How to Hire App Developers and Build the Right App Development Team

Builds the app itself. Native means one per platform, Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, while cross-platform means one developer covering both with Flutter or React Native. For a first version, cross-platform is usually the cheaper answer unless you need deep device features.

Builds what the app talks to: accounts, data, payments, notifications, and the integrations with everything else you run. Skipping this role is the most common way a project stalls, because the app looks finished and has nothing behind it. Our explainer on app backends covers the work, and the one on API integration covers connecting to other systems.

Screens, flows and the design system. Easy to buy in for a fixed piece of work, and rarely needs to be permanent on a first version.

Finds what breaks on real devices before users do. Below a certain size the developers test each other’s work, but that stops being true the moment you support more than a couple of device families. Our guide to mobile app testing covers what that should include.

Needed when there are enough people that coordination is a job. With two or three people it is your job, and adding a manager slows the work down.

Store listing, retention, and knowing which features are used. Not a launch role, and a real one within a few months of having users.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts 2025 median pay for software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers at $134,040 a year, or $64.44 an hour, across 1,905,400 jobs, with the occupation projected to grow 10% between 2025 and 2035, which it describes as much faster than average. For software developers specifically, BLS puts the median annual wage at $135,980 in May 2025.

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 is narrower and more useful here, because it reports by role: the US median for a mobile developer is $170,000, against $175,000 for a back-end developer and $138,000 for a full-stack developer. Globally, across all respondents, the median for a mobile developer is $69,609, and in Germany it is $93,972, which is the clearest illustration of how much location moves the number.

Clutch’s pricing guide reports most development companies charging $24 to $49 an hour, with country averages of $50 to $99 in the United States, $100 to $149 in Canada and Australia, and $25 to $49 in India, the Philippines, Ukraine, Spain and Mexico. Individual freelancers vary far more widely than firms, because there is no bench to pay for.

At the BLS median, an employed developer is about $64 an hour before payroll costs, holidays and the weeks with nothing queued. A contractor at $45 an hour costs more per productive hour and nothing per idle one. That is the whole calculation, and it is why the right answer depends on whether your backlog is continuous.

For what a whole project costs rather than a person, our cost comparison of every route and the prices in our MVP companies research are the closer references.

Take one self-contained item from your actual backlog, something that takes a competent developer about two hours, and pay the normal rate for it. Give the same task to everyone on the shortlist. What comes back is directly comparable, and the difference between candidates is usually obvious at a glance.

Does it do what was asked, including the part that was ambiguous? Did they ask about the ambiguity before starting, or guess? Is the code readable by someone who did not write it? Did they say how long it took and what they would do with more time? That last one predicts how they will behave on every estimate afterwards.

A public repository shows commit history, how they respond to review, and whether they finish things. It is not proof of ability on its own, and it is a faster signal than an hour of conversation.

Whiteboard puzzles and algorithm quizzes test what somebody remembers under pressure, which is not the job. Unpaid multi-day projects filter for people with free time rather than people who are good.

Open the app on a real device. Does it match the screenshots in the portfolio? Does it still work on a current operating system version, or has it been abandoned?

Check which developer account the app is published under. If the client’s apps all sit under the agency’s account, that tells you what your own listing will look like, and store accounts are much harder to move than code. Keep the developer accounts in your own name from day one.

Search the reviews for the first month after release. Crashes, login failures and missing features in that window tell you how the team tests, and how quickly they fixed things afterwards.

Portfolios are company-wide. The person you are hiring may have joined after that app shipped, so ask which parts they personally wrote, and expect a specific answer.

A portfolio of screenshots with no installable apps. Vague answers about which parts they personally built. A CV listing every technology ever invented, which usually means shallow exposure to all of them.

Quoting your project without asking a single question about it. No opinion about anything. Unwillingness to name a rate. Talking only about how they would build it, never about how it would be maintained.

Work that arrives much later than agreed with no message in between. Code copied from a tutorial, including the tutorial’s comments. Guessing at the ambiguous part rather than asking, then defending the guess.

The roles are decided, not just the headcount. You know whether this is a build that finishes or a product that keeps changing. You have a budget for a year, not a month.

You have installed at least one app from each candidate. You know which parts they personally built. You have read code, or someone technical has.

A paid test task is done and compared across candidates. The rate or salary is agreed, including what happens when the backlog is quiet. Code ownership is settled in writing. The store and cloud accounts are in your organisation’s name.