A lot of businesses own an app that nobody wants to touch. The original developer is gone, builds are fragile, crash reports pile up, and Apple or Google keeps sending deadline emails about new SDK requirements. This is the work I enjoy most. I have spent 23 years working inside large codebases at places like Progressive, Southwest Airlines and the Department of Defense, and I know how to make an aging system safe to change.
Signs you need a rescue
- Crash-free sessions are falling or your star rating is dropping.
- A store rejection or a target-SDK deadline is blocking your next release.
- Builds only work on one person’s laptop.
- Simple features take weeks because “everything is connected.”
- You’re stuck on deprecated dependencies, old Swift or Objective-C, Java-only Android, Xamarin, or an outdated React Native or Flutter version.
The approach
- App Health Check. This is a fixed-price audit of architecture, dependencies, security, performance, test coverage and store compliance. You get a prioritized, costed roadmap.
- Stabilize. I fix the top crashes, restore reproducible builds and set up CI/CD and monitoring.
- Modernize incrementally. That can mean migrating screens to SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose, adopting Swift concurrency and modern networking, and moving from Xamarin to native or .NET MAUI, all while you keep shipping.
- Hand back a healthy codebase with documentation, so your team (or I, on retainer) can move fast again.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need to rewrite the app?
Usually not. Rewrites are expensive and risky. Most apps can be stabilized and modernized screen by screen while continuing to ship. I will tell you honestly when a rewrite really is cheaper.
Our original developer disappeared. Can you take over?
Yes. I will recover access to the repositories, signing certificates and store accounts, document the system, and get a release pipeline working again.
What is the App Health Check?
It is a fixed-price, one-to-two-week audit of your app's code, architecture, dependencies, security, performance and store compliance. You get a written report with a prioritized roadmap, and it is yours to keep whether or not you hire me to do the work.