Agencies wind down, pivot to bigger clients, or hand the project off and stop answering. What’s left behind is an app your business depends on, with nobody on the hook for it.

It usually looks like some of these:

The final invoice is paid, the replies stopped
The app works, but nobody can change it
An App Store rejection nobody is handling
You're not sure you have the source code
Certificates or accounts about to lapse

The first job is making sure you own everything: the code repository, the Apple Developer account, the servers, the domains. Agencies often hold some of these, and recovering them is far easier while the agency still half exists. If they’re answering at all, even slowly, tell me before your last call with them. An hour with the departing developer is worth weeks of code reading, and I’ll be the one asking the questions.

Then I read the code and ship one release under your account. That proves the pipeline works, and it tells me what shape the code is really in: what’s solid, what’s taped together, and what just looks scary. You get that as a written read on the state of things, with the fixes ranked by what they’d cost and what they’d buy you.

Much of my career has been inside code other people wrote. I took over Hipmunk’s iOS app years into its life and led its mobile team, and I shipped Sonato Pass into a codebase I hadn’t written.

This is one shape of an existing product, picked up and moved forward. The full walkthrough, from first call to launch, is on the services page.

Also: iOS apps · Web apps · An existing product · Fractional work · All services

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