The data on the screen is medical, so a report left visible on a shared family phone is a real harm.
We build these patient apps in React Native with those users in mind. Tamil and English throughout, with text sized and spaced for older eyes, family access that is granted and revoked explicitly, reports that are fetched on demand and not left cached where they should not be, and sign-in that is secure without being a daily obstacle. Everything is tested on the older Android phones many patients carry, not only on new ones.
Chennai is where Indian SaaS learned to sell to the world. Zoho is headquartered here and has grown without venture capital. Freshworks was founded here in 2010 by two former Zoho employees, and Chargebee was started in a Chennai apartment a year later by a team with Zoho roots, with Freshworks as an early customer. That lineage produced a distinctive kind of company: product-led, careful with money, selling to small and mid-sized businesses on several continents from offices in Chennai. Chennai's SaaS teams tend to be strong on product and short on specific capacity, not on talent in general.
The city's second identity is industrial. Chennai is often called the Detroit of Asia, with vehicle plants including Hyundai's and BMW's on its outskirts, a large base of component and electronics manufacturers, and a major port. Those firms have the same problem as manufacturers everywhere in India: their operations have outgrown the spreadsheets and older systems that run them, and their information arrives late and in the wrong format. Around the port, freight forwarders, customs brokers and warehouse operators face the same problem with paperwork instead of parts, and the cost of a lost document is a container that sits on the quay.
Its third is healthcare. Chennai is often called the health capital of India, and hospital groups such as Apollo Hospitals and specialist centres such as Sankara Nethralaya draw patients from across the country and abroad. Healthcare software here has to earn trust. Health records are among the most sensitive data there is, and hospital systems increasingly need to exchange data with each other and with the national digital health stack rather than sit in isolation. Referrals, international patient coordination, patient apps and group-wide reporting all need building. Getting consent, access logging and integration right matters more than the interface.
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so the working day is the same on both sides and a question asked in the morning is answered that morning. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. Most of the work happens in your repository, your issue tracker and a shared chat channel, which suits teams used to working in writing, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
We are the right fit for a defined piece outside your team's usual specialism, a migration with an end date, or the gap while your next hire serves their notice. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. Chennai agencies and product studios can also bring us in white-label, 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 Chennai teams.
How do you work with teams in Chennai?+
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so calls, reviews and releases fit inside your normal working day. We work in your tools, Slack, GitHub and Linear or whatever your team already uses, and most of the conversation happens in writing, where it lasts. You talk directly to the engineer writing the code, from the first 30-minute call onwards, and runbooks and architecture notes are written into your repository as we go.
Can you work inside a mature SaaS product without slowing our team down?+
Yes. We read your code and conventions before changing anything, follow your review and release process, and take a defined piece of work, such as a billing migration, a new integration, a performance problem or an infrastructure move, so the changes stay in one place rather than spreading across the product. We work in Node, Python and TypeScript, inside your repository, and leave runbooks and architecture notes for your team.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Chennai?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Chennai at about ₹12 lakh a year. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. That buys 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.
Can you build software for Chennai's hospitals?+
Yes. FM360, the platform we built for a healthcare estate, runs its facilities and maintenance in production. For hospitals and diagnostic chains we build referral and patient-coordination platforms, patient apps in Tamil and English, and warehouses that join every branch's systems into one set of numbers. Consent is recorded per purpose, every access to a record is logged, and integrations use standards such as FHIR where the other side supports them.
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.