Mobile App Development for UK Businesses

At a glance

Time difference

India is 4.5 hours ahead in winter, 5.5 in summer — around four hours of daily overlap

Children's Code

Applies where under-18s are likely to access the service — not only where they are the target audience

Its main effect

High privacy settings by default, data minimisation, and restraint in engagement and profiling techniques

Store policy

Account deletion, sign-in options and subscription presentation designed in rather than discovered at review

Approach

Cross-platform where the feature set allows, native where platform depth genuinely earns a second codebase

Overlap

Around four hours daily, so design and review questions resolve the same day

Handover

Source, signing keys and store accounts in your name, with full IP transfer on final payment

Age assurance without collecting more than you should

The obvious response to the Children's Code is to establish users' ages, and the obvious implementation is to ask for a date of birth. That is worth thinking about carefully, because a self-declared date of birth is both unreliable and a new piece of personal data you now hold about everyone.

The proportionate approach depends on risk. For a low-risk service, applying the code's protections to all users by default can be simpler, cheaper and better than building age verification — you avoid collecting anything additional and you avoid the awkward cases entirely.

For higher-risk services, more robust assurance may be warranted, and that is a decision to take with your adviser rather than a default to implement. What we would avoid is the middle position that catches many products: collecting dates of birth that nobody verifies, which provides negligible assurance while adding a data protection obligation and a field users lie in.

When a UK business should not build an app at all

A meaningful proportion of UK app enquiries we receive describe something that would work better as a website or a progressive web app, and we would rather say so before building than after.

An app earns its place when you need genuine offline capability, device features such as the camera or background location, push notifications that matter, or truly repeat usage — a tool staff open several times a day, or a service customers use weekly. It does not earn its place for a task customers perform twice a year, where the install friction alone will cost you most of the audience.

The ongoing commitment is the other half of that decision. Both platforms ship annual OS releases that deprecate APIs and change conventions, SDKs need updating, and store policies change. An unmaintained app degrades and can eventually be removed. For a business without appetite for that cadence, a progressive web app delivers much of the benefit without the maintenance obligation or the store relationship.

How the project runs

1. 1

   Establish whether the Children's Code applies

   We ask who is likely to access the service before designing, because the code changes defaults, data collection and engagement mechanics rather than adding a policy.

2. 2

   Decide app versus web honestly

   We check whether a store app is genuinely warranted given the ongoing maintenance commitment. For many UK businesses a progressive web app is the better answer and we say so.

3. 3

   Design against store guidelines

   Account deletion, sign-in options, subscription presentation and disclosure requirements are treated as design inputs rather than a submission checklist.

4. 4

   Inventory what the app collects

   Including what third-party SDKs collect, since that is the part most teams cannot see and it determines whether privacy disclosures are accurate.

5. 5

   Use the daily overlap on decisions

   A standing daily slot in your morning, because app projects generate many small decisions and each unanswered one can stall a screen.

6. 6

   Submit and plan maintenance

   Submission under your accounts with your signing keys, then an agreed cadence for OS releases, SDK updates and policy changes.

What you get on every project

• A written scope with fixed milestones before any development starts — no open-ended hourly billing.
• A staging URL you can check at any time, so progress is visible rather than reported.
• One named point of contact, not a ticket queue.
• Invoicing in GBP, under Easywork Solutions Private Limited.
• Full source code, design files and hosting credentials transferred to you on final payment.