App Development in London

App development in London with a team you can actually sit with

Our studio is at 86-90 Paul Street, EC2A 4NE, a few minutes from Old Street. That matters more than it sounds. App projects go wrong in the gap between what a founder meant and what a developer built, and that gap closes fastest in a room. London clients tend to come in for the Blueprint workshop, drop by mid-project when the design is taking shape, and hold a working build in their hand well before release.

Digiruu has been building apps since 2016. We are deliberately small and deliberately senior: the people who scope your app are the people who design and engineer it. There is no account layer between you and the work, no offshore handover, and no junior team quietly inheriting the project once the pitch is over. Thirty-plus verified reviews on Clutch average 4.9, and our own app, Subconsciously, won Best Social/Lifestyle App at the Best Mobile App Awards 2023.

The kinds of builds we take on

Consumer apps, ordering and marketplace products, telecoms and fintech, internal tools for teams that live inside a workflow all day, and the backends underneath all of them. The usual stack is React Native where one codebase serves both platforms honestly, native where it does not, Firebase for real-time data and authentication, and Stripe or Apple Pay for money. Apple Watch when the product genuinely benefits from a wrist rather than because it demos well.

Projects reach us at three points. A brand-new build from an idea and a Blueprint. A rebuild of an app that has outgrown the code it was launched on. And a redesign plus rebuild of something that works but is steadily losing the people who used to open it. If yours is mainly a design problem rather than an engineering one, our app design agency in London page is the better place to start.

London work we can point at

Moblox is the UK’s first branch-free mobile network. Ten months of development, a five-star rating, and a journey from signup to usable airtime that takes under a minute, faster than any major UK provider. That project was as much telecoms integration as it was app build, and it is a fair picture of the complexity we are comfortable with.

Climate Week NYC came to us as a barely-used white-label event app. We rebuilt it properly and it took 1,600+ downloads in a single week across a programme of 500+ events, with schedules that had to hold up under conference-day traffic on patchy venue wifi.

Amore Pizzeria has taken 50,000+ orders through the app we built, and grew into a multi-million pound business alongside it. Its Apple Pay checkout completes in seven seconds, which is the difference between a repeat order and an abandoned basket.

More of the work, with the detail behind each one, sits on our apps page.

What app development in London costs

We work in fixed packages rather than open-ended day rates, so the number you agree is the number you pay.

• Blueprint, £12,000 fixed. Discovery, requirements and a scoped, costed plan. Yours to keep whether you build with us or take it elsewhere.
• Pro, £30,000 fixed. Blueprint plus the full UI/UX design: every screen designed and prototyped, ready to hand to any engineering team.
• Max, from £75,000. Blueprint, design and the complete build through to launch on the App Store and Google Play.

Most first versions land in the Max range. The reasoning behind these figures, and what genuinely moves them, is set out on app design cost in the UK.

Frequently asked questions

Do we have to be in London to work with you?

No. A good share of our clients are outside London and several are outside the UK. Being in Shoreditch simply means you can come in for the Blueprint workshop and design reviews if that suits you; everything else runs on video calls and shared builds you can install.

How long does a full app build take?

Blueprint is two to three weeks. Design is typically four to six. A first production build usually runs three to five months after that, depending on how much backend and third-party integration sits behind the screens. Moblox, which had an entire mobile network behind it, took ten months.

Who owns the code and the accounts?

You do. The repository, the designs, the Blueprint document and the store listings are all yours, published under your own developer accounts, with nothing licensed back to us.

Do you build iOS and Android at the same time?

Usually, using React Native so one codebase serves both. Where a product leans on platform-specific hardware or needs native performance we build natively and stagger the releases. You will know which applies at the end of Blueprint, not halfway through the build.

Can you take over an app another agency built?

Often. We start by reading the codebase and telling you honestly whether it is worth keeping. Sometimes the answer is a rebuild, and sometimes the engineering is fine and the problem is the interface, which is a much cheaper fix.

What happens if the scope changes mid-build?

We re-plan between sprints, which is when changes are cheap. If something moves the launch date or the cost we say so in writing at the time rather than absorbing it quietly and missing the date.

Start your project

Tell us what you are trying to build and we will tell you what it takes, including the parts that carry risk, on a free call. Get started.