Mobile app development in Mumbai
A consumer finance app from Mumbai has to do three hard things on a cheap phone. It has to sign up a customer and check their identity without losing them halfway, which means camera capture, document upload and a verification step that all survive a dropped connection. It has to keep the account secure, with device binding, sensitive screens hidden from screenshots and a session that expires sensibly. And it has to hand payments to a UPI app and come back without losing track of whether the money moved.
We build these apps in React Native for both stores, writing native modules by hand when a library falls short of the job. Journeys are tested on the mid-range Android phones most of your customers carry, with poor networks simulated on purpose. Releases are scripted so more than one person can ship, which matters when a product launch and a store review land in the same week.
Mumbai is India's financial capital. Both major stock exchanges are here, and so are many of the country's banks, NBFCs, brokers, wealth managers, insurers and fintechs. For these companies software is judged first on whether the money is right. A loan ledger that drifts from the bank statement, a payout released twice because a partner timed out, a portfolio screen showing yesterday's price: each one lands on an operations desk the next morning. What they need built is rarely a new product from nothing. It is a lending or payments backend that reconciles, a platform where each role sees exactly what it should, and approvals that need two people before money moves. Engineers who have built those systems are in demand across the city, so the work often waits for a hire.
The city's second industry is attention. The Hindi film industry, most of the country's television networks and many of its large publishers are based here, and their software problems are specific: traffic that arrives all at once on a release or a match day, rights and metadata that decide what can be shown where, and archives that are valuable only if someone can search them. A slow page on a publisher's site is lost revenue, because the readers came from search and will go straight back to it.
The third is consumer business in every size. Mumbai has D2C brands selling beauty, fashion and food through their own stores and every marketplace at once, and it is home to large family-owned groups and conglomerates whose older divisions still run on spreadsheets and exports from their accounting software. In the bigger groups the buyer is usually a digital team with a mandate, a budget and a procurement process, and the work has to survive that process as well as production.
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 the same morning. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The work happens in your repository and a shared chat channel, where every decision is written down, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go rather than at the end.
We are the right fit when a Mumbai team has a defined piece of work and wants a senior engineer on it within days: a ledger that has to reconcile, a migration with an end date, or extra capacity while you hire. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or bring us in white-label for your agency's clients 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 Mumbai teams.
How do you work with teams in Mumbai?+
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 every decision is written down in the repository or the channel. You talk directly to the engineer writing the code, from the first 30-minute call through to handover, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Mumbai lenders, brokers and fintechs?+
Yes. We build the parts where the money has to be right: loan and payment ledgers that reconcile against the bank's records every day, retries that cannot turn a timeout into a double payout, maker-checker approvals where a second person signs off before money moves, and a full history of every change of state. We work inside the system you already run, in Node, Python and Next.js, and ship in increments.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Mumbai?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Mumbai at about ₹15 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. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on the output before committing to more.
Can you work white-label for our Mumbai agency?+
Yes. Mumbai's digital and media agencies bring us in when a client needs a backend, a mobile app or a data pipeline alongside the design and campaign work. We work under your name, in your client's repositories and your channels, and sign an NDA before specifics. The code belongs to the client from the first commit. You keep the relationship, we write the code and the runbooks, and your team presents the work.
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.