A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring Mobile App Engineering Teams

Mobile application development can be complex and overwhelming. While creating an app might seem straightforward, building one that is maintainable, high-performing, well-engineered, and scalable is a true engineering challenge. The importance of getting it right adds to the pressure, as an app can be the most critical element in the success of a product, project, or even an entire company. Often, the mobile app is the first—and sometimes only—interaction a customer has with a service, making it essential to get every detail right.

Steps to success

The first step towards success is choosing the right technology and tools to bring your mobile app to life. Having the right tools on hand can save you thousands, reduce your time to market, boost the performance of your app, and increase its reach across multiple platforms. Starting off on the right foot goes a long way to helping the remaining pieces fall into place.

Once you have the technologies in place and the tools available to support them, finding a team of developers who will bring your app idea to life is the next major hurdle to overcome. The right team, whether freelance experts or in-house developers, will find the solution which can launch your app into the marketplace and secure its place as a user favourite. Remember that the Pangea universe can help you to find the perfect remote development team to fit your company and project. Just tell us what you need. We can do the work for you and connect you with up to 5 companies within 72h that match your need- all for free.

The most underappreciated fact of mobile app development is that a genius idea is only the beginning. Hard work begins at finding the technical solutions, implementations, and teams that bring great ideas to life.

Here, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to implementing your ideas into reality, starting with finding the frameworks which will build your platform, through to hiring and managing the mobile app developers which will engineer your success.

Part 1: Deciding on Tech and Tools

Mobile apps are critical to business success today precisely because they have become such a vital part of users’ lives. Today, we use apps for banking, shopping, reading, parking, watching content and communication on a near hourly basis. The first thing users need to know about a new product or service is the availability and quality of its app.

A good mobile app can drive services to stratospheric success. A bad one will lead to dismissal and a quick uninstall.

The first step to building an app that keeps users on-side is finding the right platform for your success.

Choosing between a web app, hybrid application, cross-platform framework, or native application is the first major engineering decision your team has to make. Getting it right entails careful consideration and detailed analysis.

Your decision should be rooted first in your app’s priorities. The choice between platform availability, rapid time-to-market, app performance, user experience, and the cost is not an easy one to make. Once you have these worked out, however, the pieces of the technology puzzle can begin to fall into place.

Read our article on the pros and cons of mobile app development to decide how these will factor into your mobile application.

A Framework for Success

Choosing the right technology stack feels like the most daunting first step in app development. It feels as if the wrong move is dangerously easy to make and destined to mire your app in tech failures and disaster for years to come.

However, knowing your app, understanding its target audience, and knowing how and where it’s going to operate will make the choice for you. Marrying your app’s specification up to today’s leading mobile app frameworks will make choosing the right solution clear and obvious from the start.

One of the leading frameworks today is Facebook’s React framework. Last year, React was one of the most popular frameworks used amongst professional developers and teams.

Amongst ReactJS development teams, this particular framework has a reputation as being at the cutting edge of interactive, rich, and robust user interfaces. Similarly, React’s mobile platform, React Native, is one of the industry-leading technologies in cross-platform mobile app development.

React native imports some of the performance and development advantages of React into mobile application engineering. Our guide to the pros and cons of React.js development investigates the detail of what makes React such a powerful platform for development and the advantages and drawbacks you should consider before investing your project in the framework.

Take a look at The Ultimate Guide to Mobile App Frameworks in 2021 to find out more about the latest and greatest frameworks out there that can take your app to success.

Keep an Eye on the Future

Precisely what it is that makes a mobile app succeed is constantly shifting and changing. So many apps and games have surprised us by rocketing to overnight success while great apps and solutions have failed to capture user’s imaginations at times. The one thing that underpins the success of all mobile apps is meeting or exceeding user expectations from the very start.

To do that, you must keep on top of the technology trends and user habits associated with modern mobile apps.

With technology improving at a rate that feels almost exponential, users expect more and more from their apps every day. As a result, the ecosystem is becoming ever more competitive and increasingly challenging to enter. Keeping on top of the direction of new technologies and the speed with which they arrive is critical forward planning for future app success.

Our article on the future of mobile app engineering is packed full of the key trends and shifts in technology that will underpin mobile app engineering for many years to come.

