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Buying

How to choose an app development company Test them against shipped work

Short answer

Pick a company that can show products with named stacks and honest labels (production vs MVP), that will write scope before they write invoices, and that lets you talk to the engineers who will build. Ignore download counts, awards, and tech they cannot point at. A useful first filter is: would their public case studies survive a sceptical founder?

Choosing a studio is a procurement problem with a creative costume. You are buying judgement under uncertainty. The costume is the mood-board. The procurement is: who decides, who codes, what happens when the third feature appears, and whether the first version can grow.

A brief they cannot dodge

Send one page, not a novel. If they cannot respond to this, they will not survive Discover.

Minimum brief

  • Who opens the app, and what they finish in the first minute
  • Platforms you believe you need in v1 — and why
  • What already exists (APIs, brand, store accounts)
  • What must be true for you to call v1 a success — without fake KPIs
  • Constraints: regulated data, offline, languages — only if they are real

Questions that separate shops

  1. Show me a production app and an MVP, labelled as such. RR Tech publishes both. Mixing them is how you get a 2-week promise on a 10-week job.
  2. What stack did that product actually use? Kotlin and Firebase on FCH. KMP on Ghost Mode. “We do everything” with no nouns is a smell.
  3. Who do I talk to after I sign? Direct access to engineers is a published RR Tech pillar. A hand-off factory will introduce you to a new PM every sprint.
  4. What is fixed in the proposal? Scope, timeline, investment. Change orders on the agreed slice should not be the business model.
  5. What do you not do? RR Tech does not claim custom LLM training at lab scale, React Native/Flutter as the house UI, or web case studies it has not shipped. A company that cannot name a no is selling you infinity.

Promises you can ignore

  • Guaranteed App Store ranking or a download target
  • A package price that does not name screens
  • A technology that never appears in their work (we will not invent React Native here to look current)
  • Testimonials without a product you can open — this site does not invent client quotes
  • “AI-powered” with no user job (see AI-powered apps)

How to read a portfolio

Look for screens that match the sentence. Fantasy Cricket Hub’s home is the match schedule, not a generic dashboard kit. Ghost Mode’s home is Enter Ghost Mode, not a settings maze. BrainSync’s capture is cheap (plus, voice, tags). If the screens could belong to any startup in a Behance dump, you are looking at decoration.

Also look at what they refuse to say. No client name on these products is an honest gap, not a failure. Invented users and revenue would be worse.

Commercial shape

RR Tech describes three engagement shapes on the site: explore & validate (lean MVP), build & launch (production), and grow together after launch (retainer or sprints). Active clients get 24/7 support for critical issues on live products; new enquiries get a reply within 24 hours. Geography: Auckland studio, remote delivery worldwide. Office IT is a separate NZ-only add-on — it should not be bundled silently into an app quote.

Want the same questions asked of us?

Send the first-screen job. You will get a scoped proposal or a clear no — not a mood-board and a surprise invoice.