How to Choose an App Development Company in Lagos: 12 Questions to Ask

Lagos has hundreds of agencies and freelancers who will build your app. A few will deliver on time, publish it to the stores and still answer the phone a year later. The rest are why "my developer disappeared" is such a common story. These twelve questions, asked before you pay a deposit, sort one group from the other.

Ownership and money

• 1. Who owns the code, the design files and the accounts (App Store, Google Play, cloud, domain) when the project is done? The answer must be "you", in writing.
• 2. Is the price fixed for an agreed scope, and how are changes priced? Hourly billing with no scope is how budgets double.
• 3. What is the payment schedule? A deposit and a balance on delivery is normal; 100% upfront is not.

Process and timeline

• 4. What happens in the first week? You want to hear discovery, a written scope and a design prototype, not "we start coding".
• 5. How will we see progress? Expect a staging build you can install and a tracker you can open, with updates at least weekly.
• 6. What is the delivery date, and what has to be true on your side for it to hold? Content, approvals and access are the usual dependencies.

Quality and security

• 7. How do you test? Ask about real devices, low-bandwidth testing, automated tests and who signs off.
• 8. Where will the app and its data run, and who monitors it after launch? "On our server" is a red flag; a named cloud platform with monitoring and backups is the right answer.
• 9. How do you handle personal data and NDPA compliance? Fintech, health and education apps need a real answer.

After launch

• 10. What is included after launch, for how long, and what does support cost afterwards?
• 11. If we part ways, how do we take the app to another team? Documentation, code access and a hand-over should be standard.
• 12. Can we speak to two clients whose apps launched more than a year ago? Recent launches look good in a portfolio; old ones show whether the agency stays.

What good answers look like

A reliable agency answers all twelve without hesitation, gives you a written proposal with scope, price, timeline and what happens after launch, and is comfortable with you owning everything. It will also tell you when something you want is a bad idea. Agencies that only say yes are selling, not advising.

For reference, here is how we answer: fixed prices with the scope written down, a two-week delivery for every package, a project manager and daily updates on our tracking portal, apps that run on cloud infrastructure we operate 24/7, post-launch support included, and full ownership handed over with documentation.