App development in Dublin, from the first conversation to the store listing
ESMA International Network’s iOS and Android apps are live in both stores today, running on the same membership platform as their website and member dashboard. We designed and built all three. That is what app development in Dublin looks like when one senior team carries it the whole way, with no handover to a junior delivery pod and no demo that has to be rebuilt the week real data arrives. Read the ESMA case study.
What Loco sells is the senior people themselves. The same two who scope your app are the ones who design and ship it, under our web and mobile apps service. An app has to survive real users, real data and real workflows from day one. That is the standard we design to, and it is why we would rather build it properly once. We are based at The Digital Hub in Dublin 8 and build for companies in Cork, Galway, Limerick and across Ireland, mostly remotely with a few sessions in person.
Mobile app development in Dublin: native, web app or PWA?
The first honest answer in any app project is which kind to build, and it is often not the most expensive one.
Native iOS and Android earn their place when the app lives in someone’s hand every day and needs what only the device gives you: push notifications, offline use, the camera, location, biometric sign-in and a store listing. ESMA’s native apps run on the same data as the web platform, with push notifications and guest-mode browsing.
A web application earns its place when the work happens at a desk or in a browser, when your audience arrives from a link rather than a store, or when you want one codebase that runs everywhere. ERP HEADtoHEAD’s booking engine is a web app: a four-step flow that runs two events in two countries and two currencies through two separate merchant accounts. See how the booking engine works.
A progressive web app (PWA) sits between the two. It installs to the home screen and works offline up to a point, without app-store review. It suits a content or utility product where a store presence adds little, and is the wrong answer if you need deep device integration or store discovery. Our guide to progressive web apps covers the trade-off.
A no-code or page-builder assembly is the fourth option sold hard in this market. It is a reasonable way to test an idea and a poor way to run one, because the seams show the week real data arrives.
We build all three of the real options, and the choice is scoped and costed before anything is designed.
Web application development in Dublin: portals, dashboards and platforms
Much of the web application development we do in Dublin is not a consumer app at all. It is the system behind a business: a customer portal, a member area, a booking engine, an internal platform, replacing the spreadsheet, the inbox thread and the phone call.
A customer portal is a secure front door to accounts, bookings, documents and workflows. Done well, it lets customers or members serve themselves and gives your team one source of truth instead of a shared inbox and three spreadsheets. In ESMA’s member dashboard, members maintain their own records and teams, handle event registrations and see what their membership is returning, filterable by year and month. 200 member companies across 62 countries now live in one structured, searchable place.
If what you need is more back-office than customer-facing, custom software development in Ireland covers internal tools, integrations and legacy replacement in more depth.
Product design before engineering
Every app we build is designed before it is engineered, and you use it before a line of production code is written.
For ESMA we built the design system all three products would share before designing a single page: every component drawn in every state it would ever hold, not just the happy path. Form fields shipped in six states, calendar days in eleven, the profile-edit flow in forty-eight. It is the reason the app, the dashboard and the public site read as one organisation rather than three vendors.
For you, that means:
- You steer early, on something you can click, rather than late, on something already built.
- Working demos make trade-offs plain, so decisions get made while they are cheap.
- Engineering goes faster, because the questions have already been answered.
App design in Dublin is often sold as a separate service. We do it as the first half of the same job, so nothing is lost between the design file and the live product.
Security, access and where your data lives
Security is designed in from the start, and it starts with who can see what.
Roles before features. Roles and permissions are modelled from the start, so a member, an administrator and a board reviewer each see exactly what they should. Where you need single sign-on against the identity provider your business already runs, we build to that rather than inventing a login.
Data handling. Least-privilege access and auditing are built in from day one. Sensitive actions are logged. Secrets live in configuration, never in code.
Where your data lives. Where residency matters, and under GDPR it usually does, we host in EU data-centre regions and write that choice into the plan, so when a procurement questionnaire asks where the data lives the answer is a named location.
Real devices. Native builds are tested on real hardware before store review. Simulators alone do not count.
What happens after launch: support, SLAs and app-store upkeep
An app is not finished at launch. Apple and Google change their requirements, operating systems update, and users ask for things you had not planned. We handle the build, review and submission for both stores. After that, someone has to own the app in year two as well as in launch week, and for most clients that is a monthly retainer with a named senior contact who already knows the build. Monthly retainer from €2,000/month, and you do not have to take one: a project can end at launch and you keep everything.
What drives the cost of an app?
If you are comparing app developers in Dublin, four things move the number more than anything else:
- Platforms. Native iOS and Android are two builds on one data model; a web app is one build. A shared backend is what stops two native apps from costing twice as much.
- Workflow depth. A read-only app is inexpensive. Payments, bookings, approvals, multilingual content and per-user analytics are where the engineering hours go.
- Integrations. Every system the app must talk to (CRM, payments, accounting, an identity provider) is checked and quoted before we commit.
- What already exists. A tidy existing backend or design system lowers the price; an inherited codebase that needs an audit can raise it.
The number is fixed before design starts, and it does not move unless you change the scope. Projects from €10,000, and what an app costs above that is set by the four drivers here rather than by a price list.
A note on grants. The Local Enterprise Office Grow Digital Voucher does not fund custom app or bespoke software development, so an app build cannot be part-funded by it. It covers new off-the-shelf software subscriptions, plus training and IT configuration, and it has real gates: one to fifty employees, trading six months or more, and a completed Digital for Business project in the previous two years. Our Grow Digital Voucher explainer sets out what qualifies.
