Full-spectrum mobile development
From initial strategy through launch and beyond, we provide everything your retail business needs to succeed in mobile.
Mobile Strategy & Consulting
Not sure where to start? Our consulting services help you define mobile strategy, choose the right technology stack, and plan for success. We provide roadmaps, feasibility studies, and technical guidance — all driven by an objective, ADR-driven approach that places customer needs and business needs over developer experience or programming language preferences. We start by listening. Before writing a line of code, we invest time to understand your product, your goals, your team, and your constraints. Our multi-day discovery process examines your technical ecosystem, the customer experience, timeline, testing strategy, and production support needs. The result is a clear, tailored plan that lists deliverables, milestones, risks, costs, and timelines.
What's Included
- Technology assessment and platform selection
- Roadmap development with clear milestones
- Architecture planning and review
- Team augmentation and hiring advice
- ADR-driven decision making process
- Multi-day discovery process (free, no obligation)
- Technical ecosystem evaluation
Key Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
Native Development
Native development is still the gold standard for performance, reliability, and platform fidelity, and it's where Sapling Mobile Solutions has deep roots. As early adopters of both iOS and Android, we bring extensive experience across the full native stack. Our engineers are fluent in Objective-C, Swift, Java, and Kotlin, and work comfortably with both legacy UI frameworks and modern declarative approaches like SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose. Native expertise isn't just about writing code — in fact, that's the easy part — it's about understanding how apps behave in the real world. At Sapling, we don't default to native because it's what we do well — we recommend it when it's the right technical and business decision. During discovery, we'll help you evaluate tradeoffs across performance, cost, timeline, and long-term maintainability, and guide you toward the approach that best supports your goals.
What's Included
- Audit production apps for PII leakage, security vulnerabilities, or excessive network activity
- Track down crashes, memory leaks, and race conditions
- Diagnose performance issues including slow startup and poor scrolling
- Optimize apps with Instruments and Android Profiler
- Modernize legacy codebases without disrupting users or release schedules
- Work comfortably with both legacy and modern frameworks (SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose)
Key Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
Cross-Platform Development
Cross-platform development is a powerful way to reduce time-to-market and overall development costs. Sapling Mobile has deep, real-world experience delivering cross-platform applications, with production deployments for top retailers, law enforcement agencies, and security guards. 'Write once, deploy anywhere' is the battle cry for many accomplished React Native engineers. A popular, lucrative example is Walmart's Grocery App, which generated $9B in revenue/year, and was written in a matter of months. These solutions are often a great fit for smaller teams or organizations looking to validate products quickly without maintaining separate iOS and Android codebases. There is no 'one size fits all' solution — we use an objective, ADR-driven approach that places customer needs and business needs over developer experience or programming language preferences.
What's Included
- React Native and Flutter expertise with production deployments
- Experience with .NET MAUI and Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP)
- Clean, maintainable bridges for platform-specific functionality
- Native look and feel on both platforms (not 'lowest common denominator')
- ADR-driven (Architecture Decision Records) objective approach
Key Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
Backend & API Services
Great mobile experiences depend on reliable backend systems, and while horizontal slicing works, we've found it advantageous to work full-stack. At Sapling Mobile, we design, build, and support backend APIs that are secure, scalable, and resilient under real-world conditions. Our teams have delivered production APIs for some of the most respected brands in retail and beyond, deploying on AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as self-hosted environments. We design backend systems that scale, but more importantly, we validate that they hold up under stress. As bots and automated attacks become more sophisticated, especially with advances in AI, APIs are constantly being probed. Our goal is to identify weaknesses early, long before your users (or bad actors) do.
What's Included
- Load and stress testing to validate performance at scale
- Security testing probing common attack vectors, malformed requests, injection attempts, and traffic abuse
- Resilience testing to identify bottlenecks before they impact customers
- REST APIs, GraphQL, gRPC, and legacy SOAP services
- Offline-first and Occasionally Connected Applications (OCAs) — expertise since 2002 (Palm OS, Windows Mobile, WinCE)
- Deployment to AWS, GCP, Azure, and self-hosted environments
Key Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
Privacy, Data Governance & Compliance
Privacy and compliance are no longer optional concerns for mobile applications. State, federal, and international regulations aggressively shape how data is collected, stored, processed, and shared - and the rules continue to evolve rapidly. Sapling Mobile helps clients navigate this complexity by designing mobile apps with privacy, security, and compliance baked in from the start, not bolted on later. With more than 20 U.S. states now enforcing or introducing state-specific privacy requirements (many of which take effect in 2025 and 2026) and bipartisan support from politicians, organizations should proactively prepare for the future, not react when the laws are enforced.
What's Included
- GDPR compliance implementation
- CCPA / CPRA compliance for California consumers
- CPA, CTDPA, and emerging U.S. state privacy laws (20+ states)
- HIPAA compliance for healthcare applications
- COPPA and regulations for apps serving minors
- PII and PHI data handling best practices
- Privacy-by-design architecture (not bolted on later)
- Data minimization and consent flow implementation
Key Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
App Maintenance & Support
While we're more than happy to be your partner on a brand new project, the majority of our business — roughly 75% — involves supporting existing production Apps. Over the years, we've recognized that many clients face the same challenges, especially as codebases mature, teams settle into a rhythm, and the status quo becomes the standard. Launch is just the beginning. We provide comprehensive maintenance packages including OS updates, performance monitoring, bug fixes, and feature enhancements to ensure your app stays competitive. Our proactive approach identifies issues before your users do.
What's Included
- OS compatibility updates for iOS and Android
- Performance monitoring and optimization
- Bug fixes and security patches
- Feature enhancements and iterations
- SDLC friction points and velocity improvements
- Quality audits and QA-less development coaching
- Memory leak and crash diagnosis
- Team performance evaluation with objective metrics
- Network usage analysis and optimization
- Architectural pattern identification and adoption
Key Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
Our process, simplified
We follow a proven methodology that keeps projects on track and delivers exceptional results.
Discovery
Understanding your goals and requirements
Design
Creating intuitive, beautiful experiences
Development
Building with quality and precision
Delivery
Launch support and ongoing partnership
Ready to get to the root of your problem?
Let us know your pain points by booking a complimentary consultation today. We come prepared to help.
Trusted by 50+ retail brands across the Midwest