What to check before you sign off a mobile app

A demo is run on a good phone, on office wifi, by someone who knows which order to tap things in. It tells you the app exists. It tells you very little about whether it will hold up.

Before you accept delivery, ask for these.

Turn off the network mid-task. Not before the task, mid-task. A form half-filled, connection dropped, what happens? The acceptable answers are that the work is kept locally and syncs later, or that the user is told clearly and nothing is silently lost. The unacceptable answer is a spinner that never resolves, and it is the most common one.

Install on the cheapest phone your users actually have. Not the newest. If your field team is on entry-level Android devices with 3GB of RAM, that is the test device. An app that is smooth on a flagship and unusable on a two-year-old budget phone has not been tested, it has been demonstrated.

Ask to see the crash reporting dashboard. Not whether crash reporting exists — ask to see it, with data in it from the testing period. If it is empty, either nothing has been tested properly or it is not wired up.

Ask who owns the store listings. The app should be published under your company's developer account, not the agency's. This is the single most expensive thing to fix later, and it is free to get right at the start.

Ask what happens on the next OS release. Both platforms make changes annually that break things. The answer you want is a named maintenance arrangement, not reassurance.

Finally, ask for the source and a build that someone else could produce from it. If the only person who can build your app is the person who wrote it, you do not own the app. You own a favour.