Mickael Romaniello
30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.
Mickael Romaniello
30 minutes, no slides, nothing to prepare.
One single point of contact, from concept to publication. 12 years of experience. 15+ apps delivered.
In short: I build iOS and Android apps for clients in Toronto (2,794,356 residents) and across Ontario. One single point of contact, 12 years of experience, delivery from concept to publication in 8 to 16 weeks.
2,794,356 people live in Toronto.
And if you look around you on the streets, in the coffee shops, or on public transit across Ontario, you will notice a very simple fact. Everyone is glued to their smartphone.
This is no longer just a trend. It is the absolute standard of our Canada.
Today, most global web traffic comes from mobile devices. And that number is only going up. Yet, many businesses in Toronto continue to operate with basic websites, often slow and poorly adapted to small screens.
Spoiler: if loading exceeds three seconds, the user is gone. They click. They quit. They forget. 📱
The vocabulary hides a simple reality. Native means an app written with Apple's and Google's own tools. Hybrid means one codebase adapted to both. The back-end is the server, and the API is how the app talks to it. What matters to you is not the word but the consequence: cost, speed, and what you will be able to change later.
Three ways to build, three consequences:
My job is to point you to the one that fits your ambitions in Toronto, without charging you for a Ferrari when a reliable city car will do.
Over 15 applications delivered. Startups that found their market fit. SMBs that streamlined their workflow.
In 12 years, I've seen what works and what crashes on iOS and Android. From Cannes, I won't promise you the moon. I promise you results. My job is to build solid tools that your users will actually adopt.
The key advantage is the real-world impact of your application. Shall we look together at how to grow your project in a smart and profitable way?
You are launching your project in Toronto.
And you are probably wondering who to work with to build your mobile app.
It is the first major decision you have to make. Some people think that to succeed, you absolutely need a big agency right around the corner. Others believe they should outsource to the cheapest team they can find overseas.
Both options come with serious tradeoffs.
A big agency will assign your project to a junior developer you have never met. An offshore team will deliver code you cannot read, three weeks behind schedule, with zero accountability.
The most important factor in the success of an app is not just the code. It is communication.
When you work with me, you get one dedicated expert with 12 years of experience and over 15 delivered projects. Not an account manager. Not a rotating team. One person who knows your project inside out.
Toronto is the one Canadian market where you will be compared against agencies with account managers before anyone looks at the work. That changes the conversation: the question stops being whether it can be built and becomes who you will actually be talking to. With me it is the person writing the code, which on a first product is worth several weeks.
The reason it is worth weeks is loss of signal. In an agency, what you say in a meeting is restated by an account manager, passed to a technical lead, and cut into tickets for developers who have never heard you speak. Each step loses a little intent. When you explain why a screen has to behave a certain way, the person who will write it is listening, and can tell you in the same breath that it will cost three extra days or that it will fight the platform.
The honest limit is the other side of that. One person is not a team of thirty. I will not take a project that needs four developers in parallel to hit a fixed date, I do not do interface design at the level of a specialist studio, and if the product has to launch on iOS, Android, web and a connected TV at once, you need something other than me. I say that in the first conversation rather than the third month.
Practically, Toronto is six hours behind me, so your morning is my afternoon and we get about three hours of real overlap a day. That is enough to answer a blocking question the same day and to hold a weekly call, and it is not enough for a project that needs continuous discussion. Ontario also has its own privacy rules, and if your users include health information the requirements tighten considerably — worth settling at the start, because it determines where the data is allowed to live.
With Invent Better, the person who understands your project is the person who writes it. No sales representative, no account manager in between, no handover between three teams. You talk to the developer from the first call through to launch. On a first product, where most of the decisions are made in the first six weeks, that proximity is worth weeks of calendar time.
You have a project in Toronto. And you are wondering what tools we will use to build your application.
Tech jargon can be intimidating.
I am not going to drown you in incomprehensible technical terms. My role is to choose the absolute best engine for your project in Ontario.
Here are the technologies I use every day, explained simply. 🛠️
You do not need to be in the same office to build an excellent application.
Today, the digital economy in Toronto operates without borders. But for remote work to be truly effective, you need military-grade organization. Technical chaos is incredibly expensive.
The key advantage of my approach is absolute transparency. Here is how we will collaborate, even if hundreds or thousands of miles separate us.
Let's start with the tools. There are no black boxes with me.
For design, I work code-first with visual mockups validated with you. For projects requiring specialized UX/UI work, I partner with a trusted designer. You can click through them, leave comments directly on specific buttons, and validate the interface before I ever write a single line of code.
For the code itself, I use GitHub. You have full access to the engine room. You are the sole owner of your product from A to Z.
Sometimes, the worst enemy of a project is a deal that seems too good to be true. The following case comes up often enough to be worth describing: a tech company in total panic.