Part 2: How to hire mobile app developers

One of the things that make mobile application development so difficult is the specialist and unique technical skills required. The tough constraints put on companies in time, costs, and available engineers are precisely the things needed most to engineer a successful app.

The challenge is to bring an application up to its minimum viable product with a scalable and maintainable codebase that warrants continued investment. To do that, you need talented and dedicated engineers with experience and expertise in the field.

The choice is between hiring an in-house team or undertaking the services of a remote mobile app team. Both will get you from initial idea to product release and deployment to the store - and both have their own pros and cons.

The choice you make will have an impact on the future scalability, initial budget, and level of risk tolerated in the project. Each one has an effect on specialist skills, project management, documentation, and testing available at different stages of production.

Our article on deciding between freelancers or a remote mobile app team can help to demystify some of the facts and myths surrounding both options.

Which hiring route you take will determine the next steps in your mobile application development. If that involves an in-house team, the next logical step is hiring mobile app developers.

In hiring, you’re going to want to find the team with the perfect combination of interpersonal and technical skills to accelerate progress and keep things running smoothly. While finding this ideal combination might feel like sheer luck and chance, the reality is that the odds are better than you think by simply following the best practices and looking in the right places.

Simply posting an accurate, engaging, and attractive job description, one which highlights the challenges and benefits unique to you, is enough to start getting high-quality mobile app developers to come to find you. Setting expectations, figuring out who you want, and posting an ad to find them will set the ball rolling on building your mobile app team from the ground up.

Here, we’ve done the legwork to help out. Our article on hiring mobile app developers has everything you need to get started, including a job description template for you to fill out and attract high-quality talent to apply. If you need help selecting the right company, tell us what you need. We can do the work for you and connect you with up to 5 companies within 72h that match your need- all for free.

How to Interview Mobile App Developers

The final step in the hiring process is, without a doubt, the most stressful. Yes, we’re talking about the interview. Few appreciate just how stressful the job interview is for the interviewer as much as it is for the candidate.

The purpose of an interview - to get an accurate assessment of a candidate’s abilities and personality in just an hour or two - seems almost impossible. It’s akin to being asked to make a career or company-altering decision based only on a first impression.

A successful interview, one that's the choice for the firm, requires a structured approach to get the best out of every candidate. Your goal, to assess each applicant fairly and accurately, can be achieved with a little forethought and planning.

Take a look at our article on what to look for when hiring a mobile app developer for tips on ways to assess candidates to fully understand their skills and give them the best possible impression of your company. The article also includes some tricky technical questions to get you started.

Recruiting JavaScript Developers into Your Team

With the popularity and prevalence of JavaScript tools and frameworks continuing to increase, finding class-leading JavaScript developers can be an exceptionally challenging task.

You want to be certain that you are examining the right skills under the right conditions to find a developer with the knowledge and abilities to suit your project. After all, finding a candidate to develop your app is one of the most critical early engineering decisions you’re going to have to make.

In the interview, your candidate should write JavaScript code, undertake a short technical test, and discuss their knowledge and experience all in 90 minutes or less. A tall order, but one that is very possible too. In that time you should be able to gain a thorough understanding of a candidate’s skills and how they fit into your team.

Take a look at our article on how to interview a JavaScript developer for more tips on finding the right match for your team.

Part 3: Management

Once you have your team, you’ve decided on your technology stack, and your app development is underway, the challenges of moving forward with pace and continued progress become readily apparent. The task of managing a mobile app team certainly isn’t easy. With some simple tools and techniques, these challenges can be solved and your progress and forward momentum kept with plenty of pace.

In our article on the do’s and don’ts of managing a remote mobile app team, we cover some of the technologies and techniques you should consider to help you overcome the final hurdles standing between your app and its users.

Success in Mobile App Engineering

With the tools, technologies, people, and now management in place you’ve already accomplished some of the mobile app industry’s most challenging feats.

You’ve already come from an initial outline and rough idea to a fully functioning team and the methods in place to help them succeed. Make sure to stay up to date on the latest trends and check out our article on the future of mobile app engineering.

Now, at the end of this guide, you should have everything in place to publish your app to the store and take pole position in the mobile marketplace for some time to come.