Top app development companies interview: Adroit Apps

JP Yao is the CEO and founder of Adroit Apps. This top mobile app development company was founded in 2015 in Makati City, Manila, Philippines. Currently Adroit Apps Ltd has business development and software development teams in Philippines, Canada and Japan.

Here’s what JP Yao has to say about his mobile app development company Adroit Apps Ltd and the mobile app development world:

What does your mobile app development company do?

Adroit Apps Ltd is a leading software development company providing services for mobile apps, CRM/ERP, wearables, custom hardware solutions, beacons and NFC, responsive website and maintenance support for FinTech, startups, healthcare and digital agencies.

We have a core team of 14 software engineers, designers, project managers, and QA engineers, at least half of whom have international work experience prior to working in Adroit.

Integral to Adroit company culture are fostering integrity at work and promoting courtesy in our day-to-day with customers, employees, vendors and society as a whole. We try to simplify the steps needed to take a mobile app from its conceptualization to publishing on both Apple and Google app stores.

Here is the standard process we have been using:

• Planning: The first step is to collaborate with the client on the big idea and work with the client to focus in on the problem the app is trying to solve. In this phase, we lay out the business specifications or rules, we gather requirements, review best practices, conduct problem research and conduct stakeholder interviews.
• UI/UX design: After planning comes the UI/UX design phase, where we create personas and look at how these personas will be utilizing the app to solve a specific problem. We then create wireframes of the user interface to understand how the app will appear based on user perspective vis-à-vis the app’s feature set. Finally, we create high resolution and high fidelity mockups based on the wireframes to bring the app designs to life.
• Development: We start with splitting the complex mobile app development process into several sprints and tasks. Our frontend and backend developers work together to rapidly develop and to work towards the features of the app to be delivered as part of the sprint goal.
• Testing and Quality Assurance: To ensure high quality output, our quality assurance team performs functional testing across supported devices prior to each release. Lastly, a user acceptance test is conducted together with real-world users to make sure the app can handle required tasks per specifications.
• Product Launch: We prepare the apps for submission to App Store and Google Play. We collaborate closely with clients to ensure marketing materials, images, copies and app assets are ready for public launch.

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

Depending on the scale of the app and the targeted platforms, our mobile app development projects have ranged from USD 15,000 to 60,000, but on average, it is between USD 30,000 – 50,000.

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

Adroit has engineers, designers and project managers in-house to collaborate on the project and to deliver without delay. This face-to-face setup allows us to plan, organize and actively participate in the development process on a daily basis.

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

Bobby’s Story World, eWise Money Manager and MyBlood (due 2017).

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

It’s hard to pick one. After years working on mobile apps for fintech, healthcare, F&B and marketing applications, personally, I would say it’s fintech or marketing apps.

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

Native

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

If we talk about consistency or testability, Apple seems to have provided a more consistent developer experience for quite some time now. This is largely due to the fact that development frameworks provided for and maintained by Apple have long been closed source. As a developer, there is relative ease in predicting code behavior across different iOS devices, as there are only a handful of iOS devices to test the codes with. On the other hand, there are thousands of Android devices which have hundreds of screen sizes and hardware configurations you need test on, before you can fully ensure that your code will behave the way you designed it to. We’ve had more instances on Android wherein we’ve thought we’ve fully designed the app according to Android’s developer guidelines and have expected it to behave accordingly, yet behavior across several devices seemed to vary.

About the hardware, Android has an edge in terms of the number of third-party hardware integrations you can make with Android OS. A very good example would be NFC. Even to this day, developers cannot develop NFC-based solutions on iOS devices.

There are pros and cons in publishing apps on Apple’s stringent app publishing policies. Apps get approved anywhere between 3 to 14 days in our experience. It’s great to have apps reviewed by Apple to maintain the level of quality of apps on the App Store. If you’re patching up critical issues in your app though, the processing times can be painful. On the other hand with Google Play, apps get instant approval with minimal time needed to propagate across all of Google Play’s territories.

Which one will evolve more within the next 5 years?

It will be the platform which has multiple integration points. In-car infotainment and wearable adoption will greatly influence the platform which comes out on top.

Which device is the best in the market right now?

Another challenging question, so let me present 2 options: iPhone 7 Plus 256GB, blazing fast performance, excellent camera and ample storage. So far it’s been a perfect tool for entrepreneurs.

Samsung Galaxy Note 5 (assuming it did not explode), same description as the iPhone 7 Plus above, but it has a better camera which beats any iPhone.

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

We love creating apps on both iOS and Android. Given a choice however, most devs here would prefer iOS because of consistency and testability. Device fragmentation has long been an issue with Android. Also, most of our clients are based in regions with very high iOS user base, and in cases where you need to develop for both platforms, iOS-first has been the norm.

Why is AppFutura useful to you?

AppFutura provides us visibility on international projects and allows us to compete with other big companies in getting these projects. It’s also a great platform to analyse trends in the mobile app space and see what companies are wanting to build. AppFutura also tries its best to educate clients on mobile app development practices which is great for the community.

Go to AppFutura's Adroit App's mobile app development company profile to get more information about them.

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