Hiring a mobile development studio is one of the most consequential decisions a product team can make. The wrong partner does not just waste money. It wastes months. It burns trust with stakeholders. And switching mid-project is painful, expensive, and almost always slower than starting from scratch.
We have seen companies come to us after a failed engagement with another studio. The pattern is consistent: the initial conversations felt good, the proposal looked polished, but the actual execution fell apart. In most cases, the client did not ask the right questions upfront.
Here are the questions we think every enterprise client should ask before signing a contract.
What Does Your Delivery Cadence Look Like?
This question reveals more about a studio than almost anything else. A team that delivers working builds every two weeks operates very differently from one that disappears for three months and comes back with a "big reveal."
Bi-weekly demos mean you see progress in real time. You catch misunderstandings early. You can course-correct before small issues become structural problems. Big-bang delivery means you are placing a bet that the team understood everything perfectly from the start. That bet rarely pays off.
Ask specifically: How often will we see working software? What does a typical sprint demo look like? Who attends?
Who Will Actually Write the Code?
This is the question most clients forget to ask. You meet the senior architects and technical leads during the sales process. Then the contract is signed and your project gets staffed with junior developers you have never met.
There is nothing wrong with junior developers on a team. But you need to know the ratio. Ask to meet the people who will be writing code on your project. Ask about their experience with your platform (iOS, Android, or both). Ask how long they have been with the studio. High turnover is a warning sign.
How Will We Communicate Day to Day?
Enterprise projects fail more often from communication breakdowns than from technical failures. Before signing, get specific answers to these questions:
- How many hours of timezone overlap will we have each day?
- Will we have a shared Slack or Teams channel?
- Can we talk directly to the engineers, or does everything go through a project manager?
- What is the expected response time for questions or blockers?
Direct access to engineers is not a luxury. It is a requirement for fast-moving projects. A studio that filters all communication through a single point of contact is adding latency to every decision.
What Happens After Version 1 Launches?
Launching is not the finish line. It is the starting line. The first version will surface bugs you did not anticipate, edge cases your test suite missed, and feature requests from real users. You need a partner who has a clear plan for post-launch support.
Ask about their support model. Do they offer dedicated maintenance retainers? What are their SLAs for critical bugs? How do they handle App Store and Play Store review issues? A studio that treats launch as the end of the engagement is not a long-term partner.
What Is Your Tech Stack, and Why?
The best studios have opinions about technology. They have chosen their tools deliberately and can explain why. A team that says "we use whatever the client wants" sounds flexible, but it often means they lack depth in any single technology.
Opinionated teams build better software. They have invested time learning the tradeoffs and can guide you toward the right decisions instead of deferring every choice back to you.
Ask why they chose their stack. Ask what they considered and rejected. Ask where they think their chosen tools fall short. The answers will tell you whether you are talking to a team that thinks critically or one that follows trends.
Can You Provide References in Our Industry?
A studio that has built apps for logistics companies will ramp up faster on your logistics project than a generalist agency learning your domain from scratch. Industry experience means they already understand your compliance requirements, user expectations, and common integration patterns.
Ask for two or three references from clients in your industry or an adjacent one. Then actually call them. Ask about the studio's strengths, their weaknesses, and whether they would hire them again. The last question is the only one that truly matters.
Red Flags to Watch For
Not every warning sign comes in the form of a bad answer. Sometimes it comes in the form of a missing answer. Watch for these:
- No code ownership clause. If you are paying for custom development, you should own the code. Any ambiguity here is a dealbreaker.
- No testing strategy. If the studio cannot describe their approach to unit tests, integration tests, and QA, they are shipping untested code. You will pay for that later.
- Vague timelines. "It depends" is a reasonable answer in the discovery phase. It is not a reasonable answer in a signed proposal. Estimates should be specific, broken into phases, and tied to deliverables.
- Resistance to transparency. A studio that will not give you access to the codebase, the project board, or the CI/CD pipeline is hiding something. Full transparency is the baseline, not a perk.
- No process documentation. If they cannot explain how they run a project before it starts, they will be making it up as they go.
The Right Partner Makes Everything Easier
The goal of these questions is not to create an adversarial selection process. It is to find a team that operates the way you need them to. The right studio will welcome these questions. They will have clear, specific answers. They will be honest about what they do well and where their boundaries are.
If you are evaluating studios right now and want to see how we answer these questions ourselves, get in touch. We are happy to walk you through our process, introduce you to the team, and share references from clients in your space.
Aneeza Shaheen
Customer Success Manager at DEVSFLOW Technologies