Say the number
An estimate that moves every month is a scoping failure, not bad luck. We do the discovery work first so we can quote a fixed figure against a written scope — and hold to it.
About
A small studio, built around the part everyone else skips.
Designing an app is the visible work. Shipping it — and keeping it shipping through two OS releases and a payments SDK deprecation — is the work that decides whether it was worth building.
Cognify Technologies exists because most app projects die in predictable places. Not in the code — in the scope that quietly tripled, in the store rejection nobody planned for, in the eleven months after launch when the app stopped being anybody's job.
So we built the studio around those places. Discovery produces a fixed scope and a fixed number instead of a range. Design decisions that trigger store rejections get made in week three, not at submission. And post-launch care is a service we sell with a stated crash-free threshold, not a favour we forget once the invoice clears.
We are deliberately small. You talk to the people writing the code, the work is done by people senior enough to say "that feature is a mistake", and there is no account layer between you and the build. That limits how many projects we take. It is the trade we want.
We are also early, and we would rather be straightforward about it than dress the site up with stock photography and invented metrics. What we can offer instead is unusual access: senior attention, a short queue, references you can call, and code you can read from the first commit.
Principles
Six rules we do not bend for a deadline.
Every studio has values on a page. These are the ones you can hold us to, because you would notice immediately if we broke them.
Argue before we build
If we think a feature is wrong, you will hear it in the scoping session, not in a retrospective. Disagreement is cheapest before anyone opens an editor.
The boring choice, usually
We pick tools with long support horizons and large hiring pools. Novel technology is a cost your users never see and your next developer always pays.
Small releases, always
A fortnightly build you can hold beats a six-month reveal every time. It also means a bad assumption costs two weeks instead of half a budget.
Own it past submission
Plenty of studios finish at handover. The work that decides whether an app succeeds — review defence, crash triage, OS upgrades — happens after that line.
Nothing that locks you in
Your repository, your store accounts, your credentials, documented handover. A client who stays because leaving is painful is not a client we want.
Commitments
What is true on every engagement.
Not a premium tier. The baseline.
Your repository, from commit one
Code lives in your GitHub or GitLab organisation from the first day, not ours. You can clone it, read it and take it elsewhere at any point.
A build on your phone every sprint
TestFlight for iOS, internal testing track for Android, every two weeks. Progress you can tap, not a status percentage in a spreadsheet.
Automated checks before merge
Type checks, linting, unit and widget tests, and a signed build run on every pull request. Nothing reaches main on trust alone.
A crash-free target in writing
We agree a crash-free session threshold before launch and monitor against it. If a release drops below it, fixing that outranks new features.
Accessibility is not a phase two
VoiceOver and TalkBack labels, contrast ratios, dynamic type and 44pt touch targets are acceptance criteria on every screen we build.
Handover that actually hands over
Architecture notes, environment setup, credentials inventory, runbook and a walkthrough call. Another team could pick this up without calling us.
Start here
Small studio, short queue.
We take on a limited number of projects at a time. If you are planning a launch in the next few months, the earlier we talk, the better the slot.
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