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.
Sources and further reading
Figures, platform rules and regulations change. These are the primary references behind this article and the places to check before you act on it.
