Mobile app development in Sydney
Sydney's fintechs build apps for customers who already carry their bank in their pocket. The big banks' apps set the standard for what a money app feels like, so a lending, payments or wealth app is judged against them from the first screen. Most of the drop-off happens early: in sign-up, identity checks and linking a card or account, where every extra step is a place a customer gives up and tries a competitor instead.
We build React Native apps for iOS and Android that get people through that first session: sign-up that asks for one thing at a time, identity steps that survive the app being backgrounded, clear states when a payment is pending or settled, and push notifications that arrive when the money moves. We treat the API and the app as one piece of work, because most mobile bugs in fintech are timing problems between the two.
Sydney is where Australian money keeps its head office. Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Macquarie run their groups from the city, the large insurers are here, and around them sits a dense fintech sector in payments, lending and wealth. The software these firms need is rarely a brand-new product. It is the work around the core: payment flows that settle in seconds, onboarding and lending journeys customers actually finish, reports that agree with each other, and the internal tools that keep claims and complaints moving.
Real-time payments have raised the bar. On the New Payments Platform money moves in seconds, and PayTo lets a business take agreed payments straight from a customer's account, so a lender or fintech built around overnight batch files now needs instant confirmations and a ledger that never records the same payment twice. Sydney is also where Atlassian and Canva started, so its buyers have been trained by good software built down the road. A clunky internal tool or a slow sign-up flow is noticed here in a way it might not be elsewhere. Beyond finance, the city has a large property and strata sector, online retailers shipping across a very big country, and a startup scene around Tech Central.
Hiring reflects all of that. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at A$119,602, from 526 reported salaries, and experienced engineers are contested by the banks, the big product companies and every well-funded startup at once. A team that needs a payments engineer or an extra pair of senior hands for a quarter can wait a long time for the right hire. That is where we are useful: a defined piece of work, started within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, and we move them to suit your team. Your morning stays with your own people; the afternoon is when you talk to the engineer writing your code, in stand-ups, reviews and design decisions. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so whoever joins your team next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want senior engineers on it within days, or when the Sydney hire you need is months away and the roadmap keeps moving. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the output. 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 Sydney teams.
How do you work with teams in Sydney?+
We are in Bengaluru and share four hours of live overlap with you every day, in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. That is when we join stand-ups, review pull requests and take design calls. 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. Between calls, progress is in your tracker and your repositories.
Do you build for Sydney banks, insurers and fintechs?+
Yes, and that is most of what Sydney asks us for. We build payment backends that handle NPP and PayTo without recording a payment twice, sign-up and lending journeys customers finish on their phone, complaint and claims tools that take the reading off skilled staff, and data pipelines that make finance and risk reports agree. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the one flow that matters most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Sydney?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at around A$120,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. 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.
Can you take over an app another team built?+
Yes. It is a common starting point for Sydney products whose agency or founding engineers have moved on. We read the code, run it, and write down how it fits together and where the risks sit. The first fixed-price two-week piece is usually one real fix or feature, so you see the handover working while the architecture notes build up. The code stays in your repositories throughout, as it always would.
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.