What Is It Like To Build Mobile Apps For A Living?

Mobile apps are all the rage now and increasingly replacing the role of your mother.

We now have Mobile Apps to call for a car to pick you up, to buy groceries for you, to clean up your house and even to find you a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

Brands are even embracing Mobile App development as part of their overall branding strategy.

As the demand for Mobile App development grows, many companies have sprung up to meet this growing demand.

I run a Singapore Mobile App Development House Originally US, and like many other companies around, we build iOS and Android apps for a living.

Unlike in other development house, my role is pretty unique. I hold a double role that is a combination of that of a Project Manager and Developer. I’m pretty much the only few guys in Singapore who work with clients and work on codes on a day-to-day basis.

Here’s what my typical day look like:

7:00am

Rise and shy, boot up my PC to clear all the emails that have accumulated overnight. Many of these emails can be from new leads, from my clients in other parts of the world, and also from my team members who would give me new tasks for the day.

7:30am 

Breakfast and catching up on the latest technology news.

8:00am

Travel to office.

8:30am

Development work starts. When people think about Mobile Apps, they often think of the little icons they see on their mobile phones. However, most Mobile Apps communicate with a server to exchange information, and most of the App logic are actually housed on the server. I specialize in developing the server software component as well as designing the information architecture behind it. The server component has to be developed first before the Mobile App portion could be embarked on.

10:15am

Time for a short break. I would normally surf Facebook.

10:30am

As other Vietnam Office comes online, I would update my Vietnam staff on the latest leads I am following up upon, the latest progress in code and to check on their progress made the previous day. Unlike many other Singapore Mobile App Development houses that does very little development and simply outsource everything out, we actually opened our own overseas office and do our development internally to ensure the quality of our deliverable.

12:30pm

Time to step out of the office for lunch. I typically schedule client meetings in the afternoon, so I’m really only in office in the morning.

Switching between development work and client-facing meetings is tough. They are two distinctly different tasks that requires different parts of the brain. So I normally prefer to focus on coding in the morning and meeting clients in the afternoon.

2:00pm

First client meeting of the day. This could be a meeting with a prospective client, or an update meeting with an existing client.

4:00pm

Second client meeting.

6:00pm

Another round of checking and replying to emails, and I’m done for the day!

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Building Mobile Apps for a living in Singapore is pretty interesting.

 

On a day to day basis, I meet prospective clients or clients that comes from all industries – Real Estate, Interior Design, Industrial Manufacturing, Hedge Funds, etc just to name a few. It is always interesting to understand their work, why they want to build mobile apps for their businesses and advice them the most cost effective yet impactful way to build their apps.

At the same time, I get to embrace my inner nerd and sit in my office solving problems with code.

Interacting with staff from another culture is also always a delightful and entertaining experience.

How is your typical day like?