They had inherited a mobile app developed by a very cheap offshore team. The result? The application was crashing several times a day.
The store rating had plummeted. Users were leaving disastrous one-star reviews on a daily basis. The CEO was ready to throw the entire thing in the trash.
This is a critical situation, because we know that most users read reviews before downloading an application. The company's reputation was collapsing.
The technical challenge was heavy. The codebase was pure spaghetti code. There was no documentation, no automated testing, and no monitoring tools. Fixing a simple color bug would create three new crashes somewhere else.
There is no single price for a mobile app. What sets the amount is the scope: the number of screens, whether it needs a server and user accounts, and whether it targets one platform or two. A scoping call gives a real range.
Three factors set the budget, plus two fixed costs:
The global e-learning market grows every single year. And for good reason: students and professionals in Ontario want to learn anywhere, at any time.
A solid mobile e-learning platform is not just a messy list of videos. It is the ability to securely download those courses to watch them on the Toronto subway without burning through a cellular data plan.
You have to add gamification, achievement badges, and streak tracking to maintain high motivation. For schools, we integrate a direct notification system for parents, ensuring that critical information flows completely without friction.
The restaurant industry has radically changed. If your restaurant in Toronto is not in your regular customers' pockets, you are missing out on massive revenue.
Forget the big delivery platforms that take huge cuts of your margin. The key advantage of having your own application is total control.
Not always, which is good news for the budget. An app that only handles its own user's data — a list, a tracker, a calculation — can keep everything on the phone and cost nothing to run. As soon as data has to be shared between people, synced across two devices, or seen by you on your side, a server is needed, and that is a cost that comes back every month.
It depends entirely on what was decided at the start, and it is one of the few choices that cannot be postponed. An app can keep its data on the device, let people work, then sync as soon as the network returns — with nobody pressing anything. It is essential the moment work happens in a warehouse, a basement, or on the road. Added afterwards, it often means rewriting half the app.
We pick a floor, and that choice has a price. Supporting older OS versions means more testing and giving up some capabilities. We look at who your users are: a consumer app and an internal tool deployed on a known fleet do not get the same answer. The floor can be raised later, when usage data shows nobody is left behind it.
It matters more than people think, because a heavy app is the first uninstalled when storage runs short. The weight rarely comes from the code: it is the bundled images and fonts. Loading images from the server rather than shipping them, and serving them at the right size, often halves it. That is invisible work, and it is the work that keeps the app installed.
Technically, sending costs almost nothing. What costs is everything around it: a server to decide what to send to whom and when, and enough care not to become intrusive. It is also the easiest mechanism to waste — a useless notification is the first cause of uninstalls, and an uninstalled app does not come back. Send few and make them useful, or send none.
Yes, with the user's permission, and how you ask matters as much as the feature. A permission demanded on first launch, with no context, is refused most of the time — and once refused it is painful to recover. Asked at the moment the person understands why, it is granted. Apple also requires a written explanation for every permission, and a vague one gets the app rejected.
Through the stores, and not instantly: Apple and Google review every version before it is published, and phones update at the pace of their own settings. So expect a share of your users to stay on an older version for weeks. That is why the server has to keep talking to previous versions, and why we avoid changes that break everything at once.
Often yes, and it all hangs on one thing: does your vendor provide a documented API. If they do, it is ordinary work. If they do not, or bill it per module, or refuse to open it to a third party, no app will work around that cleanly — workarounds exist and break at the vendor's next update. It is a question to put to your supplier before you put yours to me.
A website can be installed on the home screen, work offline and launch full-screen, with no store involved. It is a real third answer, and it is under-recommended because it earns less for whoever recommends it. Its limits: notifications stay restricted on iPhone, sensor access is partial, and you are not present in the stores — which matters if your customers look for you there.
Only if you have an audience in another language — and then it has to be designed in, not added on. Translation is not what costs; room is. German makes labels half again as long and overflows buttons drawn for English. Leaving room from the start costs nothing; redoing the screens afterwards costs days. The legal texts and the store listing count too.
While you hesitate, your competitors in Toronto are moving forward.
The mobile world moves fast. Very fast. Today, most global web traffic comes from mobile devices. If you keep pushing back the creation of your app, someone else will happily take your spot in Ontario.
But be careful, do not confuse speed with haste. Launching an unstable application is the worst possible strategy.
In short: you have to act fast, but above all, you have to do it right. ⏳
In 30 minutes, you will know exactly where to start.
Book a free call →30 minutes to start your project
Book a free call →Most of my projects run remotely, and in practice that changes very little. We talk over video whenever you need to, not only at major milestones, and you can reach me with questions at any point during the project — I always answer.
Once we are working together, travelling to meet you on site can absolutely be arranged if your project calls for it. Travel costs are quoted separately, upfront and with no surprises.