Top App Developers Interview: GeekyAnts

Sanket Sahu is a CEO and co-founder of Geekyants. Founded in 2006, Geekyants has more than 250 employees and offices in Bangalore (India). Here’s what Sanket Sahu had to say about his company and the mobile world.

Tell us a little bit about your previous work:

As a child, I was lucky to have found my love for coding. As time went by, with a penchant for experiments, after I graduated in 2011 as a Computer Science Engineer, I started/joined the company and have spent the last ten years growing it, functioning as a Software Developer/CEO.

What does your mobile app development company do?

GeekyAnts is a product studio that transforms ideas into reality. We specialize in web and mobile development using React, React Native, Flutter, Vue and Angular, just to name a few. We have been providing world-class digital solutions to our clientele consistently in industries like Banking, E-commerce, Real-Estate, Gaming, Healthcare and many others.

We also have a products division in the company that believes strongly in experimenting and OSS and has built NativeBase, one of the most used UI Libraries for React Native & BuilderX, a cloud-based design tool that generates production-ready React & React Native code. We've also recently launched an API maintenance platform called apibeats & a State Management Library called SyncState.

What makes us different from the competition is the fact that we have very high standards when it comes to quality and we do not take it lightly. We are very particular about the kind of products and apps that we deliver and in pursuit of maintaining our standards, we have in-house teams for every aspect of development starting from inception to design, development and delivery.

We focus a lot on the overall customer experience, which has helped us create long term relationships with our clients and that is our best feature. The client is king and we treat them so. We also practice a very open culture within the teams where ownership is given to the devs and they always put their best foot forward.

What clients have you worked for?

Some of our key clients are Google, Siveco Romania, ChildMind Institute, Tellius, Paypoint, Quintype, Endlink, MPL (Mobile Premier League) and many others.

If you had to choose one category, what kind of app do you think is your mobile app development company’s specialty?

That's a tough pick! We've delivered brilliant solutions to so many different verticals and industries that picking a favourite does not really do any justice, but if I were to pick an industry that has been special for us, I would vouch for E-commerce, Banking and Finance. We've had the pleasure to work with some really big names in the domain and they have been more than satisfied with the results. Even so, we've been really proud of the things that we've built for them.

What is the average budget of the mobile apps you develop?

Well, that highly depends on the nature of the project and the extent of it, but if I were to put a price, it would be close to $20k-30k.

Do you develop all mobile apps in-house or do you outsource some parts of the process?

Initially, we did outsource some of the work involved to vendors but we soon figured out that the quality of our work was being compromised and that wasn't acceptable, so we scaled up and now everything in Web & Mobile App development, to the T, is done in-house. We have experts in design, tech, marketing and more to help maintain our quality standards for projects.

The biggest advantage of this is that we get to maintain our quality standards and closely monitor each product that is being delivered. Any deviations are fixed and that is what has brought us to this level in the market.

The biggest roadblock would probably be the actual scale up, but I think we're past that now.

Which would you say are the best mobile apps that your company has developed and why?

We've worked with One Championship to enhance their experience. The reason why I think it was one of the best is that the project was quite challenging and really tested our mettle. The company was established really well and that brings about some amount of pressure but I am glad to say that the team at GeekyAnts rose above themselves and delivered a flawless product to the client.

MPL (Mobile Premier League) is another project that falls in the same category. It, too, was quite challenging and we had the pleasure of redefining their experience for their users and now everybody knows MPL. After all, it's India's biggest online gaming platform. :)

Another one that shares the mantle is Scrollahead, which was a news app designed in a revolutionary way which, to be honest, took us a second to get acquainted with but from there on, it was an amazing journey. What's really fascinating about this project was that it was fairly new and very well received.

Do you prefer to build mobile apps with native, hybrid or web languages?

We started out as web developers and we are very seasoned in that part of the sphere. We decided to stay true to our roots and that led us to be a little biased towards web derived languages like React, React Native and Flutter. The reason for it is that WDL's really give us the freedom to express our creativity. We've never really gone the Native way before and I can't really predict the future.

Let’s focus on iOS and Android mobile app development. Which are the Pros and Cons of each platform?

In my experience, there's a little bit of salt and sugar in both. iOS standards are really high so that can be a little difficult to work with, where Android is really accommodating. This question would be more relevant to Native developers because we build apps using cross-platform tech which results in a single codebase. The experience is more-or-less the same with that.

Which one will evolve more within the next 5 years?

Well, looking at the market and the pace with which communities are working and contributing, I think it will be an even fight 5 years down or even 10 years down the line.

And which device do you feel more comfortable developing an app for?

We're extremely comfortable working with Mobile devices, tablets and other devices belonging to the same family because it puts us in the best of our form and we get to use that cross-platform goodness that the technologies out there deliver.

Why is AppFutura useful to you?

We have been a part of the AppFutura family for quite some time now and the services have been wonderful. It has really helped us gain a lot of visibility in the market as well as generate business on a much more rapid scale. I am very happy to have GeekyAnts as a sponsored partner of AppFutura.