Top App Developers Interview: Tallium Inc.

Oleksandr Mykolaienko is the CEO of Tallium Inc. The company, founded in 2011 by himself and Serge Nekipelov is located in Ukraine and has offices in Canada as well. Oleksandr worked as a product owner in another digital startup before founding his own company. Here’s what he has to say about Tallium and the IT industry.

What does your mobile app development company do?

Our team is focused on creating excellent mobile and web applications for start-ups and midsize companies. We have proven expertise in creating functional marketplaces, geo-tracking services, social platforms, and VR/AR apps.

We take a holistic approach and never start a project until we understand every aspect and purpose of the future product.

We see each client as our long-term partner.

We understand that many great ideas remain unfulfilled if they did not receive sufficient support in the early stages. Therefore, we always strive to help new customers with our business expertise and flexible cooperation conditions to support prompt implementation of their go-to-market strategy with a reliable application that can accumulate users and generate value from the very first weeks.

More than 90% of clients with whom we began work on the first launch continue to work with us on following versions of their application for many years.

What clients have you worked for?

Half of our clients are from Canada and Scandinavia, where we have long-term partnerships and a large number of reference projects. Among our customers are DesignContest platform with more than 200,000 registered users, Uber-like app iDealer, already trusted by official dealerships of Audi, Honda, Mercedes-Benz in North America, a Stockholm-based company Universum, a global leader in employer branding, and a large number of start-ups that vigorously conquer their niches in the market.

If you had to choose one category, what kind of app do you think is your mobile app development company’s specialty?

Social apps have always been something what we really love and where we are constantly striving to push the boundaries and market standards. We are passionate about re-thinking the ways how people communicate, elaborating advanced communication channels, gamification mechanics and engaging interfaces that will make users love their application. To date, we have dozens of apps that establish new ways of communication in various communities from families and households (Connect Family App), to professional designers (DesignContest), football fans (FanLeague), yacht owners (CharterClick) or car enthusiasts (CarDrop, iDealer, Car (e) App).

What is the average budget of the mobile apps you develop?

We do not have any restrictions on the budget, we may work both with large enterprises and with individual entrepreneurs, who have a limited budget, to help them accelerate their time-to-value that is crucial for further scaling. The average budget of a mobile application can vary from $ 5,000 to $ 20,000, depending on the number of platforms involved and the complexity of the internal logic.

Do you develop all mobile apps in-house or do you outsource some parts of the process?

We do everything in-house.

Our R&D office, a team of more than 35 qualified developers, is located in Ukraine, which allows us, to offer some of the most competitive rates in Eastern Europe.

Quality of technical education in Ukraine and popularity of the IT-industry among young professionals lets us to easily scale the team and quickly find skillful experts with almost any technology stack.

Developing everything in-house, within one comfortable office, allows us to eliminate time gaps for external communication and deliver the robust product in shortest terms.

Which would you say are the best mobile apps that your company has developed and why?

We love all our applications, but probably one of the most interesting recent cases is FanLeague. FanLeague is a UK-based platform for football fans that combines elements of a betting system and social network. Thousands of records had to be processed in the system each minute, so we created a complex architecture for high-load tasks processing. Within the project, we integrated a world-leading sports data provider OPTA, a payment system PaymentsIQ, mobile ID solution BankID, and many others like Mailchimp, Mandrill, Facebook, and Google. Adding on top of it a custom service for complex calculations and distributions.

Do you prefer to build mobile apps with native, hybrid or web languages? Why?

As a mobile application development company, we prefer native development. New software development languages (Swift, Kotlin) have significantly refreshed the process of mobile applications development. Of course hybrid and web solutions have their own advantages, so the choice of technology should be based on business requirements and budgets, not on personal preferences.

If we are talking about mobile versions of sites, Web apps’ advantages are indisputable — rapid development and delivery of updates to a user, ability to be opened on any device without any hardware requirements, just a browser. But JS frameworks continue to fail in the field of mobile applications; unfortunately, speed, smoothness and UI / UX of JS-based solutions cannot be compared with the ones of native apps.

Hybrid apps, at first sight, is the best option for the MVP version of the product, since it’s no longer just browser website but a full application that spreads through the stores. It has a single code base and low development cost. The main disadvantage here is the same as in JS-based solutions in which native UI elements are embedded. It also has a huge number of dependencies, management of which is a pain for the developer.

Flutter, a framework for writing native mobile applications with a single code base from Google, is a great solution. Perhaps, this is the hybrid solution all of us need.

Native apps are classic that has its own roots in the development of desktop applications because even the main languages have remained unchanged (C, C ++, Objective C, Java). Sometimes it is too long and expensive, but the result is worth it because the user gets an application with an intuitive interface, smoothness, speed, and ability to interact with the hardware device.

Let’s focus on iOS and Android mobile app development. Which are the Pros and Cons of each platform?

Both from the point of view of user and software development it is difficult to isolate the advantages and disadvantages of each platform since in recent years they have become very close. This is expressed both in the similarity of interfaces, and similarity of approaches to the development of applications, and even in the syntax of Kotlin and Swift languages.

Which one will evolve more within the next 5 years?

It is difficult to assess the development of platforms in such a long term due to the many factors that determine the direction of development of our industry today. We can only make assumptions:

• iOS — the platform will develop not only in the direction of mobile devices but also of desktops, as evidenced by Apple’s latest presentation demonstrating the launch of iOS applications under MacOS. You can assume that at some point we will see a combination of operating systems iOS and MacOS which will be a massive plus for a user.
• Android OS — this operating system is very popular among users and vendors, so the prospects for its development are beyond doubt.

We should expect a surprise from Google and their new operating system Fuchsia OS. Probably it will be installed only on devices manufactured by Google (similar to iOS for iPhones), but we already know about the compatibility of Android applications with Fuchsia OS.

The Flutter framework is a framework originally designed for writing applications for Fuchsia OS. We can assume that shortly Flutter will become enormously popular because it is the only framework that allows you to create native applications for Android OS, iOS and Fuchsia OS, and the Dart programming language is similar to Swift and Kotlin.

Which device is the best in the market right now?

It looks like I will start another holy war here, but I’m an Apple guy since iPhone 4 was released. So, probably my vote would be for iPhone Xs. The ergonomics of Apple products inspire me since my first Apple device or even earlier; the latest products from their team are impressive. UX of iOS improved a lot and, in my personal opinion, it wins a competition with any other mobile operating system.

Another device I would like to try is the Galaxy Fold. They promise to change the future of the smartphone , so let’s see. It will be exciting and challenging for us to adapt our existing Android applications to a few different resolutions of such smartphone, and make them user-friendly on both.

And which device do you feel more comfortable developing an app for? Why?

We are comfortable to work with both platforms, as well as with cross-platform frameworks. I’m not a developer myself, so can’t say exactly which SDK is better. Each mobile team in our company (iOS & Android), believe their platform is the best one to work with.

I see some pros in development for the iOS platform — it is much easier to test all applications on iOS devices because the device park is much smaller. We only have around 10 different Android phones at the office. We have to test all other screen resolutions and launchers via online services, which is not the best options.

Why is AppFutura useful to you?

We like AppFutura because it creates a community of people who are passionate about developing mobile apps — something we have always loved the most. We are pleased to be in the circle of professionals focused on creating new mobile experiences moving the industry forward.

AppFutura allows us to tell the world about our expertise and get connected with dozens of mobile enthusiasts for future collaboration.

We also appreciate the level of service and personal communication provided by AppFutura employees.

Check Tallium Inc. profile on AppFutura to know more about the company and how to contact them.

Originally published at www.appfutura.com.